by Ted Davis

English Title: The Three Faces of Fear

Also Known As: Black Sabbath

Directed by: Mario Bava

Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!

Synopsis: Anthology of three tales of terror: The Telephone (a woman is terrorized by threatening phone calls from an unseen stalker), The Wurdulak (a Russian count encounters a family trying to destroy a vicious line of vampires) and The Drop of Water, aka La goccia d’acqua (a nurse foolishly decides to help herself to a ring from a corpse). There are no cats in the first two tales (that is in the Italian version, as the stories are presented in a different order in the dubbed USA version) but this is more than made up for by the final tale which features multiple moggies!

Cat Cattle Call: In Edwardian London a nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) receives a late night phone call from the maid of an elderly medium who has died and reluctantly agrees to go to the house to prepare the corpse for burial. At the house the maid (Milly Monti) is feeding one of her mistress’ many cats, with two more close by, when she hears the doorbell.

To a constant chorus of cat cries, she goes to answer the door as numerous cats scatter around her.

Eventually she reaches the door and admits the nurse as more cats run around their feet. As they make their way to the bedroom, the maid warns the nurse not to touch any of her mistress’s things as she told the maid there would be a terrible curse on anyone who did and they would die a horrible death.

The maid declines to come any nearer as the nurse inspects the body and her eyes alight upon an expensive ring on the deceased woman’s finger. Asked for the location of the dress in which the deceased medium is to be dressed, the maid says she has just ironed it and they go to fetch it as yet more cats come and go.

The nurse dresses the corpse while the maid goes to fetch a pair of her mistress’s shoes. Alone in the room, the nurse makes the fateful decision to help herself to the ring just as a black cat appears in the doorway.

Back in her own apartment once again, the nurse is increasingly unnerved by a series of noises: a banging window, animal cries (including a cat) and a constant dripping of water. Her anxiety increases when the storm raging outside plunges the place into darkness and she has to rely on candlelight. She is startled to see the medium’s corpse, first in her bed and then sitting up in a rocking chair holding one of the cats in her lap. This cat was one of the many cats seen running around the medium’s home.

The medium approaches the nurse as she begs for mercy before collapsing to the floor. Outside the window a cat (the same one she’d just seen being held by the medium) walks across the window ledge.

Final Mewsings: Don’t steal from dead crazy cat ladies.

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