The first manifestations of your illness have been the fear of hamburger and gardeners.
When cat collides with brain you know that hilarity will ensue.
Lucio Fulci's greatest collision concept will always be the seminal zombie Vs shark battle scene from the film Zombi. Following Zombi, Fulci delivered two of the greatest Italian zombie films of all time in City of the Living Dead & The Beyond. The latter of which actually contains a genuine FEG.
Make no mistake, Fulci was a master.
So what of Cat in the Brain (imdb) and it's heavily implied cat-within-brain content?
There is indeed a scene containing said cat in brain. I'm not sure if its a battle as such but it's pretty awesome. It's just as disgusting as you imagine it would be. I believe it's a metaphor for insanity. Cat in the Brain is a kind of satirical, autobiographical meta-film in which Fulci plays himself: a burnt out director of Italian splatter films who - after several morbid hallucinations - begins to question his own sanity. Where does the line between film and reality merge and what are the long term effects of violent films on the mind?
What this results in is essentially 85 minutes of increasingly ridiculous gore scenes (melting face scene, child decapitated via chainsaw, several scenes of eyeballs popping out... sadly no FEGs). It almost feels like a special effects demonstration tape and I'd happily give a Bmovie Cheese gore-rating of 5 - if not for the fact that the scenes themselves vary radically in quality. Not a bad thing per-se; I love the dismemberment scene early on in which it appears to be sawdust bursting out of the paper-mache arms and legs as they are violently removed from a mannequin torso.
Interspersed between each gore sequence Fulci roams around in a confused state - trying to figure out the difference between reality (a serial killer is actually on the loose) and fantasy (several "films within the film" and a variety of cheesy hallucinations.
In the end I highly recommend you see some of Fulci's classics first. I believe this may be a prerequisite for understanding the point behind Cat in the Brain. Sure the FX is disparate, and the intentional satire kind of ruins any chance of genuine cheese, but hey, this is Fulci at the end of his career saying:
"You know what? I'm gonna do whatever the fuck I like. Get me a movie camera, a cat, a brain, and a heap of boob".
Did I mention that Fulci was a master?
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