Also Known As: The Graveyard, Sheba, The Terror of Sheba, I Hate You, Cat

Directed by: Don Chaffey

This review contains a severe Kitty Carnage Warning!

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

Synopsis: An unhealthy relationship between a bitter mother (Lana Turner), her persecuted son (Ralph Bates) and a cat named Sheba leads to murder and mayhem.

Featured Felines: The son, David (played by Mark Weavers as a child), resents the attention his mother dotes on her precious Persian cat Sheba. The film opens with two white dots on a black screen coming closer; the eyes of a cat. A door opens and we see the white cat on the floor of a kitchen. David enters and offers Sheba some milk in a large bowl. He never calls Sheba by her name, he just calls her “cat.”

After saying he wished he owned a dog that would chase Sheba away, David kicks the bowl, splashing milk all over Sheba’s face, then laughs hysterically. Of course Sheba resents this and scratches David, even after he apologizes.

Kitty Carnage Warning! This sets David over the edge and he grabs Sheba and holds her face in the milk until she drowns, all the while stating, “I hate you!” While the action on screen is intensified with fast cuts, it is unfortunately clear that the real cat actor’s face was being pushed down into the milk (although we assume it was for very short periods of time). After Sheba stops struggling, David looks up and says plainly, “Mother, I’ve killed the cat.”

On Christmas morning, David’s mother, Carrie, gives him a present which turns out to be a coffin containing the body of Sheba. She then makes him go to the cat graveyard (complete with large cat statue) located within a large hedge maze where she tells him to apologize to the deceased feline. Time passes and the camera pans across numerous graves of cats named Sheba who have come and gone over the years. David has been coerced into staying with his mother, even as a married man. “You’ll never leave me, David,” Carrie threatens, “Not until I’ve told you everything.” His wife, Janie (Suzan Farmer) and infant son Paul also live at home with his mother. Janie freaks out when she looks for David inside the maze and screams when Sheba “jumps” at her.

David has flashbacks of being in bed as a child with another Sheba staring at him, bringing up nightmares of the day he killed the previous Sheba. His mother tells him to calm down and calls Sheba from the room but seems otherwise unconcerned about his outburst.

Excusing herself from an uncomfortable dinner with David and his mother, Janie goes to check on Paul. She doesn’t realize Sheba has followed her into the nursery. The next time she checks on Paul, Sheba has smothered him.

This drives Janie to the brink of insanity and she screams every time she sees the cat.

In the graveyard, David sees Sheba sitting on the base of the cat statue, which he imagines to have his mother’s face.

Carrie sits with Sheba and remembers the events which led up to her being crippled.

At a nightclub, Carrie is in a corner with Sheba when she calls over a young woman at another table.

The young woman is named Monique (Olga Georges-Picot) and Carrie hires her as a nurse to care for Janie. But Carrie’s real plan is to have Monique seduce David to break up his marriage.

In another flashback scene, David remembers the pivotal moment when he returned home from school and gave his mother an ashtray he made as a Christmas present. His mother, who is obviously unimpressed with the gift, uses the ribbon from the present to play with Sheba.

Carrie makes sure that Janie catches David in bed with Monique. When Janie runs from the room she trips over Sheba and falls down the stairs to her death.

Finally driven to complete madness and looking for revenge for the many years of torment he’s endured, David confronts Carrie about the “everything,” forcing her to tell the story about her husband and his father, although she realizes she has confused the facts in her own mind.

Earlier in the film Janie had suggested to David that Carrie and Sheba were actually one and the same. Losing his last grip on reality, David insists Carrie meow like a cat.

He forces his mother to drink milk from a bowl and then drowns her. The final line mimics the earlier one with David looking up at Sheba and stating in the same voice, “Mother, I’ve killed the cat.”

Behind the Scenes

Sheba is supposed to be a menacing representation of Carrie’s domineering nature, but in truth the cat looks largely bewildered at the goings on and anything but scary.

We couldn’t find any information about the cat actors playing the parts of Sheba (although it is clear that several cats played Sheba, at the very least in her different incarnations). The coming and going of the cats named Sheba in the story is a bit puzzling and not fully explained. From the information on the graves, Carrie owned at least five cats named Sheba. One can speculate that she obtained and kept cats named Sheba specifically for the purpose of tormenting David, to constantly remind him that he killed her beloved original Sheba. But it seems that occasionally she had two Shebas at the same time, as the dates on the graves overlap. And none of the cats seemed to have lived for much more than five or six years (eight for one of them). Does this mean David was a habitual cat killer? Or was Carrie just really bad at caring for her kitties?

The film was universally panned by reviewers and even Lana Turner admitted that it was the only time in her career she felt ashamed of a movie she’d made. “It seemed fine when I made it, but by the time it was edited — and butchered — it ended up playing as the second half of a Halloween double bill.” (The top of the bill was Mary, Bloody Mary.)

It must also be noted that director Don Chaffey also helmed the cat-centric Disney film The Three Lives of Thomasina, which also contained some Kitty Carnage Warnings but otherwise is about as far removed from this film as is possible.

Final Mewsings: Kids who kill cats should get dead cats for Christmas!

Many thanks to Ted Davis for letting us know about the cat in this film.

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