(2 of 2)
By way of homage to the original Cat People, Schrader reproduces its two most famous scenes, in which an innocent woman (and the audience) thinks she is being stalked by the cat woman, in a park and a natatorium. The high points of the first film's terror, they seem pale and out of place in this gaudy but insecure film, which is all flesh and flash, never truly passionate or frightening. These sequences, in this context, become tributes not so much to a nostalgically recalled genre piece, but to the movies' long since vanished powers of suggestion. In those days, wit was employed to scare the wits out of people, and it was possible to speak about the unspeakable without turning it into an absurdity through show-and-tell realism.
—By Richard Schickel