A Cat in the Brain (1990)

 

Director:  Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Giovanni Simonelli and Antonio Tentori

Cast: Lucio Fulci as Dr. Lucio Fulci; Brett Halsey as The Monster; Ria De Simone as The Soprano; David L. Thompson as Professor Egon Schwarz; Jeoffrey Kennedy as Inspector Gabrielli; Robert Egon as the Second Monster / Self; Malisa Longo as Katya Schwarz; Shilett Angel as Filippo the Producer

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #179 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

You say that the first manifestations of your illness have been the fear of hamburger and gardeners...

One wonders if all male, Italian filmmakers, or at least prominent ones, have a piece of DNA in their being that draws them to making autobiographical films or ones dissecting their own histories and place as directors. Never would the thought come to mind, at first, that Lucio Fulci, considering his emphasis on horror and genre cinema, would make his own 8½ (1963) like Federico Fellini. Would Dario Argento take a chance at a meta-film if he had the chance? He already did with Tenebrae (1982), a self reflecting giallo about a creator and his work but played as a straight forward film, and there are a surprising amount of self referential films in Italian genre cinema into the eighties like Demons (1985) as well. The difference here is that Fulci explicitly includes himself as Fellini did, breaking the fourth wall. When one considers Lucio Fulci’s work however a little deeper, even if one has only seen a slice of his filmography, his use of dream logic - not a cop-out phrase to describe his less narrative driven films like The Beyond (1981), but the only phrase suitable for films like his which purposely abandon logic and narrative from the beginning of them - is abstract enough for a meta-film to make sense for him and this break to happen.

When it comes to Fulci himself however there is also the factor that this particular film comes from his final films in the late eighties and nineties, a period where there has been a slow and very hesitant series of prods at, due to the lower budgets to his work, the sense of the Italian film industry winding down, and his own health issues increasing. Infamy brings Zombi 3 (Zombie Flesh Eaters 2) (1988) attention, the follow-up to the legendary Zombi (1979), attention especially given when, due to his increasing issue of declining health, Fulci despite finishing most of the film had to bow out as the infamous Bruno Mattei took over. The Devil's Honey (1986), an erotic thriller, gained attention as companies (namely Severin Films) have made it their mission to create Blu-Ray quality releases of even the era of the declining Italian industry¹. Beyond this, this is not a well held time for Fulci, A Cat in the Brain the one film from this era people have glommed onto from later Fulci.

Having seen some of the sources from this film, which re-uses films of his and those he produced they had difficulty selling, the result is peculiar to say the least. Fellini, for all his strange scenes in his career, did not start his 8½ with a clearly obvious cat puppet eating pieces of brain meat scattered around on a floor. The moment immediately starts with a statement of intent, where you throw your arms up in the air and give up any structures to film opposite to Fulci’s style regardless of your final opinion of him. It is a meaningful film for him to have made. Whether he qualifies as an auteur or not who gained immortality, he won it after his 1996 death, and was able to appreciate it somewhat in his lifetime, due to his horror films like Zombi 2.

He certainly has the personal voice, a nihilistic one which, regardless if he was pushed into making some films of lesser quality, and to add long and extended gore scenes to others, could be heard in all the films I’ve seen. (Arguably The Beyond, even with its quirks, manages to transcend into an honest-to-God horror masterpiece.) Even in A Cat in the Brain, you cannot argue against it being a Fulci film. The thing to bear in mind however is that he once made westerns, made comedies and giallos, not just films with splatter, something which comes into play here. We admire The Beyond and it's like, but he made just horror films continually after a while, even if he did do one or two hyper violent exceptions. (Conquest (1983), his sword and sandals film, has to be seen to be believed). That would be something that stuck in the back of his mind, even if he would enjoy his reputation.

Now here, his version of himself, he cannot even order a steak without thinking of a gore scene he directed. Replicating the frustrations with his career he may have actually had, Fulci plays himself, the director Lucio Fulci, as he find the gory horror films he is making and his ordinary life are blurring together. Unfortunately the psychiatrist he goes to, Egon Swharz, to heal his condition is a psychopath with plans to use Fulci’s illness to cover his serial murders. In context it is absurd, as it leads to footage from the likes of Touch of Death (1988), a sequence of an older man cooking a piece of a death woman's thigh, eating it, and then disposing the body by feeding it to the pigs. My thoughts of the film comes now with a greater knowledge of the films of Fulci's, particularly as Touch of Death is a bizarre film you barely scratch the surface of in this form, which makes this creative choice even more strange on paper to have done. The premise however, whilst it paints broad brushes on the issue of whether horror films innately corrupt people, and could be seen as problematic, is also something to take seriously.

We argue, to protect art, that the myth of horror and violence innately corrupting people is problematic. It is on both sides a subject that can be too broadly argued, without considering the complexity of human behaviour, how a person's psychology, their mental state and upbringing, are factors as much as any object being an accidental trigger. Even the real villain here, Swharz, explicitly says he wants to use that myth to use Fulci as a scapegoat, triggering gore hallucinations in him. I take the stance that an object cannot really be evil unless the supernatural was real, but I am aware of the complexity and case-by-case you have to tackle this in that mind. My thoughts went to Mortal Kombat returning to the film, not the original scandals of the first games, when they were two dimensional and cheesy in their gore, but the story behind the production of Mortal Kombat 11 (2019).

In that case, seeing the fully retendered "Fatalities" of the 2010s, where matches can end in killing you opponents, even a staunch defender of horror and transgressive are like myself felt they were too realistic and gross for my own being in terms of being healthy horrific content. The thought that came to mind was not that a player might be corrupted by this violence, but an article that came out which exposed how a developer on this sequel developed PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder)² creating the game; in that case, the issue is not the corrupting influence of playing a violent, realistic looking video game, but the creators spending so much time researching real images of violence, and trying to replicate it, that it took a psychological toll. A Cat in the Brain is so ridiculous, and with gore that is unrealistic and exaggerated, that it could not a serious comparison to a sad, real life case which causes one to think carefully about this subject, even as a staunch defender of all art, but Fulci did touch on a subject here that, ironically, would be an issue to consider even if in an entirely different artistic medium, in regards to the creators themselves.  

This in itself could easily be accused by horror fans, wishing to defend the genre, as a cheap thought to consider as they are different cases, but it is worth having. The other difference is that A Cat in the Brain, whether the humour actually works or not, is with a wink and a very weird sense of dark humour too, initially with Fulci being put off some meat dishes as an unfortunate result of having worked on such gore scenes earlier in the day, or being woken up from a nap by a chainsaw, unfortunate too when you have filmed a scene involving a chainsaw. The latter is something that must at least be a moment horror creators could have sympathise for, at least whenever trying to come up with something new many have wandered through a DIY store looking for something that has not been used yet onscreen.

When I first watched A Cat In The Brain, it was a surprise, a cascading reel of gruesome murder sets pieces, filmed for the film or taken from other sources, that goes from the sickly humorous, the disgusting and at least one that rifts on one of the most famous murder sequences in cinema in a more excessive interpretation. At first, it riffs on Fulci’s cinema, the frustrations of his filmmaking, and parodying it too as with one scene, knowingly referencing his obsession with eyeball trauma, where he has to deal with false eye prosthetics not up to his standards.  Then things start to become more erratic; with a penchant for wearing raincoat macks in his kill sprees, Swharz is a merely tangential catalyst to push Fulci, and ourselves, into hallucinatory scenes of debauchery and violence as Fulci the character slowly starts to become more and more unrevealed mentally. Decapitations, cannibalism, chainsaws, rotting corpses, and in terms of the non-gory hallucinations, even a sinful Nazi orgy amongst other things make up the running time, all nasty in tone and, even if some of the effects are clearly fake, the watery ickiness of many of them by their own would be enough to make some viewers turn green in the face.

Large portions of the film, when this transpires, are new scenes of Swharz on his killing sprees, or Fulci in continuous hallucinations which cut to pre-existing footage. As a result, the film really becomes repetitive, a string of set pieces, without a sense of connection, with decreasing impact until I became numbed by it all completely. On one hand, this could be argued to have a deliberate effect, to be so intense it becomes desensitising, but also it is numbing to a detriment. The constant gore does become too much but not in distaste, instead without meaning to it. It neither is really retrospective either; there is a profoundness of Fulci in his own fog for one scene, profound as heavy fog machine use is a trademark of his, but beyond this it is a film with a structure you have to struggle with.

The production values of the film will put off some viewers used to his earlier work if they are not prepared for this later era, the odd sense that this looks like a TV movie undercut when you wonder whether something this violent would be broadcast on Italian television in the 1990s, flatly put together, aside from some of the gore scenes and moments where Fulci’s trademark fog effects is included³. I have softened to this considerably in knowledge of the budgets he had, and my taste in cinema sympathises with no budget productions, but it will not help people used to the atmosphere of his famous work how stark this movie is. In another context, like Touch of Death, it could have overcome this if the tone's weirdness matched the production for example. Say what you think about the wavering quality of some of his films, but even his obtuse entry Conquest, which I have already mentioned, has an atmosphere even if it may have been filmed in a rock quarry, something far more memorable than most genre films. A Cat in the Brain's look is so matter-of-fact it really jars against the repetitious tone using footage from other films with other production values.

The film also does unfortunately cause me to think of the accusations of misogyny at Fulci, entirely by accident due to most of the pre-existing footage, and the new footage of Swharz's murders, always being female victims, baring a child on a tricycle getting his head carved off with a chainsaw. I will say this is accidental as, more of a misanthropist, Fulci's male characters got it as bad with drills to the head and fake looking spiders eating faces off in his filmography. It is a film like The New York Ripper (1982), a divisive film in his career, which raises the concerns, or a scene of sexual violence in his one poliziotteschi film Contraband (1980) which does a disservice. I see in this film, alongside the nudity, more the unfortunate habit, even if unintentional, of always falling back of female victims in horror which rightly gets questioned by feminists, even if completely without thought of any maliciousness from male creators. An accidental bias which presumes horror looks and plays this way, the same way Argento put his foot in his mouth, quoting Edgar Allen Poe, of the most poetic thing being a beautiful woman dying.  

And yet, I will return to A Cat in the Brain, and will find something in it, beyond even being a diehard fan of Lucio Fulci over and over, and that will be the thing to bar in mind. I can be so negative about this film, and will argue there are films in his last years - Touch of Evil, Zombi 3 and Aenigma (1987) - that are much more rewarding as lurid and weird horror flicks. But, I will have even a perverse fondness for this fascinating, batshit creation of his. Things like a strangely engaging (and jaunty) version of Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King on pan flute repeated as Swharz's stalking scenes, or Fulci running a man over in his car despite the fact man could have just stepped off the dirt road, have a funniness to them which is not ironic and cruel. Fulci completely severs the tightrope between being a serious look at his psyche and in revelling in the violent set pieces, like the case is for some of his great films, but rather than what I once thought of this, that it was a lightly lame and egotistic dissection of himself that is eventually pushed away in favour of the set pieces, it is a film made when you have little resources to make a Beyond with a sense of whimsy to it I find charming.

A weird thing to say, yes, but even in a film where a pool ball is shot into someone's body like a pocket, I found the film whimsical. Fulci himself, in his warm hunter's jacket, looks like a beloved uncle needing a hug, and even if the structure is such a huge negative creative decision, there is a meaning to him throwing himself through a barrage of this material, finally leaving it unscathed. The anticlimax, where the villain is punished off-screen, is actually inspired even by accident when you have sat through all the gore of before. It also at least, whilst I am glad this was not his final film, has an ending which redeems the whole project and, if it had been his last, would have been a wonderful one. Starting with a piece of gore and a twist, Fulci himself sails peacefully of into the horizon, content and on a vacation, on a boat called Perversity. That, even if most people would not find it sane to say unless you were a horror fan or an admirer of Fulci, is a beautiful little moment, even in its awkwardness, to have left his career on.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Chaotic/Grotesque/Quirky/Ramshackle

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Even Cruel Jaws (1995), Bruno Mattei's television film which "borrowed" footage from the Jaws franchise and even another Italian Jaws cash-in The Last Shark (1981).

2) A link to the article HERE from Kotaku

3) Fulci did make television movies in the late eighties, including The Sweet House of Horrors (1989), which were too violent for Italian television.