Despite the title, Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat has only the most tenuous connection to Edgar Allen Poe's classic tale: there are a few random black cats thrown in for no real reason, and the lead character, actress Anne Ravenna (Florence Guérin),recently starred in a movie based on Poe's novel.

Anne's next role is to be that of witch Levana, inspired by the ancient occult tome Suspiria de Profundis, the same work that provided the basis for Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy. As Anne prepares for the part (to be directed by her husband Marc, played by Urbano Barberini),she is menaced by the ugly old hag, who isn't too happy to be the subject of a horror movie.

The bulk of the film consists of random supernatural events, all lit using coloured filters borrowed from Cozzi's pal Argento: Levana emerges from a mirror to spew green slime over Anne's face, makes the Ravenna's fridge malfunction (how evil!),causes intestines to spill from their TV (she really has it in for home appliances),grabs Anne through a wall, conjures up an otherworldly repairman to fix the fridge (no, really),and in the film's goriest moment, sends a woman's guts flying through the air (an effect borrowed from Cozzi's own Alien rip-off Contamination). Meanwhile, Anne's friend Nora - Caroline Munro, still looking good at 40 - is having an affair with Marc, which adds nothing to the plot (not that there is much of a plot anyway).

It's all incredibly dumb and makes no sense whatsoever, with pointless shots of planets and stars, and a foetus only adding to the confusion, while the bizarre use of sudden bursts of rock music at inopportune moments only adds to the silliness (Bang Tango's Someone Like You is used at least four times, Cozzi getting his money's worth).

2.5/10, generously rounded up to 3 for the erupting stomach (an oldie but a goodie). It says a lot that The Black Cat is even worse than Argento's own, seriously sub-par Mother of Tears.

Oh man, where do I even begin in trying to make sense of this movie?

It's not a sequel to Demons, no matter what the title tells you.

It was called Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat in America, when it most assuredly has nothing to do with that film.

And somehow, it was nearly called De Profundis (From The Deep) and is also sometimes referred to as Demons 6: Armageddon, which makes sense because it's filled with scenes of space and planets randomly throughout the movie.

It's also - sit down for this one - an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno, made back when Argento hadn't yet decided to close off that cycle of movies with Mother of Tears. Yes, the script to this movie was adapted from Daria Nicolodi's (Argento's ex-wife and creator of The Three Mothers trilogy) script for what was going to be an official Argento Three Mothers film that never saw the light of day. And who better than Luigi Cozzi - who in addition to making Starcrash and the Ferrigno Hercules films, runs Argento's store Profondo Rosso store - to direct this?

Are you confused yet? I am and I haven't even started watching the movie yet!

Here - watch the whole thing yourself and see if you can make any sense of it.

This one is all about Marc (Urbano Barberini, who was actually in Demons),a horror film director, is making a movie called Suspiria De Profundis that is a sequel to Suspiria and based on Thomas De Quincey's story Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow. There's even a sequence where the characters discuss just how good of a director Argento is as they reveal what the Mother of Madness looks like, dripping with worms and gore.

Marc casts his actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin, Too Beautiful to Die) in the lead, along with Nora (Caroline Munro, who I should not have to tell you anything about other than the fact that her being in this movie makes me overjoyed). Things seem to go pretty well for all involved until Levana, who it turns out is a real person, objects to how she's portrayed in the movie and goes wild, blowing up food in refrigerators and people's chests.

Levana - the Mother of Tears - may be the lead villain, but there's also an evil film producer in a wheelchair named Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey, Demonia, The Devil's Honey) who hints at wanting to take Marc's soul. And Nora has designs on Marc, so there's that. Also - a refrigerator that sprays food everywhere and Michele Soavi in a cameo as a director.

This movie is also packed with mid-80's hair metal, featuring Bang Tango and White Lion all over the soundtrack.

Charitably, this movie is a mess, but I completely loved every single minute of it. There's enough bile and blood and breasts and beasts to satisfy just about any horror movie lover. I'm in for Demons 7 if these guys want to make it.

I hated Lamberto Bava's bafflingly popular DEMONS (1985) and DEMONS 2 (1986); later unrelated Italian horror films were inexplicably passed off as sequels to them – Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH (1989) and THE SECT (1991),Bava's own THE OGRE (1988) and THE DEVIL'S VEIL (1989),and this one by Cozzi (which is also known as DEMONS 6: DE PROFUNDIS, actually the title borne by the copy I watched)! Truth be told, neither does it have anything to do with Edgar Allan Poe – despite fleetingly irrelevant appearances by the titular creature (by the way, the same source also inspired Sergio Martino's YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY {1972}, Lucio Fulci's 1981 namesake and, again Dario Argento's episode in the two-part compendium TWO EVIL EYES {1990})! This 'version' also purports to be an unofficial continuation of Argento's "Three Mothers" saga (complete with cues from the famous SUSPIRIA {1977}soundtrack),years before the third entry got made! Whatever the film strives to be, it is perhaps the effort which definitively put the lid on the "Euro-Cult" style that had flourished for some 40 years! Anyway, the plot revolves around the attempts by a long-dead witch to stop an actress from playing her on-screen in a proposed movie about her exploits (I wonder whether she demanded a casting director credit!). That is it, basically – but the result displays a stupefying ineptness in every department and, as was often the case with this type of film, the script does not make a lick of sense (at the climax, the actress is possessed by the spirit of a dead child in order to combat the witch's evil force – with extraneous cutaways to outer space reportedly lifted from Cozzi's "Hercules" flicks)! The latter 'recruits' a number of people for this purpose – including fellow actress and rival for the part Caroline Munro, temperamental wheelchair-bound producer Brett Halsey, his female secretary, a refrigerator repair-man(!),a young boy, the heroine's baby's nanny and, in the very last shot, the toddler itself!; on the side of good, we get the scriptwriter (Munro's husband),the director (the protagonist's own hubby and Munro's lover!) and a female occult expert (who spectacularly expires from an exploding heart!). As I said, events follow one another without any rhyme or reason – which is not necessarily a bad thing, when it manages to create a dream-like aura (and the only such instance here is a nightmare sequence in which the actress attempts to stab her own child under the witch's influence, is stopped by her husband, whom she then attacks but he, in turn, removes the knife and sticks it in her) yet, as a rule, here it is just a succession of repugnant make-up and cheesy effects.