Confessions of a Psycho Cat is a 1968 exploitation horror film produced and directed by “Eve” (Herb Stanley) from a screenplay by Bill Boyd. It stars Eileen Lord, Ed Garrabrandt, Frank Geraci, Dick Lord, Arlenne Lorrance and boxer Jake LaMotta (later played by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull (1980).
Buddy “the addict”, Charles Freeman “the actor” and Rocco “the wrestler”each receive mysterious notes to meet at the residence of Virginia Marcus. Virginia offers the men $100,000 if they can stay alive in Manhattan for 24 hours. The challenge? Virginia intends to hunt each one of them down. It’s a safari in Manhattan! “When you receive the cheque the game is on.”Why this particular trio of men? They each committed a murder that they were acquitted of. Virginia looks at it as a sort of public service and at the same time an entertaining game. The balance of Confessions of a Psycho Cat details the hunt with a lot of unnecessary sex scenes randomly scattered throughout.
I cannot lie, I would love to have seen what Confessions of a Psycho Cat looked like without the added sex scenes. Eileen Lord who plays Virginia Marcus gives a show stopping performance! She is truly magnificent! She has a great look and fantastic expressions; shouting, yelling and laughing hysterically. She just wanted to go on safari goddammit! It is one of those epic crazy performances that linger in the mind. She never holds back the emotions going from reasonable to insane regularly. The first thing I did when the film ended was look up Eileen Lord on IMDB and I was shocked to see Confessions of a Psycho Cat was her only credit! What a crying shame! This film is worth watching just for her character and her brilliant performance! She is not the only highlight ofConfessions of a Psycho Cat though. Virginia’s three victims were all perfectly chosen.
The sex scenes are filler and rather goofy filler at that. Some of the participants actually look bored and some of the acting by this group was hilariously bad. The keyword being “hilarious”. I didn’t hate the sex scenes. They are an attractive 60s-licious bunch of folks who spend their screen time nude or partially dressed and cough out some pretty silly nonsense that certainly gave me a chuckle. The Pièce de résistance was Rocco’s hooker pictured in the two images above. Her scene was one of the added bits and she was clearly not in the same room as Jake LaMotta. There is no way Rocco would have let that crazy dame in his room. Her dialog was priceless.
“What you bring me up here for anyway? All you’re doing is reading that silly little paper. I came up here to have some fun. What’s the matter? Don’t you like me? (Takes off bra and examines her breasts) I never had any complaints before. Can’t you tell I’m a girl? I think I look pretty good. I think you’re putting me down. I’m sexy and that’s what I came up here for…sex.” She than starts kissing her own reflection and really goes at it, tongue and all for a good minute plus. Classic sixties sexploitation fun!
While Virginia and her trio of victims was certainly the highlight and definitely the film’s best performances, the clumsily added sex scenes were quite amusing. The film had the deck stacked against it when some Einstein decided it would be more marketable as a sexploitation flick and it is a damn shame that seemingly no one will ever get to see the original vision of Confessions of a Psycho Cat. That said, the superb story and characters of the central plot make up the majority of the film and there are a dozen memorable well-executed scenes.
