The Night of a Thousand Cats (1974)

In case you're a fan of "The Simpsons" (and who honestly isn't?), you probably are familiar with the hilarious supportive character of Crazy Cat-Lady. This totally dysfunctional and rather uncanny woman surrounds herself with an army of cats and even uses them as artillery to throw at people. Well, the main character of this film – Hugo – is sort of like the richer, more civilized, male and cinematic equivalent of Crazy Cat-Lady! For completely unexplained reasons, Hugo keeps A LOT (but surely not a thousand) of cats in the basement of the family castle, and that's definitely not the only curious aspect of his life-style. Hugo has everything in life others could only dream of. He's filthy rich, supposedly good looking (although I personally think he looks too much like Daniel Stern), he has a giant castle with a hunchbacked servant, a fancy helicopter and oceans of time to spot & stalk ravishing women. And yet, despite all his wealth, Hugo is a sick man who collects people's heads in pickled jars and feeds the leftovers to his collection of loudly meowing cats. He seduces women by endlessly circling his helicopter over their houses, finally manages to take them home and then kills them after only one night of hot passionate sex. He repeats this strange ritual no less than four times throughout the film (at least, in the fully uncut version) before the ravenous pets break out of their lair and aggressively turn against their master. "Night of a 1.000 Cats" is an utterly dumb and pointless movie. I know not to expect too much from the Mexican exploitation efforts directed by René Cardona Jr., but this has got to be one of the most incoherent and plot-less films I ever endured. There isn't a single bit of elementary logic or depth in the script and the absence of continuity is almost infuriating! Why the hell is Hugo so upset with the world even though he's probably the luckiest man on the planet? Why start a collection of decapitated human heads if your ancestors always collected stamps? Why doesn't he ever get caught even though his modus operandi of picking up girls in a helicopter isn't exactly subtle or inconspicuous? Why on earth would someone keep an army of cats in his basement even though he clearly doesn't show any affection for animals? There sure are easier ways to get rid of cadavers. At least you'd expect a nonsensical and trashy film like this to be entertaining and over-the-top gory, but it really isn't. Most of the footage in the full version is intolerably tedious and unnecessary, like Hugo flying around in his helicopter and standing guard at the gates of women's houses. I noticed there's a 63 minutes version available, so in case you do want to see this film for some incomprehensible reason, make sure you purchase the short version. The full version certainly doesn't contain any more graphic violence, sleazy sex sequences or corpse-eating cat action, I guarantee you. The photography, editing and sound effects are all incredibly tacky and amateurish. Hugo Stiglitz is a lousy actor without the slightest bit of charisma, but still René Cardona seemed to enjoy working with him, as Stiglitz also appears in the terribly inane Jaws-rip off "Tintorera", "Treasure of the Amazon" and "The Bermuda Triangle". This turkey is one to avoid at all costs, unless you want mew harder than a serenade of a thousand cats.

This is a strange and plot less movie about a psychopath (Hugo Stiglitz) who flies around Mexico City's poshest neighborhoods in his helicopter picking up sexy, bikini-clad women whom he then takes back to his castle where he has sex with them, murders them, pickles their heads, and feeds the remains to the titular "mil gatos" that he keeps in his basement.Director Rene Cardona Jr. never made what could really be considered a "good" movie in any sense of the word, and this one is especially inept. A serial killer isn't exactly going to be too inconspicuous flying around the ritzy suburbs in a helicopter. Hugo Stiglitz was probably a lot less irresistible to women than Cardona Jr. seemed to think he was in movies like this and "Tintorera". And if one wants to dispose of bodies, a few good-size hogs would do the job a lot more efficiently (and quietly) than 1,000 yowling cats. Also, I might point out that the action of this movie takes place over a lot more than a single night, in fact very little of the action even happens at night.Basically though faulting the movie's frequent lapses in logic is really missing the point. What Cardona Jr. seems to be trying to do is string together a lot of visually interesting scenes with the slenderest plot strands imaginable, making a movie that is about half avante-garde and half exploitative trash. Unfortunately, some of these scenes aren't too interesting to begin with (the helicopter footage) and some just go on too long (a strange interlude where the killer watches one leggy would-be victim doing a showgirl routine). Some scenes, however, are pretty interesting--especially the scenes with the cats. And as usual Cardona Jr. has lured a number of pretty European actresses (Anjanette Comer, Cristine Linder) to Mexico to swap bodily fluids with Stiglitz and become cat chow. I hope they at least got a nice Mexican vacation out of it!

This film goes nowhere. There is no blood, no nudity, no weirdness... absolutely nothing that describes this as a 70s horror film. There is hardly any dialogue and great part of the film are just shots of a helicopter and bad seventys instrumental music. The few girls in the film are beautiful, but considering that it was a horror film and it was the 70s, there should have been more skin shown, at least to justify for the poor story line and bad acting.This film is nowhere close to any other 70s horror gems. Another factor that disappointed me was that the movie is all spoken in English. Since the title is La Noche de los Mil Gatos, I thought it was going to be spoken in Spanish, so that took away my interest since the beginning.I do not recommend to serious horror film buffs.

what an awful movie! I was hoping to see an undiscovered classic and what I got was something like a tacky 70´s after shave commercial; crap acting, crap visuals...what a waste of a suitably crazy plot.On the other hand ,all the sex scenes seemed to be removed from the spanish version that I saw, altough it appears to be slightly longer than the others ( 93 minutes)...at least some gratuitous nudity would have helped me to stay awake.