MisterWhiplash Lucio Fulci had a master craftsman hands doing what he did, which was making thrillers and horror movies. I mention both of those since, as he says on an interview on the DVD in a gruff and old-man manner, there is a difference. This would most likely lean towards horror, and a kind of self-knowing horror. In the same interview he says that most American horror filmmakers of the 70's and 80's and on into the 90's ripped off the Great Italian Masters (as he says, i.e. Argento and Bava), but with this film he might be even more on the money. It's knowing of what makes a horror film and how an audience responds, but it also plays with how a filmmaker looks on at the horrors around him. Scream would play around with the idea of a horror audience's expectations, but Fulci isn't just into playing. He's take a hammer and smashes any conventions to the ground and splatters it. Dr. Fulci is in on the joke, and on the horror on display.He plays himself too, which helps and makes things more absurd than they would be with another actor. He's been making his latest horror film, loaded with sadism and Naziism (we don't see much of the Naziism except for one pivotal sequence he imagines as being directed with a Nazi orgy). He seeks psychotherapy to deal with these visions of graphic murder around him, which get egged on by just visual associations (a vision of raw steak, a chainsaw). But as it turns out his psychotherapist has some other ideas of his own, and in hypnosis he takes over where the director is just visualizing. It's not a thriller because, basically, we know who the 'killer' is the moment he says it on screen, looking every bit like an Italian Christopher Lee.There's blood, lots of it, and dismembered heads, and dismembered hands, and throat sliced and eyes gouged out (at one point Fulci looks at his footage and says "Not real enough" over some eye test footage), and some dismembered other bits. It's hard to say where it might rank among the goriest of the gory Fulci films, but it's up there. But what makes it work better than it might from other circumstances is that Fulci, by proxy playing "himself", gets to say 'Hey, look at what we do here?' Fulci in the same interview on the DVD expounds on how much he despises psychotherapy, and it's here too that he gets to have a lot of fun. It even looks like they were having fun making it, getting to fool around much as 'Dr. Fulci' get fooled on himself. Hell, there's a shower stabbing scene to boot!Sure, it's still crude like a lot of Fulci's movies, but there's a kind of demented artistry at work as well. Fulci is serious about what he does, and what he does is delivery mountains of violence, but always in a kind of fantastical way. And there's always a sense of humor here, some of it very morbid. If you can tap into it, it's really one of Fulci's most entertaining films.

Master Cultist Though far from Fulci's best work - you have to go back 6 or 7 years for that I'm afraid - this is still an effective shocker, which actually manages to be post-modern before that became the norm post 'Scream'. Fulci plays himself, a horror movie director who is being terrorised by a serial killer who is slaughtering his victims in a copycat of the gory deaths of people in Fulci's movies. That's all there is plot wise, but, as ever with Fulci's work, this is about the gore set-pieces, and they are excellent. Beheadings, eye poppers, chainsaws, we get the lot here. Fulci is adequate in his role, but be warned, there is the usual level of misogynistic content on display, as he is notorious for. Not his best, but far from awful.

Lotica This movie was made around the time that Lucio Fulci was starting to lose his touch. Before, his movies were not only gore-filled, but they had a story, great writing, and great camera shots that were very beautiful for something any other Italian director (besides Dario Argento) could not produce. Near his death, his movies seems very poor, and somewhat distasteful. The only two movies I could watch of his were Aenigma (1987), and The House of Clocks (1989). Though, Un gatto nel cervello (The Cat in The Brain) is a very entertaining movie that Fulci produced near his death. One of the main reasons, is that Fulci actually stars in it... AS HIMSELF! The plot line is basically Fulci has been driven insane by his movies or whatever, and he starts imagining scenes from his movies being played out in real life. What this means, is that there is a lot of stock footage with in the movie, mainly from Touch of Death and Sodama's Ghost, two recent movies Fulci had produced before. I liked how the scenes were integrated into the movie, though you could tell that the footage was stock somewhat if you've actually seen the movies. Anyway's the movie is entertaining, though the gore kind of does lose the touch of any other Fulci gore epic before. Though the thing that surprises me, is that Fabio Frizzi (composer of some Fulci films such as Zombie, The Gates of Hell, and The Beyond) is actually the composer of this movie's music. You can actually tell by the bass line, sort of. I wish I could find a soundtrack for this movie, if there is one.

Scarecrow-88 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.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.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.