CAT IN THE BRAIN
DVD Region 0. Hardgore / Screen Entertainment

Censorship is an arse, and if you needed proof of that, here's a shiny new DVD of Lucio Fulci's gorefest Cat in the Brain (aka Nightmare Concert) for you. This film was sent packing when first submitted to the British censors three or four years ago, apparently being so depraved that no amount of cuts could make it acceptable for public consumption. Yet here we are in 2003 and the film was been passed, uncut. Now, can someone please explain how society has changed to make a highly dangerous movie perfectly innocuous in just a few years? C'mon BBFC, we're waiting...

Not that this is the extreme movie it's made out to be. Gory, yes, but also so ridiculously camp and cartoonish that you wonder just what sort of humourless idiot would have ever considered it a threat to society. The film itself is a plotless, messy, very silly mish-mash of splatter footage, mostly cobbled together from unreleased (and unreleasable) clunkers like Touch of Death, Sodom's Ghosts (both by Fulci), La Porte d'Inferno, Massacre, The Murder Secret, Bloody Psycho and Bloody Moon (not the Jess Franco laugh-riot). Holding all this together is a mad story involving Fulci playing himself - a film director haunted by visions of violence and horror. He seeks psychiatric help, but his shrink is far more interested in using Fulci's nightmares as an excuse to carry out a series of murders, convincing the disturbed movie-maker that he himself is the actual culprit.

So, clearly nonsense of the highest calibre. But if you enjoy Eurotrash cinema and are prepared to switch off your brain, this might pass by fairly painlessly. Gorehounds will be delighted with it, and it'll probably be a great party movie. But by any conventional standards, this is terrible.

Amusingly, Fulci and his apologists have long asserted that Wes Craven stole the concept of this movie for his New Nightmare movie, where he played a director haunted by his own creation. Such claims are truly laughable: I doubt if Craven even knew who Fulci was, let alone had see this movie, and the fiction-blurred-with-reality concept had been used by better directors than Fulci before. And of course, for all it's many faults, Craven's film was a provocative, intelligent piece of work: even the most ardent Fulcit might have a hard time making that argument for this film.

Still, some people are too obsessed with their love of wilfully obscure culture to ever give credit to the mainstream...

DAVID FLINT

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