On
a stormy night, the Cat climbs up the outside of a Chicago skyscraper, on a
mission of vengeance. A lightning bolt dislodges her from a precarious perch;
she fires her cable-claw which hooks onto a roof and with her foot-claws she
climbs back up. She reaches the penthouse level and tries to force her way in
through window which has steel plating behind the glass; she pushes and
suddenly it falls in, dropping her to the floor where a thug seizes her. She
kicks him in the chest and gets free but more thugs are on the way. She fights
her way through them, ripping out a fuse box to turn the floor dark, giving her
an advantage. A baddie is calling the boss on the phone and Cat seizes the guy,
demanding he tell her what the boss is up to. And then gas spews from an outlet
in the wall, putting her to sleep, where she dreams…
Flashback
1: College student Greer Grant had a cute meeting with Police Officer Bill
Nelson when she spilled her loose change in front of him. They began dating and
she soon learned that he wanted to protect her, so she learned to be helpless
around him and anytime she tried to assert herself, he would quash her. They
married and she dropped out of college; Bill discouraged any attempts she made
to have a life of her own. Then one night, Bill was killed when he intervened
in an armed robbery and she was left alone. Greer tries to find a job but she
wasn’t really trained to don anything. And then she ran into Dr. Joanne Tumolo,
her physics professor and Dr. Tumolo hired her as a lab assistant, which she
enjoyed greatly, leading her to gain confidence and self-awareness….
The
Cat is awakened and meets the Big Bad: Malcolm Donalbain, sportsman,
entrepreneur who is planning to open a chain of health emporiums. The staff
will be an army of women given powers identical to Grants by equipment based on
Dr. Tumolo’s designs, women also under Donalbain’s mental control by
will-nullifying collars. Disgusted, she shoves the thug holding her into
Donalbain who has a severe phobia about being touched. He recoils and shouts
for Zabo, his gigantic, mind-controlled henchman who hurls the offending thug
across the room. Cat breaks her bonds and fight off Zabo who turns out to be
stupid so she easily confounds him and escapes through an airshaft; at the top
she rests in the shaft while leading the baddies to think she has fled so she
ponders…
Flashback
2: Dr. Joanne Tumolo shows Greer a device she has invented to make it possible
for any woman to fulfill her physical and mental potential. She ran out of
funds and was desperate so she accepted Malcolm Donalbain’s offer to underwrite
the project. Donalbain then pressured her into using his test subject, Shirlee
Bryant. So the project continued, using the indifferent Shirlee by day and repeating
the experiments by night with the enthusiastic Greer. And Greer becomes more
intelligent, more empathetic, athletic, and skilled as the treatments
progressed. But the experiments with Shirlee are a disaster so Dr. Tumolo goes
to Donalbain’s penthouse to confront him and discovers an exact duplicate of
her equipment. She also sees Shirlee dressed in a cat woman outfit as Donalbain
put a mind-controlling collar on her, which immediately saps her will. She is
then put through her paces, fighting henchmen and climbing to the top of a
tower. Ordered to swing by her cat claw to the next tower, she loses her grip
and falls to her death. Dr. Tumolo decides to go to the police, taking one of
the cat costumes as evidence. She goes back to her lab and tells everything to
Greer, who leaves to pack a bag to stay with Dr. Tumolo. But while she’s gone,
Donalbain’s thugs, who spotted Tumolo at the penthouse, set off dynamite in her
lab. When Greer returns, Dr. Tumolo warns her that the bad guys stole her notes
and now they know about Greer before she dies. So Greer dons the cat costume
which was undamaged in the safe, and went out on her mission of revenge….
And
now Cat returns to the penthouse, overpowers some henchmen but when Donalbain
tries to contact them, the lack of response tips him off that something is
wrong. He and Zabo head to his lab where they find Cat sabotaging the
equipment. She flips Zabo into a machine, electrocuting him as Donalbain shoots
at her. The lighting shorts out, plunging the room into darkness. Cat taunts
Donalbain, noting he has only one bullet left and se is coming closer so his
phobia against being touched leads him to shoot himself. AS the place burns,
Cat escapes over the rooftops, wondering, “Have I become a stronger woman --
only to become a poorer human being?"