Every time that Quentin Tarantino releases a movie, there seems to be an immediate renaissance in trashy film from various bygone eras. And with Inglourious Basterds slated for a late August debut in the States, its arrival seems to have reawakened an interest in genre schlock reaching back a few decades, despite this new film’s World War II focus. With Tarantino’s brief dash into the fray of reconstituted b-movie classics failing by the end of the ‘90s, other boutique distributors have had to take up the call subsequent to the demise of Rolling Thunder Pictures. There’s obviously still a market for it, the nerds just might not have enough money to indulge in pleasures like buy DVDs – or anything for that matter.

Earlier this summer, a film alternately hailed as a classic or utter tripe received a DVD liberation via Grindhouse Releasing, an appropriate name for such a company. A Cat in the Brain isn’t simply another ninety minutes of gore from Italian director Lucio Fulci – although that’s a great deal of what the film is comprised of. Instead, Fulci’s film refuses to follow any sensible or traditional narrative model and focuses on a series of increasingly problematic flashbacks that the film’s director and star begins suffering as a result of a dedication to his slasher flicks. The horror genre has and always will be dogged by the perception of its being nothing more than masturbatory gore – and a lot of the time that’s what it is. Fulci’s attempt at social and personal criticism through the guise of cut rate murder sequences, though, could be used to refute a few, but not all, of those arguments levied against the genre’s legitimacy.

In 1970, twenty years prior to the filming of A Cat in the Brain, writer and satirist Terry Southern composed a novel entitled Blue Movie, which follows the travails of Boris Adrian, an elite Hollywood director, as he works to incorporate the worlds of high art and porn into one digestible filmic product. Regardless of the outcome of Adrian’s efforts, Southern arrived at the same crossroads Fulci came to. Not that Southern was enmeshed in the porn industry, but he sought someway by which to use elements from art that were perceived as proper and thoughtful while still manipulating the low brow physicality of stag films to yield a product that possessed the positive attributes of both. Artists have always struggled to reconcile a personal view with an outside perspective of a work, but in Fulci’s 1990 introspective film, this inner tumult is projected on screen for just about an hour and a half.

The aforementioned flashbacks that Fulci is prone to while a character in A Cat in the Brain – brought on by a luncheon consisting of steak tartare and a variety of other ridiculous situations including a scene where the director attacks paint cans in a perverse inverse of The Jerk – are meant to relate the apprehension that the director feels as his filmography becomes ever more engorged with gore, although, the lifestyle he’s been granted doesn’t seem to be too problematic to the director. Fulci has a responsibility to society on some level, but struggles to see a fair demarcation point.