THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM FOR GIALLO

Liner notes by DJS for the Box Office Spectaculars laserdisc release of Lucio Fulci's 1990 film CAT IN THE BRAIN.

About a minute into A Cat in the Brain, we get a super-wet closeup of a cat fervently clawing away at the bloodied cerebral matter of the protagonist, the ubiquitously-named "Lucio Fulci." A few moments after the curd-smushing horror-cat, we see a crazy psychiatrist -- a character created by "Fulci" for this movie-within-a-Fulci-movie -- grab the king of chainsaws (McCullough, to the clueless) to expedite his cannibalistic cookery.

What's not to like?

This is, after all, a giallo film, so one should not wax all flinchy and high-horsed about hyper-attenuated grotesquerie, eccentric and unlikable characters, oblique narrative, discordant strategies which subvert conventional plotting, ultraviolence, and excess of all kinds. Some gialli may seem especially opaque to Americans incapable of perceiving story except in terms of a linear 1-2-3 plot.

Lucio Fulci is one of the honored sons of this cinematic form, energized by Mario Bava and his minions in the 1960s. Though the 1970 it was Fulci, Dario Argento, and Umberto Lenzi who expanded the reach and grasp of the giallo (literally, "yellow," after the lurid, predominantly yellow jacket illustrations found on 1930s crime fiction), setting the standard for the third wave, characterized by Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi in the 1980s.

A Cat in the Brain further literalizes the reflexive scenario of Argento's Tenebrae (1982), which examines a writer of thrillers who "works from life" and is beset by hallucinatory implications that his work has become too much for him to bear. This embodies a whole shopping list of classic stupid questions too often asked of those who produce work in a genre glibly labeled "horror," to wit:

Don't you think that stuff is sick? That it perverts young minds? That it inspires murderers? That it corrupts all it touches? That whoever would yield up such nastiness must themselves be pretty nasty? Weren't they traumatized as children? Tainted early, probably by horror movies or books ? Or thoughts? Or ideas?

"Doesn't that stupid old theory say that seeing violence on the screen provokes violence?" asks the mad shrink in Cat.

Really, such crap is so dated it officially classifies as antique, and so wrong that it never should have passed GO in the first place. But people fear what frightens them, and examining the horrific is not the first impulse of "normal" folks. Giallo cinema impolitely forces this scrutiny with its rude basic menu of chainsawn corpses, bright scarlet blood, and chesty sluts with nary a breast implant in sight. It doesn't ask your permission and couldn't care less who it offends.

Cat is a horror movie about a guy who makes horror movies. Few people lead what could be called "normal" lives in the dark universe of the giallo, which is usually populated by the deranged, the addicted, the disenfranchised, the alienated, the damned and the lost. Normal human interaction is reduced to banal dialogue and soap opera sub-plots, and these exchanges unnerve the viewer precisely because they're so strikingly pedestrian. They sound precisely like the robotic interactions that might be concocted for cardboard characters by a screenwriter preoccupied with the possibility that he may be slipping off the edge of sanity; they become ominous in their forced and unnatural normalcy -- both for Cat's characters, and for the characters in the movie "Fulci" notes he is "in the throes of shooting."

By describing this maddening itch in his head as a cat in his brain, "Fulci" (along with the real Fulci) adequately evokes the demon piggyback rider of Robert Bloch's story, "Enoch," who also seems to be the product of a killer's dementia ... until the brain-eating Enoch decides to switch heads.

The cheesy cat puppet we see inside "Fulci"'s skull looks cheesy for a reason: "Fulci" later complains that the gouged-out eyeballs provided by his special effects guy "don't look real," either. Nothing in the beleagured director's world seems real anymore, enabling a mystery tormentor (possibly imaginary) to frame him by using the furniture of his own ouevre. Not only does Cat reference horror cinema within its own structure (i.e., the movies cited during Cat as being "Fulci"'s repertoire), but also steps outside the frame to quote the shower murder of Psycho and, in a more demented twist, provide the most perverted use yet of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

No one, at this late date, can clarify why the director character "Lucio Fulci," portrayed by Cat director Lucio Fulci, is referenced as "Fulvio" in the film's end credits and in most Italian press material. He is clearly heard to be addressed as "Lucio Fulci" -- usually "Dottore Fulci" -- and the nameplate on his door likewise reads "Dr. Lucio Fulci." Best guess: The distributors may have initially thought the confusion between the real director and his same-named character too much for foreigners to bear.

Similarly, why Nightmare Concert, the export title imposed on this film, was considered grabbier than A Cat in the Brain, I'll never know. Our crack team of ninja researchers at Box Office Spectaculars notes that Nightmare Concert appears on the English-language version of the title sequence, also known as the "international" version, since it is the one delivered to all foreign territories for dubbing into their respective native languages.

Fulci is more famous -- some say notorious -- for his louder efforts, such as his Zombi films, or his classic, Quella villa accanto al cimittero (The House by the Cemetery), but A Cat in the Brain remains my favorite of his movies.

In fact, I can feel one scratching away right now ...

-- David J. Schow

January 1999