The Black Cat Blu-ray

Made during a particularly creative and prolific period in maestro Lucio Fulci's film-making career, and while his grisly Zombie trilogy seem to be held in much higher regard by horror fans, for me, maestro Lucio Fulci's singularly strange Poe adaptation has always maintained an uncommonly tenacious grip on my imagination, being so much more than just another a Grand Guignol gore-fest, Fulci's 'The Black Cat' is certainly no less morbidly cunning, wantonly feral and murderously unpredictable than the exquisitely Gothic film's raven-hued, equally black-hearted, rooftop stalking feline killer! Sublimely set against against a prototypically quaint English village, there are unimaginably blackened forces fulminating evilly behind the lead-lined windows and pictorially groomed gardens! After the sudden, inexplicable, increasingly brutal deaths of three locals bring handsome Inspector Gorley (Peter Warbeck) down to investigate these curios events, his Stoic investigations alongside pretty photographer and amateur sleuth Jill Trevers (Mimsy Farmer) very soon take a desperately disturbing decent into the diabolic paranormal machinations of the profoundly psychotic, necromantic realms of supremely sinister local bogeyman Prof. Robert Miles (Patrick Magee) whose cavalier dabbling in the more nefarious aspects of the occult soon threatens to consume all those who have the grave misfortune to come under his terrible, murderously mesmeric thrall! Inspirational horror icon Fulci successfully invokes one of his more accomplished and darkly fascinating invocations of evil with his boldly audacious re-telling of the eternal Edgar Allan Poe classic. This is a hugely entertaining, frequently bizarre, visually stylish, grimly atmospheric Gothic horror film vividly replete with his signature grisly phantasmagoria and hallucinatory, hyped-up splattery nastiness along with a tangible sense of some monstrous ancient evil being given eerie verisimilitude by maestro Pino Donaggio's somewhat underappreciated score, and celebrated cult figures Mimsy Farmer, David Warbeck and the always menacing Patrick Magee have never been more delightful to watch!