A Cat in the Brain (aka Nightmare Concert) (1990)
Review by the Fiend of Grue
The movie begins by showing Lucio Fulci, playing himself, sitting at a table thinking up the most horrible ways to kill people while jotting them down on a pad of paper. This is all inner cut with scenes of a cat feasting on brains. Next we see a man eating a piece of a woman’s leg before slicing her limb from limb with a chainsaw and then taking the pieces and making it into hamburger for his pigs. We soon find out that this sequence is part of the movie within the movie that Fulci is shooting and directing.
As the cast and crew end their day, Fulci heads to dinner by himself at a posh restaurant. As the waiter describes several of the dishes on the menu, the visions in Fulci’s head take over and everything the guy is describing makes him think gory, sick thoughts . Not having an appetite anymore, Fulci leaves without eating.
The terrible visions continue to persist so Fulci decides to go see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tells him that what is happening is he‘s having a “type of identity crisis,” that he’s “breaking down the barriers between what you film and what’s real.”
After that visit, Fulci heads back to the studio to meet with one of his actors about a scene in the movie he’s shooting. They exchange some small talk and then head onto the set where a beautiful actress is sprawled out on a bed. The man walks over to the bed and Fulci directs him to hit her, which he does. The woman begins to bleed from her mouth and stares back at the man in shock. All of the sudden, under Fulci’s rambling of “You like it! You enjoy it!” they begin to make out very passionately as the man rubs the woman’s blood all over her chest and stomach, finally stopping at her panty line! Strange stuff, let me tell ya.
The psychiatrist visit apparently didn’t help at all because the visions still continue to pervade Fulci’s mind. Scenes of orgies, lesbian lust and sadism all being filmed and directed by Fulci fill his thoughts. Fulci is seen cheering on every last debauchery, continually shouting out, “Shoot it all! Shoot it all! Sex, death, degradation, cruelty!” Finally as the scene reaches its climax (pun intended) Fulci yells out, “Put it in the pocket!” and we see a woman sprawled out with her legs spread on a pool table and a guy shooting a ball right into her crotch! You don’t see that everyday.
Fulci is suddenly shaken back into reality and finds out that while he was having that vision he attacked a woman and was trying to rip her clothes off. This of course sends him back to the psychiatrist. At this visit, the psychiatrist puts Fulci under hypnosis. While he’s under the doc’s spell, he is told that he will now no longer know reality from fiction at all. The psychiatrist then tells the spellbound Fulci that he will murder people and make it look like Fulci is the one doing all of the killing.
What the manipulative psychiatrist implants in Fulci’s psyche does take effect because after this meeting, Fulci goes even more crazy as the images continue to get more and more frightening and gory. As Fulci’s visions intensify, the psychiatrist does in fact begin to murder people. He strikes with no mercy, no remorse and as his list of victims begin to pile up, Fulci’s mind slips further into complete madness. Can Fulci find a way out of his mental nightmare? Can he also find a way out of his mental torment that has been placed on him by his psychiatrist or will he be blamed for all the murders?
Do you like gore? Do you like massive amounts of gore? Then this is the movie for you because this has some of the most gore that’s been put on film in a single setting ever, I think. It’s not to the point of comedy like Dead Alive, but rather very realistic for the most part, and will leave any gorehound feeling satisfied.
A Cat In The Brain was released in 1990 and is arguably the last great film that Fulci ever made. This movie has one great gore set piece after another that is as good as anything that Fulci ever put out. Most of the scenes of carnage were taken from other movies that Fulci had previous put out such as The Ghosts of Sodom, The Murder’s Secret, Touch of Death, Massacre, Bloody Psycho, Escape from Death and Hansel and Gretel. All of the scenes used from previous movies were added in seamlessly and go along well with this film.
The score is done by the Fulci regular, Fabio Frizzi and is right up there with the other great scores he did for Fulci. From swinging jazz numbers to scary dissonant horror rumblings, once again Frizzi lays down an outstanding score that makes the movie even better.
Fulci playing himself here does a really good job in the lead role. He was known to make appearance in his films, but this was the first and only time that he played a main character. David Thompson as the psychiatrist is also pretty good as the manipulative serial killer but the rest of the cast doesn’t really matter because GORE is the real star in this movie. A wheelchair bound zombie, decapitations galore, microwaved, melting heads, slit throats, several severed limbs, maggot-infested corpses and a shower stabbing scene that will make you forget all about Psycho round out only a small fraction of the endless barrage of gore sequences that you undertake while watching this film. Although the gore is the standout item in this movie, it also has several depraved moments, one of which I already mention involving the guy rubbing blood all over a girl but also another one worth mentioning involves a man straddling a woman on a couch and he’s slapping her in the face back and forth, real hard mind you, while she sings out an opera song seemingly enjoying it. It is things like this that you only get from a Lucio Fulci film.
This is without question Fulci’s tribute to his most loyal fans…the horror crowd. After spending decades of his life trying to find his niche in film by directing several spaghetti westerns and comedies, Fulci finally found his place in the world of horror during the last two decades of his life. As he rides off into the sunset in the movie in his boat called the “Perversion” you can smile and know that A Cat In The Brain is his toast to us…his loving minions.
As with most of Lucio’s films, I HIGHLY recommend checking this movie out.
Popularity: 10% [?]
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