Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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.

insomniac_rod It is Dr. Lucio Fulci's party and we are all invited! In approximately 90 minutes, we are bombed with extremely gory and violent situations involving mutilations, brutal beatings, beheadings, slashed throats, exposed guts, vulgar language, etc. There is even a very weird moment from a musical film where a woman is bitch slapped without mercy while she sings!Fulci's psychiatrist's smile is one of the most frightening things I've seen in a while!This is a bizarre movie. It is brutal, filled with blood, and misogynistic. It is a tribute from Fulci to himself. Hey, even at the ending he drives a boat while accompanied by a very sexy Italian chick in a bikini.Sadly, it is a very flawed film. The plot is absurd but in my opinion it inspired Wes Craven's "New Nightmare" (however, Ze do Caixao A.K.A. Coffin Joe used it on "O Exorcism Negro" from 1974). The editing is horrible. The music is lousy. The acting sucks! Fulci may be the best actor in the whole film.But it is very entertaining for gorehounds. It's extremely violent content should please those who hail Fulci like me.

Lotica This movie was made around the time that Lucio Fulci was starting to lose his touch. Before, his movies were not only gore-filled, but they had a story, great writing, and great camera shots that were very beautiful for something any other Italian director (besides Dario Argento) could not produce. Near his death, his movies seems very poor, and somewhat distasteful. The only two movies I could watch of his were Aenigma (1987), and The House of Clocks (1989). Though, Un gatto nel cervello (The Cat in The Brain) is a very entertaining movie that Fulci produced near his death. One of the main reasons, is that Fulci actually stars in it... AS HIMSELF! The plot line is basically Fulci has been driven insane by his movies or whatever, and he starts imagining scenes from his movies being played out in real life. What this means, is that there is a lot of stock footage with in the movie, mainly from Touch of Death and Sodama's Ghost, two recent movies Fulci had produced before. I liked how the scenes were integrated into the movie, though you could tell that the footage was stock somewhat if you've actually seen the movies. Anyway's the movie is entertaining, though the gore kind of does lose the touch of any other Fulci gore epic before. Though the thing that surprises me, is that Fabio Frizzi (composer of some Fulci films such as Zombie, The Gates of Hell, and The Beyond) is actually the composer of this movie's music. You can actually tell by the bass line, sort of. I wish I could find a soundtrack for this movie, if there is one.