Soooo much pussy is present in René Cardona Jr.’s The Night of a Thousand Cats, a Mexican horror film that will scare nobody but representatives of PETA. It will, however, entertain the hell out of practically anyone willing to tolerate the director’s slow, but unintentionally silly style, evident in such zoo-minded snoozers as Tintorera: Killer Shark and Beaks: The Movie. This particular animal-oriented effort stars Nightmare City‘s Hugo Stiglitz as — wait for it — Hugo, a leather-wearing cad who flies around in his helicopter to pick up hot ladies. (Hey, it may be a gimmick, but guys, it works.)

Taking his latest find back to his bachelor pad, a 1600s monastery owned by his family, Hugo introduces her to his bald, mute robed goon of a servant with a limp, Dorgo (Gerardo Zepeda, El Topo), who’s “obedient and as faithful as a cat” and not too shabby in the cooking department, either; according to Hugo, “meat is his specialty.” (Dorgo also gets a hard-on for a stethoscope, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyhow, Hugo’s date is going along swimmingly, until a cat interrupts the meal. At that point, our angered, bearded douche hurls the helpless animal over a ridiculously tall chain-link fence, on the other side of which stand hundreds — or perhaps 1,000, hmmm? — of felines, meowing their precious widdle paws off. So Hugo grinds his girl up and feeds fistfuls of the ground round to the kitties. (Oh, but not the head! That goes in his basement collection.)

The script then plops Hugo back into the chopper to spy in on babes in pointy-boob bikinis, and pick the next one to fuck ‘n’ chuck. For a guy who gets so much bed action, Hugo’s sex scenes should be better, but Cardona’s camera zooms in on the noses of polar bears and other stuffed heads on the wall, which don’t mean nothin’. (I apologize for quoting Richard Marx; it’ll never happen again.) —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Relax, The Orphan Killer is an orphan who’s a killer, not a killer of orphans. That said, yeah, he’s still the kind of guy who’ll stab a machete in your face, or choke you with barbed wire, even ax a nun if he has to. On the playful side, he likes to steal bras for sniffing purposes.

Masked murderer Marcus (David Backus, Priest) can’t get over the fact that after their parents were killed some 20 rough-odd years prior, his 5-year-old sister, Audrey, was adopted and he wasn’t. While she got to play with Barbies, he had to be molested by a priest and made a mockery of by other kids. So he tracks down Aud (Diane Foster, who also co-produced), strings her up, rips open her blouse and tortures her. Sibs!

This relationship isn’t much different than the one between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode of the exalted Halloween franchise, except that Marcus speaks (mostly about Jesus and pain and suffering — y’know, the usual) and, quite thoughtfully, wears a tie while on his rampage of rivalry. There’s not much more to it than that, with writer/director Matt Farnsworth filtering in pieces of the backstory on a need-to-know basis between instances of bloodletting. That savagery, however, is executed (pun intended) quite well.

In fact, the overpowering aggro-metal music notwithstanding, The Orphan Killer is one of the most impressive pure DIY horror films I’ve seen, if not the most. Marcus isn’t likely to be the next horror icon — neither are Victor Crowley, ChromeSkull, Babyface and the other touted wanna-be Vorheeses — but Backus certainly succeeds in making him repugnant. Foster, exuding a Scarlett Johansson/Elizabeth Olsen quality, plays her wounded heroine role to the hilt. Her efforts are worth it, given Farnsworth’s slick, yet brutal direction and top-notch effects that make this squarely not for the squeamish. —Rod Lott

Buy it at The Orphan Killer.