text: I couldn't help but relish the entire premise of CAT IN THE BRAIN because it dutifully explains a director's steadily going mad, seeing people murdered from past movies he has made. Even mundane activities such as cooking a meal in the microwave or running a faucet of water yield some horrific butchery from a film in the past. Director Fulci playing himself, is directing GHOSTS OF SODOM(?)and can not seem to deprive his mental well being from constant murder. He seeks help from a psychiatrist who, instead, uses Fulci's work as a method to execute a series of innocent people, hypnotizing the director into thinking that perhaps he's responsible.<br /><br />This is obviously a film playfully poking fun at Fulci's image, while exploring the themes of how such a profession, which produces so much death and destruction, rarely untamed, could mold and shape a legacy. The film features pretty much a wrap-around story surrounding non-stop graphic violence with every possible way to kill a woman expressed in grisly detail. This has a shower murder Hitchcock never could direct, or probably want to. The film's savagery compliments the mental state of Fulci's Fulci(..I know)during the running time. Reality and cinematic fiction have fused and Fulci can find no escape. The ending(..explaining the old cliché:"It's only a movie")couldn't work any better than it does here. Fulci's boat says Perversion(..excellent touch)and he sails off..I can only wish this was his final film because that's a perfect close if there ever was one. David L Thompson is the deranged psychiatrist planning to kill his adulterous wife. Jeoffrey Kennedy is a cop Fulci fears had a family murdered by the fiend.<br /><br />The ultra-violence in the film features plenty of unique ways to take a head off such as the door to a chest, a scythe, a chainsaw, and hatchet. The most brutal violence derives from nasty chainsaw activity as a dead body is hacked to pieces(..how a gardener's chainsaw work on a log fits beautifully in one nightmarish hallucination sequence)..the most shocking use of a chainsaw is when a little boy gets decapitated! The opening scene with the puppet cat tearing away, feasting on Fulci's brain, is a howler. The scenes which are spliced within the film, featuring a horrified Fulci looking on, are obvious, but I couldn't help but enjoy this anyway.