Giallo #12: "The Black Cat" (1981)

Edgar Allan Poe and giallo in the same breath sounds like either a match made in heaven or an awkward fit and, truth be told, Lucio Fulci's "The Black Cat," loosely based on the author's short story, likely falls somewhere in the middle.
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Set in rural England, the film naturally begins with a gruesome death, the apparent doings of a green-eyed black cat, seemingly in cahoots with a local psychic who can communicate with the dead, played by Patrick Magee, whom I immediately recognized as the handicapped man who was so wronged by Alex De Large in Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange". 
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Once two teenagers go missing, a Scotland Yard detective and a photographer begin to sniff around the mysterious deaths around tow, enough to lead them to the psychic and his mysterious little kitty.
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If there's one major criticism of the film, it's that there are no surprises to be had (as the viewer, we see the perpetrators in plain sight) and the overall atmosphere is dingy, dark and frankly, obscure to the point of illegibility. (Never mind the fact that the audience is expected to quiver in fear from a cat.)
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No, really "The Black Cat" is much more of a bland piece of gory detective fiction (I can't say mystery, since there really is none) that's more or less a standard-entry film in giallo timeline, uniquely framed around a deadly feline. 
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As usual, there are a few noteworthy scenes, like a plummet from a high loft in an abondaned building impaling a victim to the spikes of rusty rebar, or "The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion" star Dagmar Lassander diving head-first out of a window with her body aflame. 
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There's also a cute reference to Alfred Hitchcock, the genre's obvious overriding influence, in which photographer Jill Trevers, in a late scene, uses her flash to temporarily blind her potential assailant in a dark room, a cue taken from Jimmy Stewart at the conclusion of "Rear Window". [C-]