Thoughts on Evil Cat

    On Criterion, I watched the 1987 Hong Kong supernatural action film Evil Cat, directed by Dennis Yu and written by Wong Jing. The film is about a family that, every 50 years, must fight the resurrected cat demon until its nine lives are up, and only the son born every 50 years can fight the demon with his inherited energy and strength. The demon is now on its ninth life, coming back and possessing people and sucking out people's lifeforces, jumping and pouncing in big leaps like a cat. Master Cheung (Chia-Leung Liu) has cancer, and is worried that he will die of the disease before he can defeat the demon, so he decides to train his daughter Siu-Chuen's (Lai-Ying Tang) boyfriend Lo (Mark Ho-nam Cheng) to be the warrior.

    Despite that this film has some heinously sexist moments (a young woman who is seen as whiny and annoying on a car ride is left tied up on a pole by guys laughing at her), the film is very neon atmospheric and combines excellent wire work with the cat-like jumps and claws and arched backs, blue lightning that follows the demon around (including a part where it attacks a woman by shooting a beam right at her vagina in a ridiculous moment), and the violence is gory, with punches that go through torsos. There are left-field moments, like when the movie suddenly cuts to a singer performing a canto-pop song, and he just pops into the story, with fans adoring him outside, only for him to be a victim of the cat-demon seducing him, having sex with him in a car, then biting off his tongue and killing him.

    I liked how the film ends in a surprisingly heartbreaking way, not the triumphant ending that I was expecting. It's a weird horror-fantasy, and very interesting to watch.