Dario Argento protégé Luigi Cozzi takes on "The Three Mothers" with bizarre results in THE BLACK CAT, on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

With his wife Anne (Florence Guerin, THE CLICK) just wrapping up work on the giallo "The Black Cat" for a rival director (Michele Soavi, THE CHURCH), "king of the spaghetti horrors" Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini, DEMONS) wants to showcase his wife in his new horror film about the witch Levana of Thomas de Quincey's essay "Suspiria de Profundis" since Dario Argento appears to be uninterested in completing his own "Three Mothers" trilogy. Anne has reservations about "playing such a bitch" but it appears that the spirit of Levana feels the same way about Anne or anyone else purporting to show the face behind her crepe veil, appearing to Anne and threatening to drive her beyond the brink of madness. Anne's initial strange behavior – as well as the dire warnings of academic and occultist Esther (Karina Huff, VOICES FROM BEYOND) – are ignored by Marc and his writing partner Dan Grudzinski (Maurizio Fardo, ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX), busy as they are negotiating with reclusive producer Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey, THE DEVIL'S HONEY) who seems to want their souls in exchange for his funding and promotion; however, Anne may be taking a very method approach to the role when Levana tries to compel her to sacrifice her newborn son in order to fully incarnate herself in the real world. Is Anne possessed or going insane, and will Dan's actress girlfriend Nora (Caroline Munro, SLAUGHTER HIGH) really kill to make the role her own as she has boasted?

Co-scripted by an uncredited Daria Nicolodi, who also co-wrote and co-starred in Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR the same year, THE BLACK CAT is less interesting for its messy, meandering plot – in which a malfunctioning refrigerator and a vanishing repairmen (Antonio Marsina, MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD) are the height of horror – than its reflexive approach to Italian genre filmmaking and the allusions to the behind the scenes world of Cozzi's mentor Dario Argento. Not only are is Marc the "king of the spaghetti horrors" – Argento also had a horror director named Marc in OPERA – Barberini's filmmaker expresses anxiety about the cutthroat business of film funding and his desire to do original work, and makes a throwaway remark about how too much self-promotion might have him winding up hosting gameshows (a reference to Argento's emergence from behind the camera into a TV personality in the eighties). If the film feels even less subtle than most Italian horror films of the period, it may be because the character arc of protagonist Anne reconciling the light and dark halves of her psyche seems to be the only consistent through-line amidst a lot of aimless wandering by the other characters including PAGANINI HORROR's Jasmine Maimone as the nanny and Cozzi's daughter Giada (SINBAD AND THE SEVEN SEAS) as a Mario Bava-type spectral ghost girl who provide exposition. Argento regulars Rosario Prestopino (PHENOMENA) and Franco Casagni (THE STENDHAL SYNDROME) provide some gory but unspectacular make-up effects – including a rehash of Cozzi's exploding stomach gag from CONTAMINATION – while the old school optical effects of Armando Valcauda (STARCRASH) attempt to give Levana's menace a cosmic scale but the film's best asset is the photography of Pasquale Rachini (THE HOUSE OF THE LAUGHING WINDOWS) with its Argento-esque gel lighting and some occasionally arresting mobile compositions. The synth scoring of Vince Tempera (THE PSYCHIC) is augmented heavily with eighties punk rock songs from Bang Tango and White Lion that does not have quite the effect of the Argento compilation soundtracks of the period. In the nineties, Cozzi would direct two feature-length documentaries on Argento as follow-ups to Michele Soavi's DARIO ARGENTO'S WORLD OF HORROR in addition to running Argento's Profondo Rosso shop. He returned behind the camera in 2016 with BLOOD ON MÉLIÈS' MOON.

Picked up during production by Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation – the company Golan was given as severance from Cannon Films – THE BLACK CAT was altered in post-production from Cozzi's workprint cut of the film (which snuck onto VHS in Japan), with 21st making minor changes to the editing rhythms of some scenes while also replacing one of the White Lion songs in two instances with the song "Good Lookin'" penned by Harriet Schock ("Hollywood Town") for the modern wraparound segment of Golan's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with Robert Englund. Although the film was announced as a VHS release from RCA/Columbia, the release was canceled and the film instead premiered with trims to violence on the Sci-Fi channel and has since popped up intermittently on television through MGM who ended up with both the Cannon and 21st Century libraries. Although it seemed like all MGM might have is a video master, Severin's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer thankfully confirms that they do indeed have "pristine vault elements" which cut through the video haze and the noise of the saturated color gels on the old video master to reveal that there was always a degree of diffusion in some shots while others suffered generational loss from optical overlays; however, the film at its best sports palpably slimy textures, lighting color schemes that now seem more Argento-esque than standard music video, and more conventionally-lit scenes possess a clarity with the overall impression being that the more entertaining PAGANINI HORROR could have looked this slick with this film's moderately higher budget. The English mono track is presented in a clean DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 encode with familiar dubbing voices throughout and some depth in the music scoring (the songs seem to have less presence in the soundscape). Optional English SDH subtitles also transcribe the song lyrics throughout.