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A slasher that plays it classy, this is the sixth film adaptation of John Willard’s 1922 play. It was directed by Radley Metzger, who stepped away from adult briefly — he also made Maraschino Cherry the same year under his Henry Paris name and would return for the uncredited The Tale of Tiffany Lust the following year — to direct a mainstream film.

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of Cyrus West (Wilfrid Hyde-White, My Fair Lady), his cousins are summoned to his mansion to watch his will and testament. They are stuntman Charlie Wilder (Peter McEnery, Footprints On the Moon), hunter Susan Sillsby (Pussy Galore herself, Honor Blackman), her lover Cicily Young (Olivia Hussey, Black Christmas), surgeon Henry Blythe (Daniel Massey, The Vault of Horror), fashion designer Annabelle West (Carol Lynley, The Poseidon Adventure) and songwriter Paul Jones (Michael Callan, Double Exposure). Joining them are the executor of the will, Allison Crosby (Wendy Hiller, Toys In the Attic) and the maid, Mrs. Pleasant (Beatrix Lehmann, Psyche ’59).

To get the entire estate, Annabelle must remain in the abandoned mansion with all of her cousins for one night and remain sane. Dr. Hendricks (Edward Fox, The Day of the Jackal) will judge her, yet the first thing he does is inform everyone that a trenchcoat-clad patient has escaped from the mental hospital, one who believes that he is a cat and loves to murder with claw-like weaponry.

What follows is a haunted house/slasher/giallo cocktail that is quite a potent mix. Shot in the same house as The Omen, it looks and feels great. Metzger’s only non-adult movie, it came about because of his long-time business relationship with producer Richard Gordon, who had once hired him to direct the English language versions of the films he was importing from Europe.

In an interview with Psychotronic Video, Metzger said, “It was a fun picture, but the litigation involved was horrendous. The distributor chose not to honor the contract. We sued, and it is very difficult to be the aggressor in a lawsuit. After all those years of defending myself in censorship cases in which we never lost one, there I was trying to create a case on the other side. It took a very long time. We won the suit because it was an obvious breach. The picture was finally released in 1981, but the timing was off. The haunted house aspect helped when it came to ancillary rights. Outside of theatres, Cat has done tremendous business. It was the leader in all those syndication packages. It has never stopped playing. We actually have been living off that picture for eight or nine years.”

You can watch this on Tubi.