Karen Arthur worked with screenwriter Don Chastain to loosely adapt Eric Westphal's play Toi et Tes Nuages, which she had seen in Paris in 1975, to create this movie that even today, nearly fifty years after it was made, seems unhinged.

Ellen Carpenter (Lee Grant, Valley of the Dolls) is an astronomer who shares her home - a ramshackle house in the Hollywood Hills that they inherited from their anthropologist father - with her sister Cissy (Carole Kane),an adult child devoted to her mafus, which are pet monkeys which she keeps in a cage in the living room. There's a problem though. The mafus never last long as Cissy tends to kill them. And oh yeah - Ellen is in love, real love, incestual love, with her sister.

Now, Cissy wants another monkey and Ellen refuses. There's been enough death. But then their godfather Zom (Will Geer, The Waltons) gets Cissy an orangutan from his zoo. And at the same time, Ellen is finally finding love - she's as emotionally stunted as her sister is developmentally - with David, a fellow astronomer (James Olson, Amityville II: The Possession). She's not ready to let him into her life, as when Cissy finds out, she beats the orangutan into oblivion.

When Ellen goes away on a work trip, David comes to visit. As she's not there, Cissy lets him in and tells him how the mafu cage was brought into the house and used by her father to keep doing his research when he wasn't in the jungle. She locks David in the cage and begins to study him as her subject, finally flying into a rage and beating him into the next life too. She buries him in the garden, but keeps painting him, which leads to Ellen locking herself in the bathroom and Cissy finally having a nervous breakdown.

I don't want to ruin any more of this movie, which is surprising at nearly every turn. Arthur, unfortunately, dealt with some bad luck making films - Lady Beware is one example - and The Jerry Gross Organization tried to sell this an exploitation movie, changing the name to Don't Ring the Doorbell.

Carole Kane is absolutely the greatest in this movie, playing a character quite unlike anything else she'd ever do in her career. Lee Grant is, as always, perfect. This movie is really something else, one I'd been waiting to watch and I was rewarded for my patience.

"The Mafu Cage" is a boring and pointless trudge through god knows what. It was mislabeled a horror movie, which is okay by me - I'm fine with drama, especially those adapted from plays - but lord. What was the point of it?

The plot is something to do with two sisters whose explorer father dies, and leaves them a house which comes equipped with a jail cell with chains he apparently used to tie up an orangutang (?). The younger sister, played by Carol Kane, is mentally ill, though the hows and whys of her illness are unexplained and unexplored.

The elder sister is an astronomer.

One day, some guy brings an orangutang into the house and they chain it up. The crazy sister kills it, in an unpleasant, if not graphic, scene.

I can hardly even bring myself to explain any more about this movie.

Here's one thing: Carol Kane, who plays the crazy younger sister, is the only performer in the movie who has any kind of presence, and leaves any kind of impression on the viewer at all. I guess it could count as a positive that it's not a horror movie, since I don't know if she's work in that role, but she was obviously born to play quirky, eccentric, and even mentally ill women - if not really violent ones.

So why doesn't it work? The fact that none of the other actors work at all? They're not bad actors, just not very watchable. The fact that the movie doesn't get into the heads of any of the characters? The fact that you can't believe the situation - what was the point of the cell, exactly? That was just a bizarre contrivance coming between you and the movie.

I just couldn't wait for this movie to be over. With any luck, I'll forget about it soon.

If you're going to make horror picture, you should make sure of the following:

1. It has an understandable plot.

2. It is scary.

3. It should filmed in enough light for you to know what's going on.

This film follows none of the above criteria. In fact, the words "PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER" on the front of the DVD box must be the biggest lie in the English language. So what as it got to offer? Well, no attractive women, Carol Kane and whoever plays her weird sister in this are as ugly as sin. What they wear is quite nice, perhaps because they moved from Africa at the start of the film. Why do I mention this? Because the plot seems to revolve around the younger sister missing her old home to such an extent, she plays tribal music full blast all day long, and walks about in outfits that wouldn't look out of place on a shaman's wife. Eventually she hears voices in her head(?) and decides to kill and torture a few people in a cage they have built into their house. There is a rather grim ending. And that's it. I was seriously freaked out by this surreal movie, which I doubt even made sense to its director. What was she hoping to accomplice? If it was giving me a hernia, her efforts were an unqualified success. 0/10