Wow! Such a good movie.

Thanks for the memories!

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Things open with a shot of cats hungrily devouring a gigantic human brain. We see a director devising the screenplay for his next horror yarn. "Chainsaw murders... evisceration... sadism..." he mutters to himself. The description could aptly describe the next eighty-eight minutes of this movie, which contain more severings, slashings, and body parts than most gore films put together.Lucio Fulci's oddest movie is a real mixed bag. On one hand it has a really interesting premise in that Fulci is essentially playing himself, on set while directing his gory movies, so it's a movie-in-a-movie type plot like WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (only this came first) that has the opportunity to explore the link between the violence in horror films and the violence in real life (and if movies have any effect), and what prolonged exposure to gory violence might do to a man! As well as this, it's a study of Fulci's supposed psychological state so gets a bit confusing as you can well imagine.On the other hand, the movie is simply an excuse to string together a series of incredibly gory set-pieces from previous Fulci films and others, and then to "insert" Fulci's character into these scenes as if he is witnessing the murders first hand. The effect is an interesting, if muddled one, marred by some extreme technical faults (skies and backgrounds are different colours in film segments) which are par for the course for no-budget productions like this.Fulci himself takes the leading role of the confused director, making this a must-see movie for his die-hard fans. Realising that he himself is not, and can never be, an actor, Fulci instead opts for a tongue-in-cheek performance which seems to be a case of either love it or hate it for horror fans. Personally, I think he copes admirably with the role and the comedy. Speaking of comedy, some of it is intentional but a lot of it is not, such as the cheesy dubbing and the over-the-top extravaganza of some of the set-pieces. Take for example David Thompson's turn as the crazed psychiatrist - this guy goes so over-the-top as the crazed slasher that his performance has to be seen to be disbelieved! The hilarious highlight in my mind is when Fulci repeatedly runs some poor fool who got in the path of his car - classic stuff, and for some reason extremely funny.Gore hounds certainly get their money's worth with this movie, even if the majority (but not all...) of the effects and sequences are taken from previous films (thus Brett Halsey is billed in the cast as "the Monster" even though he never actually acted in this film - hmm, wonder how he feels about that?). Kicking off with a corpse being chainsawed, minced and fed to pigs, the film includes a Nazi sadist orgy, lots of eyeballs, beheadings, behandings, a melting head in a microwave, maggotty corpses, bloody stabbings, a PSYCHO-derived (but even more shocking) shower murder, chainsaw and trunk decapitations, a piano-wire throat garrotting, and oodles more. Of course, it's all pretty cheap and fake-looking but there's so much of it, it all becomes a bit overwhelming - especially to the BBFC who banned it outright when the film was subjected for video release in the UK.Definitely a must-see for lovers of the bizarre or those looking for something a bit different from Fulci, although it's a lot different to the zombie films he is most widely known for. Although there is lots to hate about it, I think there is even more to like and find interesting, which is why I recommend this as a "at least see it once" kind of movie.

Though far from Fulci's best work - you have to go back 6 or 7 years for that I'm afraid - this is still an effective shocker, which actually manages to be post-modern before that became the norm post 'Scream'. Fulci plays himself, a horror movie director who is being terrorised by a serial killer who is slaughtering his victims in a copycat of the gory deaths of people in Fulci's movies. That's all there is plot wise, but, as ever with Fulci's work, this is about the gore set-pieces, and they are excellent. Beheadings, eye poppers, chainsaws, we get the lot here. Fulci is adequate in his role, but be warned, there is the usual level of misogynistic content on display, as he is notorious for. Not his best, but far from awful.

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.

Lucio Fulci was one of the most prolific Italian directors by the time of his death in 1996, yet his career had long since descended into a downward spiral of increasingly futile genre entries that could barely stand in the shadow of his earlier work. For much of the '70s into the mid-'80s, he cranked out such stylistically distinctive horrors as "City of the Living Dead," "The Beyond," and the brutal giallo "The New York Ripper," fondly remembered by fans like myself. And while "Cat in the Brain" falls in with the era of Fulci's decline as a filmmaker, it is a shocking, darkly hilarious headtrip that, while a clearly inferior work (the framing, effects, and acting are below par), proves an interesting, open-ended meditation on pop psychology and film's ability to desensitize. Make no mistake: "Cat in the Brain" is a total gorefest, and as disjointed as Fulci's previous films, but it deserves credit for trying to be something more. In a deliciously tongue-in-cheek touch, Fulci plays himself: a director in the midst of filming yet another violent horror flick who comes down with perverse/murderous hallucinations; after visiting a shrink who puts him under hypnosis, his dreams and reality begin to intersect, to the point where the viewer cannot discern the two. The recent DVD from Grindhouse Releasing mentions "Cat" as an heir apparent to the likes of "Eraserhead," and it does carry a similarly disquieting, awkwardly funny quality associated with the best surrealist art.