From Showgirls to this, it’s my year to watch movies that are considered horrifically bad, but are actually kinda cool. I mean I’m not running out to buy Cat People posters for my dorm, but from its wordless mystical prologue on, it never hits a wrong note, and is slick looking with cool music (until the lame Bowie title track over the credits, sorry).

I guess Ruby Dee’s introduction, overexplaining why her character name is Female, pronounced fuh-MOLL-y, is a wrong note, but right after that, look it’s John Larroquette, and then a pretty woman hosing an elephant (this is Annette O’Toole, the Jessica Chastain of the original It). Okay, I guess the movie’s attempted reenactment of the Tourneur version‘s pool scene, seemingly written only as an excuse to show Annette naked, is another wrong note.

Comic relief guy loses an arm:

As soon as Nastassja Kinski arrives in New Orleans to meet her long-lost brother Malcolm McDowell (awesomely, lecherously creepy), he goes off to kill prostitutes in form of a leopard and gets captured. Kinski gets a zoo job to be near her leopard-brother, wants to date zookeeper John Heard (After Hours bartender) but sexual desire makes her get furry, and while she’s trying to figure this out, McDowell is pestering her: “we can live together as mates, just as our parents did.” John Heard somehow survives a night of full moon bondage sex, and she takes her late brother’s place as a zoo exhibit.