So, read this explanation: A crippled woman takes pleasure in tormenting her son, blaming him for her condition, all because he killed her cat. Flash-forward a few years and despite a new wife and baby, his mother still owns him and all hell breaks loose.

Now what if I told you that Lana Turner plays the mom?

Directed by Don Chaffey, who also made C.H.O.M.P.S., Pete’s Dragon, One Million Years B.C. and Jason and the Argonauts, this is the kind of potboiler that you keep waiting to simmer over and nothing wild happens at all.

Ralph Bates (the great, great nephew of French scientist Louis Pasteur who also played Doctor Jekyl in Dr. Jekyl and Sister Hyde and Frankenstein in The Horror of Frankenstein) plays the son and you kind of wish this had been made in Italy so that all the repressed psychosexual madness would come out in more visually exciting and demented ways. That said, Olga Georges-Picot is fetching.

Also known as Persecution and The Terror of Sheba, file this one under murderous cats.

You can watch this on Tubi.