Color, 1978, 101 mins. / 95 mins. 36 secs.
Directed by Karen Arthur
Starring Lee Grant, Carol Kane, Will Geer, James Olson, William Sherwood
Scorpion Releasing (Blu-ray & DVD) (US R0 HD/NTSC) / WS (1.78:1) (16:9), Avenue (UK R2 PAL)
the late 1970s, the feminist movement had 
thoroughly stormed the horror genre and upended the ideas of women as victims or fearful monsters. Films like The Stepford Wives and Daughters of Darkness used chills to make a larger point about issues of female power, sometimes with a dash of a lesbian subtext thrown in for both commercial appeal and a nod to the growing gay rights movement. Meanwhile in 1975, a documentary called Grey Gardens was wowing discerning cinephiles with its true-life gothic portrait of two female members of the Kennedy clan devolving into antisocial eccentricity right before the filmmakers' eyes. Not surprisingly a movie decided to mash the two strands together, and the result was The Mafu Cage, a thoroughly bizarre but unforgettable slice of psychological terror with a shockingly high-caliber cast. 
the time for striking supporting roles in The Last Detail, Dog Day Afternoon, and Hester Street. She seizes the lead role here with her teeth and 
runs completely wild, delivering a powerful performance unlike anything else ever put on film. Scary, pathetic, and oddly touching, she really carries the entire feature on her shoulders and manages to overcome the potentially silly, sordid elements of lesbian incest that nevertheless became a focal point of the film's frequent reissues under titles like My Sister, My Love and Deviation.
simian and a nasty bite on Kane's leg. Grant 
appears in a separate video interview, "Solar Flare" (16m49s) in which she discusses some of her and Kane's public comments about their initial difficulties with Arthur (who was too cheerful all the time for the subject matter) and the incredibly close, sisterly bond she formed with her co-star. "Visions of Clouds" (44m32s) puts Arthur herself in the spotlight, in which she covers everything from her reasons for doing a horror film as her second feature, the lessons she learned from the initial skirmishes with her stars, her status as the second female DGA member, and the Cannes screening that put her in between Godard and Truffaut. In "Shot and Slice" (26m58s), cinematographer John Bailey (who went on to American Gigolo and In the Line of Fire) and editor/frequent collaborator Carol Littleton (who did Body Heat and probably went mad trying to make sense of Dreamcatcher) cover their own experience on the film, their second effort with Arthur before embarking on Hollywood careers. Arthur also contributes the first audio commentary, with Bailey and Littleton doing the second; there's some content overlap here and there, but they do a thorough job of covering the entire production from its initial adaptation stage to the creation of the elaborate cage sets. Last up are a substantial gallery of stills and promotional art as well as the original main title sequence and that elusive segment of cut footage (both sourced from VHS); the latter was cut without consulting the filmmakers, but it's not a critical loss as it mainly draws a parallel between Cissy's relationship with Mafu and Ellen's budding romance at work.Blu-ray
DVD
