Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on the new internet machine.
Lewis Black used to do a bit about candy corn. He hates candy corn (as everyone really should), but finds that every year, he approaches it as if the concept is entirely new to him only to rediscover every year how much he doesn’t like it. This is almost exactly my reaction to most Italian horror films. I always desperately want to like them and usually end up disappointed and confused. So it is with A Cat in the Brain (or Un Gatto el Cervello), a film that makes this worse by having a truly great name and at least one poster (the cat looking out of a human skull) that ranks among the greatest of all time. It’s probably asking too much for the film to live up to either of these things, and it really, really doesn’t.
I’ll give this all the credit in the world for creativity, though. A substantial amount of this film was produced in post-production using scenes and clips from previous Lucio Fulci films. In this one, Fulci, playing himself, starts to have real-world visions of some of the atrocities that he is filming. So, he spends the day filming a man hacking up a body with a chainsaw and then cooking and eating part of the corpse. That day, he’s unable to eat meat at lunch and pictures a handyman with a chainsaw suddenly using it on people.
