One A Week Reviews #6: Cat in the Brain (Nightmare Concert)

Cat in the Brain is a walk down memory lane by Lucio Fulci, mostly built from clips from his other (lesser) films. It's a cheap gorefest masquerading as meditation, some weird, director's walk-about. There's a loose story which is even more loosely draped with clips intended to represent the memories of the director in his Winter. Everywhere he goes, events cause him to flash back to the gore that is his business.

The movie opens with hand-puppet cats, who move like Mr. Rogers' furry friends, digging into a huge pile of "brains." Within five minutes we're also treated to a man cooking and eating a chunk of a corpse's thigh, then cutting the rest up in the world's neatest chain-sawing. Not a drop of blood lands on him. This, like half the footage from this movie, is edited in from an earlier Fulci production. The cats are in Fulci's imagination, while the chainsaw murder is inserted as a movie Fulci is making. The poor man can't get his movie gore to be convincing (while it dazzled, it never really was), and his private life is fearsome. Every mundane event in his day brings with it a gory insert shot, most of which they barely bother to match with the locations, lighting, and look of the story they're integrated them into. He just can't catch a break.