Directed by Erle C.
Kenton, written by Edward Dein and Jerry Warner
Starring Noah Beery, Jr.,
Lois Collier and Paul Kelly
1946
Several characters,
including a newspaperman and his bumbling photographer assistant, descend on an
old dark house in an attempt to solve a 15-year-old murder and find a hidden
treasure. When the elderly woman who inhabits the house turns up dead,
seemingly murdered, an exotic visitor arrives, claiming the old woman’s black
cat now carries the soul of the old woman and the secret of both the murder and
the treasure.
Considered one of the low
points of Universal’s horror cycle, THE CAT CREEPS is a hard flick to find.
Even Portland’s treasure trove of movie rental esoterica, MOVIE MADNESS, didn’t
have a copy. I ended up watching it on dailymotion.com, of all places. Adding to the
confusion is the fact that Universal also had a flick over a decade earlier
called THE CAT CREEPS WHILE THE CANARY SLEEPS, which is officially considered a
lost film (and is a remake of the silent classic THE CAT AND THE CANARY). Aside
from being hard (but not impossible!) to find, this flick has nothing to do
with those ones.
In any case, it’s more of
a murder mystery than a horror story, but there are (seemingly) supernatural
elements, what with the black cat angle, and I found Paul Kelly and Noah Beery,
Jr. as the newspaper reporter and his cameraman buddy to be an appealing duo,
worth following from the film’s brief run-time.
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