Sergio Martino’s giallo take on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is similar to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but much twistier and trashier and about an hour shorter. (The Shining still wins for sheer quantities of blood, but Vice has more lovingly depicted violence.) As in Kubrick’s classic, you’ve got a burnt-out, alcoholic writer living in a big haunted house with his nerve-wracked wife. You’ve got mysterious murders and mounting suspicion. You’ve got what might be a supernatural force lurking at the edge of things (there it was a little boy, here’s it’s a yowling black cat named Satan). And best of all, you’ve got genuine style. Lowbrow doesn’t by any means exclude the possibility of craft. Where The Shining opts for the slow-build opening of the family’s drive to the Overlook, Martino is all slam-bang: bam, long shot of the villa at night; bam, close up on a pair of yellow cat’s eyes framed by a jet-black face; bam, a portrait of the writer’s mother dressed as Queen Mary Stuart; bam, the writer raising a toast to his dearly departed mum. “Oh yes, she definitely deserved being compared to Mary Stuart. No one else has been represented in such different ways, as a murderer or a martyr.” He then proceeds to savagely humiliate his wife in front of their dinner guests. She flees in tears, but after they’ve gone, she reappears, dressed in the same dress Mama was wearing in the portrait. The cat yowls; the woman taunts; the man attacks. It’s a bonkers scene, but smartly so: much of the film is contained therein. (1972) — Matthew Lickona