When is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” not Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”? When it’s Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat, of course. Nary a soul should be startled by that, given the director’s history with others’ intellectual property. (This is where you Google “cozzilla.”) However, with Poe’s bibliography residing whole-hog in the public domain, anyone can make a Poe adaptation or — as Cozzi has done here, following in AIP’s financially viable footsteps — just slap Poe’s name on a movie simply for salability’s sake.

Hey, at least Cozzi includes a black cat!

Filmmaker Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini of Lamberto Bava’s Demons) has written a sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria centering on the witch Levana. And who better to play the goop-drooling, pustule-faced “mother of madness” than his own actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin of Jess Franco’s Faceless)?

Almost immediately, Anne starts encountering visions of Levana, starting with that butt-ugly witch — whose bumpy-lumpy face looks like a sweeps-week stunt for Dr. Pimple Popper — leaping through a mirror. Frightening as that brush with delusion may be, Anne returns to that deep dark truthful mirror night after night. More creepy crap happens around her, from a refrigerator’s produce sparking with electric jolts to a professor’s stomach exploding.

Being set in the world of making movies, The Black Cat is a movie that makes references to other movies. The most overt is when Marc’s screenwriting partner (the Gene Siskel-esque Maurizio Fardo of Enzo G. Castellari’s Escape from the Bronx) name-checks Suspiria, to which Anne replies, “That title rings a bell” as Goblin’s spooky, bell-ridden theme gets needle-dropped on the soundtrack.

Cozzi goes crazy with the saturated color gels of Argento and Mario Bava, but if there’s one director he’s ripped off more, it’s himself! It appears he’s recycled the box of Christmas-ornament spacescapes from his Hercules twofer and/or Starcrash, not to mention the latter’s leading lady (Caroline Munro, sexy as ever) and, finally, Contamination’s alien eggs for Levana’s Oxy 10-ready, pox-a-poppin’ skin. Mind you, these are all welcome elements of cut-rate creativity; and with The Black Cat and Paganini Horror arriving the same year, Cozzi clearly was on a roll — hopefully garlic-buttered. —Rod Lott

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When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, Silver Bullet.

Not exactly a novel, Cycle depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.

That’s not a criticism of Cycle, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for Silver Bullet. We get the attack on the lonely fat woman, the mauling of the cop in his car, the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.

A tween Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two working legs, the kid in the wheelchair outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows, The Nutcracker Prince) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey (Surviving the Game).

Busey is incredible in this flick, and by that I mean semi-lucid — and this was a few years before the motorcycle accident that caused his head injury and what we now know as the acronym-spouting “Gary Busey.” At the end is an amazing reaction shot where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and going through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.

Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who pleads with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) has a small role as the sheriff, and Reservoir Dogs’ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.

As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from King Kong ’76 producer Dino De Laurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy — enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and with its share of solid horror moments well-timed by first-time feature director Daniel Attias (who went directly to series TV and never looked back). Plus, in these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.

Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster — as well as the entire film — but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I appreciate it more today than the several times I saw it several decades ago. Cycle of the Werewolf is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella — but Silver Bullet brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott

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