Busy Mexican drive-in actor Hugo Stiglitz (who appeared in several films for both Cardonas as well as Nightmare City) stars as Hugo (of course), a wealthy layabout who lives in a Gothic estate where he brings beautiful women home for entertainment. He manages to procure many of them by flying his helicopter around Acapulco (which consumes an insane amount of the running time), but after tiring of them, he strangles the women, keeps their heads preserved in glass cases, and uses the bodies as food for his subterranean pit filled with, supposedly, a thousand hungry cats. He also has feline-themed artwork around his place and seems terrified of them, though the exact origin of his psychosis isn't really explained. Naturally he also has an ugly, weird henchman named Dorgo (Zepeda), who helps out with the grisly day-to-day chores, but the game might be over when Hugo brings home his latest conquest, pretty vacationer Cathy (The Baby's Comer), for a weekend at the mansion of flesh-eating kitties.

Despite its very short running time of just over an hour, The Night of a Thousand Cats is so filled with padding you could easily make a half-hour TV episode out of it without losing anything of narrative substance. That said, it certainly delivers where it counts in the sex and violence department, including a pretty surprising opening love scene (for '72 at least) and lots of weird Gothic touches along the way. Unfortunately a couple of the cute cat costars look like they were treated pretty roughly during filming, but if you can overlook that unpleasant and really unnecessary aspect, there's plenty of amusing fun to be had here, especially with the loud '70s clothes, decor, and gargantuan brandy snifters.

A VHS mainstay in the early '80s, this film looked pretty awful for many years with several labels recycling the same wretched, pan and scanned transfer over and over. The Code Red release marks its first widescreen appearance in America and looks pretty nice, at least compared to its predecessors; you can finally make out what's going on in the darker scenes, and the full compositions at least make this feel more like a real movie. The print is also cleaner, with a few age-related defects but in much better shape than what we've had before. The English audio sounds about the same as it always has, i.e., hilariously awful. For those who can't get enough helicopter flying, there's also an Italian DVD containing a longer 78-minute cut of the film in English but heavily cropped to 1.33:1, as well as a German DVD of the longer version in scope but without an English-language option. From the menu on the Code Red disc you also get to "suffer through" some additional Code Red trailers like The Vampires' Night Orgy, Black Angels, Cut-Throats Nine, Teen Lust, Terminal Island, and Class of '74.

The film was issued on DVD by Code Red as a double feature with House of Insane Women, and the label took its second stab at that film with a Blu-ray release from what appears to be the same source material, with similarly muted colors and damage marks. Sharing space on the Blu-ray is a dated SD version of Passion Plantation, a trashy Italian Mandingo cash-in originally released as Emmanuelle bianca e nera (not to be confused with the same year’s Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle with Laura Gemser). Directed by onetime spaghetti western helmer Mario Pinzauti, it was filmed back to back with his similar Mandinga; no bonus points guessing what that one’s copying. The plot here actually bears some similarities to the same year’s Mandingo sequel, Drum, as bratty, "forthright" plantation daughter Emanuelle (Longo) kicks her pathology into overdrive when her betrothed, cattle rancher neighbor Lawrence (Gismondo), starts to get a little too close to her maid, Judith, after she saves him from certain death. Emanuelle isn't restrained about her own love of the plantation's enslaved population, but when Lawrence starts to go all anti-slavery on everyone, that's just a step too far as high melodrama and bizarre antics ensue on the way to a violent finale.

Too ridiculous to take seriously, this one takes the lead of 1971's notorious Goodbye Uncle Tom by aiming for an earnest plea against prejudice and slavery. Of course, that message feels a little weird juxtaposed against lots of heavy breathing and panting and thrashing around, all of which makes the American title very appropriate. The anachronistic but fun electronic score by Roberto Pregadio is almost worth checking out all by itself, and the dubbers are a roster of familiar voices from the '70s who barely even try to go for any kind of southern accents at all. As for the cast, well, A Cat in the Brain's Longo certainly struts her stuff admirably as the star and ensures the film's drive-in credentials with a prolonged skinny-dipping scene that turns into a trap for an unlucky voyeur.

Something Weird released VHS and DVD-R versions of this film years ago, and the Blu-ray features an anamorphic bump of a similarly ragged, pale source in standard def. It is what it is, scratchy audio and all. Extras include a newly created standard def trailer for Passion Plantation (complete with a new MPAA red-band card and a prominent Something Weird bug in the corner), an Exorcism's Daughter TV spot, and bonus trailers for Devil Woman (paired with Dragons Never Die), Lightning Bolt, and Beyond the Door.

Updated review on October 10, 2017.

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