Cat in the Brain

Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fulci is finding his work is getting to him. When the waiter at his favourite restaurant suggests steak for lunch he thinks of a scene in one of his films where a man cuts a chunk out of his wife's body and cooks and eats it.

The waiter then suggests steak tartare, causing Fulci to recall what happened next, when the man chainsawed and minced up the rest of his wife's body and fed it to their pigs…

Fulci thus goes to see the psychiatrist who lives nearby, one Professor Egon Schwarz. (That sounds like a name you should trust, no?) After studying Fulci's ouevre Schwarz suggests hypnotism as the best way to effect a cure. Unfortunately, he is himself insane and embarks on a campaign of murder which he plans to blame on the increasingly tormented and confused Fulci…

Though his cult reputation had been secured by the his late 70s and early 80s zombie films, Lucio Fulci's career was on the downward slide by the time of this 1990 shocker. After a series of commercial and/or critical flops he had been forced to leave the shooting of 1988's Zombie 3 – the film fans had been waiting for, that should have served as his comeback vehicle – on account of illness, leaving notorious schlock merchant Bruno Nicolai to finish the film to his usual low standards…

Fulci thus spent the next two years languishing in television productions, two of which, Ghosts of Sodom and When Alice Broke the Mirror, provide the source for many of the flashback/hallucination sequences here.

Perhaps he took some comfort in the fact that something similar had happened a decade before, when the commercial failure of his 1977 giallo thriller Seven Notes in Black had likewise precipitated a period in television before Zombie came along.

This time, however, there was to be no comeback, as he continued to struggle with ill-health and to get films made for the last half-dozen years of his life. The final irony came in 1996 when old rival Dario Argento agreed to produce a remake of House of Wax, Wax Mask, only for Fulci's untimely death that year to allow Argento's special effects protege Sergio Stivaletti to make his directorial debut.

Watching Cat in the Brain, you get the sense of acquiring an insight into Fulci the man. All he really wanted in his old age, it would seem, was to be recognised as a serious, intelligent artist and loved as a human being.

Not so much to ask, it would sound, but a difficult thing when your films are notorious for their violence, misogyny and/or misanthropy (mainstream critics would say the former, Fulci enthusiasts the latter) and when appealing to the audience who expects these things from you necessarily means turning off most everyone else.

Commercial constraints thus dictated that Fulci's 8 1/2 – there's even a sequence where one of the killer's victims goes round a carousel, in a manner reminiscent of Fellini's circus/carnival ringmaster-isms – had to be bloody. Indeed, taken purely on a count of such incidents, it's perhaps his goriest and nastiest film.

Unfortunately, however, the majority of the splatter effects are poorly realised and unconvincing. Admittedly, Fulci's criticism of some effects in the film-within-the-film that he is working on do provide for a self-critical reading, but one suspects the typical gorehound would neither be interested in or willing to accept such.

Worse, they are just about the only other thing the film has going for it. Where Fulci's earlier gialli – even the much reviled New York Ripper – had atmosphere, style and mystery to keep the viewer interested, here the fact that we know the killer's identity, even if 'Fulci' doesn't – seriously undermines things, along with the difficulty of creating satisfactory matches between material culled from the various sources. (The relationship between psychoanalyst and prospective killer was better handled in Lizard in a Woman's Skin as well.)

Nevertheless, any film in which the director-protagonist writes himself a happy ending wherein he and the starlet old enough to be his daughter sail off into the sunset on a boat named "Perversion" – remembering that the alternative title of Fulci's1969 One on Top of the Other was Perversion Story – has to be saying something, consciously or not…

Hard Gore's Region Free DVD presents the film full frame at 4:3 in a somewhat soft and grainy transfer. All of this is excusable – it looks like the original aspect ratio and that the combination of different stocks, lighting and low budgets means that it's about as good as we could expect. Less satisfactory, however, is the absence of an Italian language track, so that we cannot hear Fulci in his native language but only dubbed into English.

The extras comprise a biography/filmography of the director; a small stills gallery; a selection of trailers for other Hard Gore product; and a pair of contrasting essays/reviews of the film, one approaching the film from the gore/horror standpoint and finds it thereby lacking, and the other as a self-reflexive satire with plenty worth saying.

Forearmed is forewarned…