In early 1977, French director Eddy Matalon set sail for Canada where he made a brace of horror films, the home invasion thriller Blackout in 1978 and this muddled and incoherent addition to the post-The Exorcist (1973) run of demonic child films. A barely comprehensible jumble of tenuously connected ideas and events, Matalon’s script, co-written with Myra Clément and Alain Sens-Cazenave, raises more questions than it’s willing to answer.

Don’t try to make any sense of the story – it’s fairly clear that the writers didn’t really know what was going on half the time. In 1947, Robert Gimble (Peter MacNeill) learns that his wife has left him with their son, George, leaving him to look after their daughter Laura (Linda Koot). In a fit of pique, he sets off after her only to be burned alive in a car crash along with Laura. Thirty years later, George (Alan Scaife) is all grown up and married to Vivian (Beverly Murray), who is suffering depression following a miscarriage, and their eight-year-old daughter, Cathy (Randi Allen). She finds an old doll with its eyes sewn shut in the attic while mum hangs out with the neighbours, including a medium (Mary Morter) who has visions of imminent death and destruction. Cathy soon develops psychic powers and begins bullying the local kids before using her new-found powers to send her nanny Mary (Dorothy Davis) hurtling through a window to her death. After Cathy tries to kill herself in a nearby lake, the increasingly depressed Vivian comes to suspect that her daughter is possessed by the spirit of Laura though to what end the script never really finds adequate answer. Is she after revenge? If so, against who? We’re no nearer to solving that riddle as the end credits roll.

In a charitable mood one might suggest that something was lost in translation, the result of mainly French-speaking filmmakers working in English, a language they seem to have only passing familiarity with. But at other times, sheer incompetence seems to be the only explanation for Cathy’s Curse. Seemingly set in a world where cause and effect doesn’t exist, things just happen which, thanks to the lousy editing, an apparent lack of script supervision (Monique Champagne is credited as “continuity” though you’ll end up wondering what she was actually doing on the set) and a simple inability to grasp the basics of storytelling, are rendered utterly incomprehensible. It feels like bits of vital expository footage and essential camera set-ups were either lost in post-production or never filmed at all.

Questions without answers soon start mounting up – where does the medium come from? Who called her? We see her face down in a snow drift and then she turns up burned to a crisp in the attic without explanation – and we never even find out the poor woman’s name. How does Vivian get out of that bath of blood so quickly and where did the leeches come from? And what exactly is Laura after? None of these questions are answered leaving several possibly important plot strands dangling.

This can lead to moments of unintentional hilarity. The moment when Vivian confronts Cathy who then starts teleporting around the house is a good example. Any sane person, presented with a child that disappears and reappears at will would react with, at the very least, amazement, possibly complete terror. But not Vivian. She seems to accept it with little more than exasperated anger and keeps scolding Cathy for her behaviour even when she disappears in front of her very eyes.

Some of this will be down to a badly written script, some to poor direction and editing. But the cast do nothing to help. Alan Scaife survived the humiliation and went on to a decent enough career, mainly on American television, but he also found work in films like Murder by Phone/Bells (1982), Iron Eagle II (1988) and Lethal Weapon 3 (1992). Beverly Murray’s career was less prolific but she did manage to find work again amazingly (hers is one of the least convincing performances in Cathy’s Curse) and Dorothy Davis had been in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) but did little else of note. Randi Allen, whose idea of acting seems to have been shouting at people and widening her eyes occasionally to look scary, never worked again.

Matters aren’t helped much by the terrible effects, especially the ridiculous burn scars that Cathy sports in the climax and by the script’s insistence on reminding us of better films, a really bad idea under the circumstances. There’s an aggressive black dog and a nanny who meets a sticky end to remind us of The Omen (1976) and Cathy’s sweary possession (though when her worst cuss phrase seems to be to accuse someone of being a “filthy female cow” she’s not really entering into the spirit of things) inevitably reminds us The Exorcist.

Cathy’s Curse has developed something of a cult following over the years though it’s hard to fathom why. There are so many comparably budgeted films of the time that are a lot more coherent, expertly made and fun than this. The stilted dialogue, poorly delivered by bad actors, is momentarily funny but it outstays its welcome very quickly. For a long time, until it was restored by Severin in 2017, the only English language prints available were shoddy US versions, colours faded, sound indistinct and missing 9 minutes, trimmed by distributors to help it sit better in double bills. The restoration looks better (though the shoddiness of the effects work is done no favours at all) and while the version we’d been watching all those years was at least mercifully shorter and so marginally less boring, the already tentative storyline was made all the more baffling.