Nightmare concert

Fulci himself had a clever concept for a movie: have the director be the main character around whom the boundaries that separate reality & movies begin to crumble. This idea prefigured Wes Craven's New Nightmare by years, but sadly the growing health problems Fulci was suffering from are clearly evident in the resulting movie.

The movie is pieced together with footage from some of his previous works and the new material looks like it was shot in and around the area where Fulci lived, so he did not have to travel far.

It is sad to see such a legendary talent slowly eroded, but Cat in the Brain, along with the awful Voices from Beyond show the inexorable decline in Fulci's work.

Remember him for Zombi 2, Don't Torture A Duckling and The Beyond, rather than this sorry affair.

As most Fulci fans would agree, his best movies came out in the late seventies and early eighties. In 1988 he had to pull out of directing the terrible Zombie 3 after only a few weeks, due to ill health. What that ill health was is anyones guess. But judging by Nightmare concert of 1990 vintage, he is obviously still suffering. I am of the opinion that producers were pressuring him to put his name to something, and in the end, this is what came out.

It is a real mish mash of a slasher story spliced with scenes from other movies. Of course, fulci plays the lead. Or rather, is on screen with things happening around him. He is supposed to play himself, though i doubt anyone could be that wooden in real life. It is often difficult to tell WHAT is happening as the film jerks from scene to scene with nothing to link them together. Fulci spends most of his time looking puzzled and shocked, just as i am sure you, the viewer, will be.

It has plenty of gore in it as you would expect and will be most peoples reason for acquiring this movie. Fair enough. Just don't expect the cinematic punch of Zombie or the Beyond. At the end of the day its a horror movie, albeit a confusing one. I think it did its job, as i was left feeling somewhat disturbed and unwashed afterwards. Get it if you're a real gore hound or a fulci fan, other than that theres not really much to recommend it. Very strange psycological gore fest. Hmmmmmmmmmm....... Poor Fulci.

Lucio Fulci has the lead in this film where he plays a director of horror flicks who suffers from depression and neurosis as an effect of his own movies. Reality and fiction blur, everywhere he goes is blood and murder, Fulci becomes insane. Meanwhile his psychiatrist turns to a sadistic slasher...

Watch this film for the gore, because the satire is rather unsatisfactory! There are many violent scenes like brutal stabbings, chainsaw-murders and as an entrance-sequence a cat is eating a brain... combined with much nudity and even some trashy moments like the Nazi orgy. Fulci does a solid job with playing himself and the gore-F/X are pretty stunning, especially at the end of "Nightmare Concert" T there´s much red juice is running!

The main weakness of this film is his forced wittyness, however mostly the jokes don´t function! Maybe some insider-jokes were featured which I didn´t understand, but the self-irony about a director who becomes a mentally victim of his own works stays empty at all!!

6/10

Forget THE BEYOND--CAT IN THE BRAIN is Lucio Fulci's masterpiece. If Dario Argento is the John Ford of Italian splatter cinema, the lyric poet and publicly acknowledged grand-master, then Fulci was surely its Howard Hawks--the caretaker and solid storyteller who knew how to sink a hole in one with the easiest flick of the wrist. Splatter-geeks somehow seem to have dismissed this picture with a contemptuous shrug--maybe it's too highbrow and "conceptual" for their red-meat tastes. In a stroke of daring even Fellini and Michael Powell never tried in their self-reflexive classics, Fulci plays himself--or rather, a particularly tormented and increasingly unhinged version of himself, driven mad by the combination of guilt and bloodlust triggered by making hyperviolent horror movies. "Fulci" wonders whether he is responsible for a string of gruesome murders breaking out around him...and the movie's combination of a fiendish, id-driven love of cinema, and a shuddering revulsion at its consequences, makes this for me the most painful and personal of all movies about moviemaking. The author's conflicting emotions are played out as nakedly as in VERTIGO or BLOW OUT--only this movie has the illicit fun of its grindhouse origins. Horror afficianados may have given this picture the high hat, but I know it has at least one fan...Jean-Luc Godard.

As one who often paid good coin to see Fulci movies during their brief theatrical runs, I can appreciate the guilty pleasure of kicking back to hoot at badly-dubbed sadism and cheesy gore. But I draw the line at clods who insist that Lucio Fulci was some kind of tortured, misunderstood artist. Better you should write theses on the mise-en-scene of AIRPORT 1975, or maybe the underlying theme of ROLLER BOOGIE. There's no doubt Fulci was intending to shock his audience with mean-spirited viciousness; however, his ham-handed obviousness and ineptitude are what make his films "classics". I haven't seen BEATRICE CENCI or that DUCKLING one, so maybe there was some real talent there once. But from ZOMBIE onward, Fulci delivered more unintentional comedy than on-purpose terror. CAT IN THE BRAIN is probably his worst ever, a hopeless porridge of old gore-fx footage spliced into new scenes in an excruciating attempt at a psychological thriller. A horror-film director slowly losing his ability to distinguish reality from fantasy IS a scenario ripe with possibilities: wait till you see how badly this simple-yet-solid premise is botched. Or better yet, take my word for it and pass altogether. I hold no personal animus against the late Fulci, but it irritates me no end that this guy is slowly gaining a reputation as some kind of great Italian moviemaker - mostly from lazy gorehounds who can't be bothered to check out De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti or legit horror masters like Bava and Freda. Maybe CAT IN THE BRAIN isn't representative of Fulci's best -he was in failing health at the time- but I've seen his other "triumphs" and his only genius was in aiming low - and missing.