Sam Panico Whenever I'm watching a Fulci movie - or even discussing him - I turn to Becca and often speak in an Italian accent and say things like, "Can I stab the woman in the eyeball now? I'm bored." If we're to believe this meta-biographical film, my impression is not far off.Fulci plays himself, a man haunted by the ever-worsening gore that his movies use. Now, real-life murders - and an obsession with violence everywhere he looks - have taken over his mind. He has, quite literally, a cat in the brain, eating away at the soft tissue, that we see while he's trying to finish writing a script.Finishing his latest film, Touch of Death,Fulci tries to eat a meal, but even the fillets and steak tartare he's offered remind him of the gore he's just directed. And then when he gets back to work, he's irritable, even smashing a plate of animal eyeballs. Fulci is and at eyeballs? Something's wrong!He can't even sleep when he gets home, as a handyman is using a chainsaw outside. Fulci flips out and uses a hatchet to smash some paint cans while the music from The Beyond plays.Fucli decides to see a shrink, Professor Egon Swharz, who we first see fighting with his wife, Katya. His nurse, Lilly (Paola Cozzo, the pregnant nun from Demonia) lets him know that Fulci has arrived. Lilly instantly knows who the director is and Swhartz is interested to break down the barriers between film and reality.Back at work, Fulci is struggling to complete both Touch of Death and Ghosts of Sodom (Sodoma's Ghost) at the same time. What follows are two completely batshit sequences where Fulci directs a Nazi seduction scene and imagines a Nazi orgy while being interviewed by a long-legged German reporter. Fulci mutters a non-stop stream of sexual demands as the action unfurls in front of him, reducing him to only being able to say, Sadism. Nazism. Is there any point any more?" When we come back to reality, Fulci has smashed all of their cameras and must apologize.When he returns for more therapy, the trap is sprung. Swharz wants to use Fulci to commit crimes, killing a string of prostitutes (using footage of other Fulci movies). The toll is taking over his professional life, as his assistant director has started working on his movie without him. Everywhere Fulci goes, death follows and even the police aren't there to take his confession. When he goes to the police inspector's house, he sees the man and his family stabbed, chainsawed and decapitated.Everywhere Fulci goes, death follows and even the police aren't there to take his confession. When he goes to the police inspector's house, he sees the man and his family stabbed, chainsawed and decapitated. He still can't convince anyone that he's the murderer - he's a kindly looking older man in a cardigan who people know creates these little gore movies.Schwarz finally flips out and kills his wife, cutting her head off with piano wire. He hypnotizes Fulci, who suffers through a series of violent images before passing out in a field next to a cute cat digging up the remains of one of the doctor's victims. His friend the inspector finally arrives, but it's to tell Fulci that they've caught the doctor in the act and that he's innocent.Months later, Fulci and Lilly, the nurse from earlier, are on his sailboat, named for his first movie Perversion. He uses a chainsaw to chop her up and then makes fishing lures with her bloody fingers. Is Fulci a killer? Nope. He's just finishing the exact movie that we just watched. The film wraps and he sails away with Lilly, who is really an actress. Everything ends happily - at least in this version. Another has a scream during the credits to suggest that maybe Fulci is a killer. Cat in the Brain - its title is a play on The Cat in the Hat - is a weird one. Fulci is the main actor in the film, but he had no confidence in his acting abilities, so his voice is dubbed by Elio Zamuto (who was also the Italian dubbing voice for Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I.).Supposedly, the film started with a script with no dialogue that was a catalog of mutilations and the sound effects that would go with them. And Brett Halsey had no idea he was even in the film until long after it was done, as Fulci just used previously shot footage. This hurt their friendship, as Halsey felt he should have been paid.In Fulci's one U.S. convention appearance at the January 1996 Fangoria Horror Convention in New York City, he appeared on crutches with a bandaged foot. He was sick - he'd die two months later - and blizzards had covered the city with inches of snow. Yet fans came from all over the country for the rare chance to meet Fulci. This footage is on the second disk of Cat in the Brain and features the man himself speaking to the crowd, where he claims that Wes Craven's New Nightmare rips off this film.Sure, Cat in the Brain raises issues of the effect of horror on the people who make it. But is it really just a greatest hits of Fulci's later period work? Did he feel trapped within the genre? Was it cathartic to create? These are all questions I would love to have heard him answer.

Michael_Elliott A Cat in the Brain (1990) ** (out of 4)After years of filming ultra-violent scenes for horror films, director Lucio Fulci begins to think that it's impacting his mental state. He begins to see a shrink who decides to act out his own violent fantasies by mutilating women and trying to make the director think that he's the one committing the crimes.A CAT IN THE BRAIN came at the very end of the Italian horror craze and people are either going to see it as a cult masterpiece or an incredibly awful hack job. I'm somewhere in the middle on this because there's so much gore and madness here that you can't help but be slightly entertained if you like that sort of thing. However, at the same time, there's no question that they were working with very little to no money and you can't help but see it as a hack job since the majority of the footage here comes from other movies.Footage from Fulci's TOUCH OF DEATH gets the most scenes here but we also get clips from his THE GHOSTS OF SODOM. There's also footage from THE BROKEN MIRROR, HANSEL AND GRETEL, MASSACRE and BLOODY PSYCHO, which is scattered throughout the picture. All of the gore scenes are taken from those pictures and usually the "new" footage has Fulci either directing those scenes or witnessing them. Either way, it's really not as creative as it could have been and just gives the film a very cheap look and feel.Some have argued that this here was Fulci's 8 1/2 but that's a bit of a stretch as I'd argue that the main reason for this film is that the movies this borrowed from didn't get that good of a release so they took the best moments, threw them in this film and sold the fact that Fulci was playing himself. It obviously worked as those films have been forgotten while A CAT IN THE BRAIN continues to gain a cult audience.The story is pretty much a mess and not all of the new scenes fit well with the stock footage. As far as Fulci goes, it's certainly fun getting to see him act in the lead role but one wishes that the material would have been slightly better. As I said, the film has a very weird and crazy feel to it and it does have some sort of bizarre atmosphere. There's a lot of gore in the picture and that there will be the main draw but again, why give this film the credit for that when the best gore shots are from other movies?This latest viewing of A CAT IN THE BRAIN was the first time I had watched it while also having watched all of the films that footage was lifted from. This film is certainly better than most of those movies, although I will say TOUCH OF DEATH is a better picture. With that said, my opinion of this film has actually gone down a little bit after seeing the original movies in their full length. They're certainly not good movies but there's no way around the fact that this films best moments are from those films.

Master Cultist Though far from Fulci's best work - you have to go back 6 or 7 years for that I'm afraid - this is still an effective shocker, which actually manages to be post-modern before that became the norm post 'Scream'. Fulci plays himself, a horror movie director who is being terrorised by a serial killer who is slaughtering his victims in a copycat of the gory deaths of people in Fulci's movies. That's all there is plot wise, but, as ever with Fulci's work, this is about the gore set-pieces, and they are excellent. Beheadings, eye poppers, chainsaws, we get the lot here. Fulci is adequate in his role, but be warned, there is the usual level of misogynistic content on display, as he is notorious for. Not his best, but far from awful.

Jonny_Numb Lucio Fulci was one of the most prolific Italian directors by the time of his death in 1996, yet his career had long since descended into a downward spiral of increasingly futile genre entries that could barely stand in the shadow of his earlier work. For much of the '70s into the mid-'80s, he cranked out such stylistically distinctive horrors as "City of the Living Dead," "The Beyond," and the brutal giallo "The New York Ripper," fondly remembered by fans like myself. And while "Cat in the Brain" falls in with the era of Fulci's decline as a filmmaker, it is a shocking, darkly hilarious headtrip that, while a clearly inferior work (the framing, effects, and acting are below par), proves an interesting, open-ended meditation on pop psychology and film's ability to desensitize. Make no mistake: "Cat in the Brain" is a total gorefest, and as disjointed as Fulci's previous films, but it deserves credit for trying to be something more. In a deliciously tongue-in-cheek touch, Fulci plays himself: a director in the midst of filming yet another violent horror flick who comes down with perverse/murderous hallucinations; after visiting a shrink who puts him under hypnosis, his dreams and reality begin to intersect, to the point where the viewer cannot discern the two. The recent DVD from Grindhouse Releasing mentions "Cat" as an heir apparent to the likes of "Eraserhead," and it does carry a similarly disquieting, awkwardly funny quality associated with the best surrealist art.