A Cat In The Brain (1990) – Review

A quick glance over the blood flecked resume of Italian gore meister Lucio Fulci shows that, for the most part, the eye popping director has a knack for delivering truly unhinged works of Spaghetti horror that seemed genuinely unconcerned about delivering such trifling matters as a coherent plot or any kind of conventional logic when there where splattery setpieces and a trippy, dreamlike atmosphere to maintain. But even after turning in stomach churning projects such as Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Beyond and New York Ripper, somehow Fulci’s most deranged work still lay before him in the form of A Cat In The Brain (aka. Nightmare Concert), a truly bizarre movie that takes meta horror to some decidedly strange places long before Wes Craven made it hip with New Nightmare and Scream.
So buckle up for a movie that serves up a slice of Italian horror the likes of which you’ve never seen before as Lucio Fulci delivers the most unlikely protagonist your are ever likely to see. You see, tonight, playing the role of horror director Lucio Fulci is…. horror director Lucio Fulci!?!?

As he orchestrates the latest gruesome scene in his newest horror film, doctor turned movie director Lucio Fulci is working hard to deliver yet more grotesque imagery to the screen and yet during his down time he notices that he’s started to experience strange and violent visions as he goes about his day to day life. One minute he could be simply returning home after helming a scene full of cannibalism and dismemberment, the next he witnesses an unassuming neighbour go from cutting firewood to a bloodstained, blank faced killer waving a chainsaw around.
Understandably concerned about his mental health, he visits nearby psychiatrist, Egon Schwarz, in order to try and kick these disturbing hallucinations into touch, however, this proves to be an extraordinarily bad move when it turns out that Schwarz is a perverted serial killer in his spare time. When he isn’t decapitating prostitutes and fantasising about killing his wife, Schwarz cooks up a plan to let Fulci take the rap and preps him with a spot of hypnosis to unravel mentally on command.
From here, things get even weirder. When Fulci isn’t seeing the lines between reality and his own violent movies blur alarmingly, he’s trying to rip the clothes of a female interviewer or hallucinating that he’s watching an entire family get butchered in front of him. Meanwhile, Dr Schwarz seems to be getting ever more feral in his murders as he gradually works back to killing his wife and soon he realises that he’d better pull the trigger on the confused horror director lest he gets fingered for the brutal slayings he’s been committing.
Can Fulci full his bald, spectacled head out of his horrific vision long enough to realise that he’s being framed, or will a life of crafting ungodly violence for the screen condemn him to insanity?

I’m going to be honest with you, it’s tough to know where exactly to begin when delving into the finer points of Fulci’s weirdest film which acryally quite a wild description to give if you’re familiar with the director’s past work. Due to the fact that it’s a film by a filmmaker about a filmmaker, some priple have drawn amusing comparisons to the work of Federico Fellini and described A Cat In The Brain as a splatterpunk 8½, however, I’ve always personally seen the film as the gorehound equivalent of freeform jazz as the movie has the feel of being crafted by Fulci as he went along as it persistently refuses to follow typical narrative styles as the director obviously wants his audience to join him on his slightly awkward descent into madness.
To say that A Cat In The Brain is a personal work is something of an understatement as Fulci himself (who vaguely resembles a short, balding Benny Hill in a constant state of mental distress) has pulled off the hysterically crazed act of casting himself as himself, but probably the best thing about this truly surreal decision is that it allows him to spend the entire ninety minutes giving all of his detractors and critics a defiant middle finger. Constantly called out for being too violent and potentially misogynistic (a tough thing to deny if you’ve watched New York Ripper), the fact that Fulci allows the film to bait the audience in thinking that his character will go insane due to his hyper-vicious movies, he instead pivots and makes himself the victim of a psycho who is actually a psychiatrist as a big fat “fuck you”. Of course, for someone who is trying to counter the whole “violent films create violent urges” argument, maybe he shouldn’t have included an extended Nazi orgy sequence, but his heart is in the right place. It’s not unlike a similar trick that Dario Argento used when making the similarly personal Tenebrae where he made an exceedingly violent movie to counteract complaints of highly unseemly content by raising those exact points within the film in question. However, as a finished result A Cat In The Brain proves to be a far more scattershot animal that’s so random and formless it tends to be different things to different people.

Some will come away from the random happenings and copious bloodletting with the idea that Fulci has pulled off a bold, avant-garde, experimental piece filled that questions the need for extreme violence with a scene where a hippy gets repeatedly run over with a car; other will feel that Fulci is having one big joke at the expense of his naysayers as he gleefully takes the piss. However, some will also feel that A Cat In The Brain is one big, incoherent mess and will no doubt accuse the director of all of his old flaws and probably invent a couple of new ones as well, bit the truth actually lies in a little bit of all three. Those who enjoy the director’s more famous works will find much to love, especially the hefty amount of bloody setpieces that spring about about every seven minutes as Fulci’s fried brain coughs up another mental episode like a rancid hairball; however not a one of them can possibly hope to match his more famous moments such as the legendary eye pop from Zombie Flesh Eaters, the regurgitated intestines from City Of The Living Dead and the little girl having a fist sized hole blown in her head from The Beyond. The reason for this is that the director cheekily inserted scenes from two of his more recent releases (Touch Of Death and Sodoma’s Ghost) and even includes moments from films he’d supervised which essentially means that for all it’s verve and weapon’s grade strangeness, A Cat In The Brain is technically not much more than a glorified clip show.

Still, despite its cut and pasted nature, it yields gonzo and goofy results that lesser maniacs simply couldn’t hope to muster and if anything, the genuinely amusing ending that subverts all expectations to offer up a cartoonishly happy ending is not only a cracking example of Fulci telling his critics to go do one, it’s also acts as an oddly effective goodbye to his fans as he literally sails off on a boat named Perversion.
It may be insanely flawed, but I can tell you this: Christopher Nolan or David Fincher couldn’t hope to make A Cat In The Brain that Fulci does… But then Fulci could hope to make Inception or Fight Club either, so I guess it all evens out in the end.
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