Alta Vista Productions
Starring: Dick Miller, Barboura Morris, Antony Carbone
Directed by: Roger Corman
Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!
Synopsis: Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is a meek nobody who works as a busboy in a beatnik club and aspires to be an artist, except he has no talent. That is until a freak accident unlocks his hidden skill for covering corpses in clay which take the local art scene by storm.
Cat Corpse (with obvious Kitty Carnage Warning!): Early in the film Walter returns home and his landlady asks if he has seen her cat, Frank. Walter says he hasn’t and goes into his apartment to experiment with the modeling clay he has bought. As he struggles to sculpt he hears the cat, whom he calls Frankie, meowing somewhere within the wall. Walter has the best intentions of freeing Frankie from the wall when he grabs a knife and shoves it into the wall but when he hears the cat scream he knows he’s made a mistake.
Sure enough when he knocks away the wall he discovers he has stabbed Frankie, who is already stiff as a board.
Later Walter gets the idea of covering Frankie with clay and taking him into the club where he is proclaimed a genius by the locals for his realistic work he calls “Dead Cat.”
Purr Blur: Near the end of the film when Walter is going crazy and running through the dark night streets he pauses in an alley where he hears a cat meow. He looks down to see a Siamese cat looking up at him.
Final Mewsings: Apparently rigor mortis sets in immediately in cats.
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