'The Cat Girl' (1957) – Alfred Shaughnessy.

In many ways, sensational British cryptid horror 'The Cat Girl' remains a picture purrfect vintage fright flick, eerily steeped in wintry Gothic doom. Somewhere within this isolated, historically hateful house, a monstrously mutable midnight mistress is grimly awakened, thereby unleashing this fearfully fascinating, cat walk creeping feline freak of supernature! Until only relatively recently, Alfred Shaughnessy's shadow-steeped shocker 'The Cat Girl' was not all that readily available, not often screened, and infrequently broadcast, its relative obscurity wholly undeserved. The distractingly beauteous Leonora Johnson (Barbara Shelley) returns to her ancestral home with the hope of receiving a sizeable inheritance, but very soon distressingly discovers that the ominous mutterings of a benighted family curse fatefully prove to be more corporeal than a twice-told tale! The unfortunate Leonora realizes there's little truth in the hoary old maxim, as not only CAN a Leopard change its spots, it can ALSO evilly possess, and supernaturally transfigure the dazzlingly voluptuous figure of Barbara Shelley into a savagely sinister species of soul-shatteringly diabolical, skin-flaying terror!

While thematically owing much to maestro Val Lewton's crepuscular, skin-crawlingly effective minimalist masterpiece 'Cat People', Shaughnessy's softly creeping, greatly atmospheric chiller possesses a darkly mesmerizing personality all of its own! But beware!!!!!!!!! the uncommonly beautiful Hammer Horror star Barbara Shelley is mesmerizingly malevolent in one of her most memorably macabre roles!  The predatory nocturnal peregrinations of this malignly murderous minx will give you paws for thought!!!!! But once she digs her stiletto sharp claws into your tremulous, fear-frozen flesh, her fatally carnal embrace will seal your fate. Again, a little too much is made of 'The Cat Girl' being inferior to 'Cat People', whereas I enjoyed it for its own singularly striking merits, and Barbara Shelley's terminally toothsome performance as the sultrily sinister, shape-shifting, man-eating feral feline is in a lurid league all of its own! Take heed! Pretty Leonora Johnson is the kind of perfidious puddy tat that puts YOU out!!!!!

Fun film factoid, British independent horror maestro Peter Walker directed two films written by Shaughnessy, namely the groovy exploitation classics 'Tiffany Jones' & 'The Flesh & Blood Show'.