Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Nayan Gough 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.

Sam Panico Whenever I'm watching a Fulci movie - or even discussing him - I turn to Becca and often speak in an Italian accent and say things like, "Can I stab the woman in the eyeball now? I'm bored." If we're to believe this meta-biographical film, my impression is not far off.Fulci plays himself, a man haunted by the ever-worsening gore that his movies use. Now, real-life murders - and an obsession with violence everywhere he looks - have taken over his mind. He has, quite literally, a cat in the brain, eating away at the soft tissue, that we see while he's trying to finish writing a script.Finishing his latest film, Touch of Death,Fulci tries to eat a meal, but even the fillets and steak tartare he's offered remind him of the gore he's just directed. And then when he gets back to work, he's irritable, even smashing a plate of animal eyeballs. Fulci is and at eyeballs? Something's wrong!He can't even sleep when he gets home, as a handyman is using a chainsaw outside. Fulci flips out and uses a hatchet to smash some paint cans while the music from The Beyond plays.Fucli decides to see a shrink, Professor Egon Swharz, who we first see fighting with his wife, Katya. His nurse, Lilly (Paola Cozzo, the pregnant nun from Demonia) lets him know that Fulci has arrived. Lilly instantly knows who the director is and Swhartz is interested to break down the barriers between film and reality.Back at work, Fulci is struggling to complete both Touch of Death and Ghosts of Sodom (Sodoma's Ghost) at the same time. What follows are two completely batshit sequences where Fulci directs a Nazi seduction scene and imagines a Nazi orgy while being interviewed by a long-legged German reporter. Fulci mutters a non-stop stream of sexual demands as the action unfurls in front of him, reducing him to only being able to say, Sadism. Nazism. Is there any point any more?" When we come back to reality, Fulci has smashed all of their cameras and must apologize.When he returns for more therapy, the trap is sprung. Swharz wants to use Fulci to commit crimes, killing a string of prostitutes (using footage of other Fulci movies). The toll is taking over his professional life, as his assistant director has started working on his movie without him. Everywhere Fulci goes, death follows and even the police aren't there to take his confession. When he goes to the police inspector's house, he sees the man and his family stabbed, chainsawed and decapitated.Everywhere Fulci goes, death follows and even the police aren't there to take his confession. When he goes to the police inspector's house, he sees the man and his family stabbed, chainsawed and decapitated. He still can't convince anyone that he's the murderer - he's a kindly looking older man in a cardigan who people know creates these little gore movies.Schwarz finally flips out and kills his wife, cutting her head off with piano wire. He hypnotizes Fulci, who suffers through a series of violent images before passing out in a field next to a cute cat digging up the remains of one of the doctor's victims. His friend the inspector finally arrives, but it's to tell Fulci that they've caught the doctor in the act and that he's innocent.Months later, Fulci and Lilly, the nurse from earlier, are on his sailboat, named for his first movie Perversion. He uses a chainsaw to chop her up and then makes fishing lures with her bloody fingers. Is Fulci a killer? Nope. He's just finishing the exact movie that we just watched. The film wraps and he sails away with Lilly, who is really an actress. Everything ends happily - at least in this version. Another has a scream during the credits to suggest that maybe Fulci is a killer. Cat in the Brain - its title is a play on The Cat in the Hat - is a weird one. Fulci is the main actor in the film, but he had no confidence in his acting abilities, so his voice is dubbed by Elio Zamuto (who was also the Italian dubbing voice for Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I.).Supposedly, the film started with a script with no dialogue that was a catalog of mutilations and the sound effects that would go with them. And Brett Halsey had no idea he was even in the film until long after it was done, as Fulci just used previously shot footage. This hurt their friendship, as Halsey felt he should have been paid.In Fulci's one U.S. convention appearance at the January 1996 Fangoria Horror Convention in New York City, he appeared on crutches with a bandaged foot. He was sick - he'd die two months later - and blizzards had covered the city with inches of snow. Yet fans came from all over the country for the rare chance to meet Fulci. This footage is on the second disk of Cat in the Brain and features the man himself speaking to the crowd, where he claims that Wes Craven's New Nightmare rips off this film.Sure, Cat in the Brain raises issues of the effect of horror on the people who make it. But is it really just a greatest hits of Fulci's later period work? Did he feel trapped within the genre? Was it cathartic to create? These are all questions I would love to have heard him answer.

Leofwine_draca 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.

callanvass Lucio Fulci is an infamous Italian Horror director, well known for staging extremely violent gore scenes. Lucio begins to question his own sanity when weird visions start to commence. He goes to a nearby shrink for help. Lucio foolishly takes his Shrink's advice, because he doesn't realize The Shrink is much less lucid than Fucli. The Shrink hypnotizes Fulci to commence vicious murders. This was Fulci's swan song. With all due respect to one of my favorite Italian filmmakers, this is one of his weakest movies. It's basically just a compilation of gore scenes, with a bit of plot thrown in for good measure. It's without a doubt, one of the goriest movies I've ever seen. A guy gets run over multitudes of times (Extremely brutal stuff, and very well done) a cat gnaws away at brains, woman is sawed to pieces, and MUCH more. The problem with all the gore is I got bored of it after a while. The movie is nowhere near strong enough to get by on gore alone, because the story is quite weak. When it's not throwing all that gore in your face, its busy boring you by being overly talky, and as I mentioned previously. Even the gore gets tiring after a while, and I'm a big gore hound. I'll give credit where credit is due. Lucio Fulci is a director, so his poor acting skills can be excused, but he is not pretty to watch. He does this inner monologue at times, and relies on confused facial expressions. I didn't buy he was on the brink of being a madman. Not sure why he felt the need to do this film, but it doesn't work. Despite the somewhat abrupt ending, it has a clever little twist at the end, and reeled me in, I'll admit that, but to be honest? I didn't care about it, because I was underwhelmed by this movie. Final Thoughts: Die hard Fulci fans ought to seek this out to watch at it at least once. The rest needn't bother. Fulci has done worse in his career, but he's also done way better. Check out The Beyond, House by The Cemetery Zombi, or City of The Living Dead if you haven't already4/10

MisterWhiplash Lucio Fulci had a master craftsman hands doing what he did, which was making thrillers and horror movies. I mention both of those since, as he says on an interview on the DVD in a gruff and old-man manner, there is a difference. This would most likely lean towards horror, and a kind of self-knowing horror. In the same interview he says that most American horror filmmakers of the 70's and 80's and on into the 90's ripped off the Great Italian Masters (as he says, i.e. Argento and Bava), but with this film he might be even more on the money. It's knowing of what makes a horror film and how an audience responds, but it also plays with how a filmmaker looks on at the horrors around him. Scream would play around with the idea of a horror audience's expectations, but Fulci isn't just into playing. He's take a hammer and smashes any conventions to the ground and splatters it. Dr. Fulci is in on the joke, and on the horror on display.He plays himself too, which helps and makes things more absurd than they would be with another actor. He's been making his latest horror film, loaded with sadism and Naziism (we don't see much of the Naziism except for one pivotal sequence he imagines as being directed with a Nazi orgy). He seeks psychotherapy to deal with these visions of graphic murder around him, which get egged on by just visual associations (a vision of raw steak, a chainsaw). But as it turns out his psychotherapist has some other ideas of his own, and in hypnosis he takes over where the director is just visualizing. It's not a thriller because, basically, we know who the 'killer' is the moment he says it on screen, looking every bit like an Italian Christopher Lee.There's blood, lots of it, and dismembered heads, and dismembered hands, and throat sliced and eyes gouged out (at one point Fulci looks at his footage and says "Not real enough" over some eye test footage), and some dismembered other bits. It's hard to say where it might rank among the goriest of the gory Fulci films, but it's up there. But what makes it work better than it might from other circumstances is that Fulci, by proxy playing "himself", gets to say 'Hey, look at what we do here?' Fulci in the same interview on the DVD expounds on how much he despises psychotherapy, and it's here too that he gets to have a lot of fun. It even looks like they were having fun making it, getting to fool around much as 'Dr. Fulci' get fooled on himself. Hell, there's a shower stabbing scene to boot!Sure, it's still crude like a lot of Fulci's movies, but there's a kind of demented artistry at work as well. Fulci is serious about what he does, and what he does is delivery mountains of violence, but always in a kind of fantastical way. And there's always a sense of humor here, some of it very morbid. If you can tap into it, it's really one of Fulci's most entertaining films.