by Mark Murton

Original Title: Torment

Directed by: John Guillerman

This review contains a Kitty Carnage Warning!

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

Synopsis: In this somewhat overwrought melodrama, saved by an exciting ending, two crime writer brothers, Jim and Cliff Brandon (John Bentley and Dermot Walsh) vie for the affections of their secretary Joan (Rona Anderson). Joan clearly prefers Jim which pushes the moody, neurotic Cliff over the edge.

Kitty Cameo: The film opens with an unidentified man entering a house through a window. Brandishing a gun, he moves through the darkened room and out into the corridor. A dubbed on cat cry alerts him to the presence of a black cat on the floor nearby.

Kitty Carnage Warning! The man quickly gathers up the cat and (out of view of the camera) squeezes the life out of it before tossing it aside. He then enters a room where we see the shadow of a man in a chair cast onto the wall and fires two shots at him. In the next scene we learn that the gunman was in fact Cliff, one of the crime-writing brothers, acting out the plot of his latest idea for a story with the man in the chair a simple cardboard cut-out. However, later in the film the other brother, Jim, and Joan find the cat’s dead body in a corridor upstairs. Joan must have passed the poor cat numerous times because she was under the impression he’d been sleeping there all night. “Poor little Tabs,” Jim sighs. Jim places the lifeless (and clearly fake) body of Tabs on a small table nearby and when they confront the increasingly unhinged Cliff about it he admits to killing the cat when acting out his storyline idea.

Final Mewsings: If the only way you can get inspiration is by killing cats please find another career.

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