AKA - Nightmare Concert
These kinds of movies shouldn't exist in the 1990's. The time was over, the passion for the genre was gone, times had certainly changed. New York's 42nd Street was being cleaned up, video stores were now reigning king, the days of the grindhouse, the sleaze infested gutters of exploitation theaters were pretty much gone. The directors, the actors, the production companies, now fallen kings to be forgotten for a long while in the politically correct 1990's, the progressive crappy barren wasteland of the 1990's. Fulci dies, Soavi makes the last "real" Italian zombie movie, Argento relegated to TV made movies and complete crap, Carpenter gets soft, Romero makes nothing but irredeemable waste. Italy forgets and moves on. America gets over flooded with cheap direct to video horror.
Dark times. You could say this is Fulci's last "good" movie. I'd say he peaked at The New York Ripper (1982), but that's not to say I don't like the utter trash he put out post-Ripper. This included. Cat In The Brain is a strange one to peg down. Fulci plays (...wait for it), an Italian horror director named...Lucio Fulci who in the midst of making a movie starts loosing his mind. Suddenly he is haunted by the images of his old films and his dreams start to seep into his reality. A killer is on the loose in Italy cutting up victims in the same fashion that Fulci dreams, or has killed in one of his old movies. Is it his own paranoia, or is it actually happening. Think Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) only ten times dumber. His shrink stalks him, is weird to his wife and other nonsensical stupid things happen. The plot moves along, Fulci looks old as dirt and kinda "getoffamylawn!" if you ask me, but who cares there's like ten decapitation scenes and plenty of naked chicks. Gross naked chicks, but I won't shake my fist at it.
(Guy behind him just so very unamused)
For all of it's faults (and there are plenty, most of the gore scenes are made up of stolen footage from other people's movies), there are some high points. The movie is soaked in the red stuff. Every other minute something is rotting away, or a little kid gets chainsawed, or a hooker gets knifed up. The creepy old guy factor is just...astonishing. Nothing grosser than a zoom in on an old dude's lips as he licks them while he spies on a girl taking a shower. Just kinda bums you out when you look around and you're watching that go down at 4am and you're in your bed alone watching this piece of shit movie.
("acting")
It's kind of a bummer though that soooo much footage was used from other movies. Fulci picks from his own movies, Ghosts of Sodom (1988), When Alice Broke The Mirror (1988) and some others...without permission of course. Bloody Psycho (1989), and Andrea Bianchi's Massacre (1989) are also shamelessly ripped off. So chances are you've seen the coolest gore scenes in Cat... so that sucks.
Enough about the movie itself, let's talk about the discs. Grindhouse Releasing (the same great company that put out the new versions of The Beyond, Pieces, Cannibal Ferox, etc.) put out a gorgeous 2-disc a couple weeks ago, and you probably already know that, because you're reading this and like I have probably been anticipating this release for the last year or so. The lenticular cover is cool, but just a little insert, and it's rare something like 1,50o or so put out. They love doing that crap. The real gem here though is Fulci's Q&A at Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors fest in 1996, just three months before his death. There are no sub-titles for this however which would be great because it's very much a low-quality video camera and some douchey translator kinda-sorta translates Fulci's bullshit. There he talks about how Wes Craven ripped off Cat In The Brain in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). Oooooookay, Lucio, yeah fucking right. Some other great interviews where homedude goes on and on about how Italy hates him, and how he doesn't get the respect he deserves and about how he's so full of himself for being great and blah blah blah. The nonsensical ravings of an old lunatic basically. It's rad.
Rent it, buy it if you feel like supporting an awesome DVD company like Grindhouse Releasing. It's got gore by the bucket load, it's got Fulci being a huge weirdo, and cool packaging.
7/10
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