Cat People
I was truly convinced this was an allegory about AAAAIDS. But then Malcolm McDonald gets shot and meek Natassja Kinski absconds to Virginia and gets back a sex fiend. The analogies break down from there, I lost the plot. The writer was really putting out fires with gasoline.
Our protagonist is a meek girl that turns up in New Orleans. She is picked up at the airport, I though literally, but turns out he is her estranged brother (yikes!). They get home, where their maid (housekeeper? Mother figure?) with a messed up name fixes them some gumbo.
He is really interested in her, in the biblical sense (yikes!), but when she doesn’t put out, he disappears for days. She wanders around the city, alone, and finds an endearing panther on the zoo. She even gets a job at said zoo (what the hell?), after a meet cute involving her jumping into a tree like a scared cat.
Meanwhile, many people are attacked by a panther. We never see Malcolm McDonald and the panther together, but he shows up again to hiss at our meek protagonist. The cops show up, search the place and find human remains, which means the maid is thrown in the clink, and our protagonist moves in with the zookeeper.
There’s a bit of a love triangle forming, because there’s another zoo lady dying to get into his pants. The ladies are friendly to one another, particularly after our protagonist reveals to her she’s a virgin. The protagonist and the zookeeper spend a weekend at a bayou, but she doesn’t put out, but chooses instead to strip, head out into the dry land (they were in a bayou!) and hunt, kill, and consume raw rabbit flesh.
Already at the zookeeper’s house, Malcolm McDonald shows up again and straight up demand sex! She still resists to fuck her brother, so he forces himself unto her and she needs to stab him with a glass shard. He starts transforming into the panther, but not before the zookeper shows up and tames him, then the zoo lady cocks his shotgun and blasts him to the street.
I think the wereleopardness is out in the open now. Our protagonist is a repressed wereleopard, while Malcolm McDonald is the easy going and extrovert man-leopard hybrid. This is the AIDS connection, there was unfortunately some people that deliberately infected others with AIDS by having sex.
This is where I lose the plot. The protagonist is really changed from leaving the house, go to Richmond, and come back an extrovert sex fiend. It seems this a bit later, since the zookeeper and the zoo lady are together now. The zoo lady goes skinny dipping in a public pool, but gets chased around by the protagonist.
Finally, our protagonist turns into a panther and throws herself from a bridge, swimming away from the zookeeper. She ends up at the cabin where they almost fucked, and so does he. They go full 50 Shades of Grey, she turns into a panther forever, the end.
Self/less was also set in New Orleans, this is becoming an obsession..
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.