Cathy's Curse is a bargain basement version of The Omen meets Carrie, which were contemporary horror hits at the time. It's a truly terrible film that has the added disadvantage of seemingly being only available in prints that are in an atrocious state (in the one I saw, the colours were so bad that the blood was purple). But even if this movie was released on high definition it wouldn't change the fact that it's abysmal.
The story is senseless. A mother takes her son George away from the family home, leaving the father and daughter. The dad isn't too pleased about this, so he jumps in his car with his little girl Laura. They swerve off the road to avoid a rabbit and the car blows up. Thirty years later, the son returns to the family home with his wife and daughter, Cathy. Pretty much right away Cathy becomes possessed by George's sister Laura's old doll and becomes homicidal, killing various people. Laura seems to be an embittered soul, angered by her early death and wrecks havoc via her brother's offspring.
From the above synopsis, I think it's only fair to say that the film, strictly speaking should have been called Laura's Curse. But this is only a glaring detail and this film quite frankly doesn't concern itself with such trivialities. There are many moments of WTF in this film. At one point Cathy teleports from the bottom of the stairs to the top and vice-versa, and her mother, witnessing this, just gets annoyed; she doesn't actually seem to be, well, a little surprised that her daughter has developed the ability to teleport at will, she is merely irritated with her misbehaving child. In another scene Cathy sits down for breakfast and throws her plate across the room at the opposite wall, smashing it to bits, and the housekeeper simply picks it up and seems to imply that she just dropped it, rather than launched it 3 metres over the other side of the room. In other words, people in this movie do not act like Earthlings. A further example of utter madness, is where the medium takes hold of an old family picture then starts talking in creepy voices, getting progressively more and more demented until she smashes the picture on the floor while screaming; she then turns around and says that she's really had a marvellous time and would simply love to pop over again. It's just weird. What perhaps makes these people all the stranger is that absolutely no one can act. The performances are universally atrocious. The handyman is abysmal too, although it's maybe not surprising seeing as he appears to be Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac in a rare acting appearance.
There are one or two occasions when Cathy's Curse is almost effective. And it can't be argued that it's pretty bizarre throughout. But despite all this, it drags. The unintentional hilarity is something to behold but you really need some buddies and beer to enjoy this one.
