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CAT IN THE BRAIN

I've seen a lot of godawful movies in my life. I used to make a sport out of it, methodically researching and hunting down the worst possible films and watching them, sometimes four or five in a row. It was something of a hobby, torturing myself in front of the television set every weekend. Even with a roomful of friends, the pain wasn't lessened. I endured DEAD BOYZ CAN'T FLY, 555, SPLATER FARM, STUFF STEPHANIE IN THE INCINERATOR and countless others. I've seen well over two thousand films in my life - if not more - and I would wager a guess that at least 30% of them have been absolute dreck. So it amazes me that even today I can find a movie that makes me want to swallow my own tongue.

Enter CAT IN THE BRAIN, A.K.A. NIGHTMARE CONCERT, one of the worst films in Lucio Fulci's filmography. Now that's saying quite a lot. MANHATTAN BABY, DOOR TO SILENCE, CONQUEST, HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY, AENIGMA, HOUSE OF CLOCKS... all garbage, all painful to sit through. Fulci was a director who had found his true metier in the giallo film. When the giallo became passe and tired, Fulci moved onto gory, nonsensical horror films - THE BEYOND being the only one that is any good - and languished there until he died in 1996. CAT IN THE BRAIN is often described by fans as Fulci's 8 1/2, a comparison which only serves to underline the fact that none of those fans have actually seen 8 1/2.

Little more than a masturbatory romp through his own late filmography, CAT IN THE BRAIN stars Fulci as himself, a film director whose work is beginning to get to him. The constant stream of violence he is directing is screwing with his mind - he can't even look at meat anymore - and he takes it upon himself to visit Egon Swharz, a psychiatrist. The shrink soaks up all of Fulci's films and comes up with an idea. A closet sadist saddled with a floozy wife, Swharz places Fulci under hypnosis, planting strange suggestions in out poor filmmaker's head. Swharz uses these suggestions to push Fulci close to madness. Why? So he can start killing people left and right and use Fulci as a fall guy. So while our smirking psycho shrink is off butchering people left and right, Fulci wanders around suffering flashbacks of all the mayhem he's directed over his career.

What this film really is is a greatest hits package. For about an hour or so of it's running time, CAT IN THE BRAIN has Fulci wandering around various locations as scenes from his lesser known films are played out for the audience. Clips from THE TOUCH OF DEATH and GHOSTS OF SODOM are plentiful, as are clips from various non-Fulci directed horror films. This is a particularly lazy waste of a good idea. The best scene of the film is where Fulci stumbles upon himself filming a scene from one of his earlier movies. This scene touches upon what this film could have been. Had Fulci been content to make a film that deals with the effects of spending one's life committing horrible acts of fictional violence instead of twisting the story into standard slasher territory, CAT IN THE BRAIN could have been good. There is a germ of a decent story here but Fulci mishandles it.

Fulci claimed quite often that Wes Craven ripped off CAT IN THE BRAIN when he made NEW NIGHTMARE. That's ridiculous. Craven's film is filled with genuine ideas - the permanence of film and fairy tales in popular culture being my favorite - while Fulci's film runs out of them before the halfway point. There is no clear line of concentration to be found in CAT IN THE BRAIN. The whole of the film seems to support the idea that film violence has real world consequences but Fulci goes out of his way to argue against that point numerous times, the most obvious being when the shrink is laying out his grand plan, delivering one of the worst monologues in the history of cinema - "after all, doesn't that stupid old theory say that seeing violence on the screen provokes violence? Hmm?"

Which is it, Mr. Fulci?

I don't think he knew where he was going with this film. It is clearly trying to be a post-modernistic piece but it lacks any insight at all. It is poorly made and poorly executed on just about every level. Fans of Fulci's film might enjoy seeing the director up on screen but that enjoyment will probably be short-lived once the narrative gets underway. Fulci looks tired and bored the whole time. After suffering one of his terrible hallucinations, Fulci usually just shakes his head and walks away as if he can't believe the crap he just saw was crap he actually directed. About half way through CAT IN THE BRAIN, I too was shaking my head. For a director who had made some of the best gialli and some of the most unique and memorable - though often terrible and misguided - horror films of the 70s and 80s to have come to this is baffling and depressing. Fulci should have quit while he was ahead and faded into cult glory.

Terrible.