A Cat in the Brain (1990) and Artists Looking Back at Their Own Careers

Context plays an important role in what you consume.  A book might hit harder if brought into the context of the time when it was written.  A television show could depend upon news and headlines from the time of its airing.  A movie might need to be seen within a filmography of other movies to be understood.  Context is important in each of these situations.  Without proper context, you do a disservice to the movie and yourself.  That’s how I feel this week, since context is such an important part of the movie I watched.

A Cat in the Brain, also known as Nightmare Concert, is a 1990 movie directed by Lucio Fulci that was a culmination of his filmography.  Having never seen a Lucio Fulci movie before A Cat in the Brain, I wasn’t as understanding of the meta concepts as I could have been.  I took the movie at face value, watching what was presented to me instead of having the history of Fulci affecting my viewing.  The movie could have been more effective with that history to back it up.

Lucio Fulci played himself in A Cat in the Brain.  As he was working on a new splatter horror movie, he began experiencing PTSD.  He wasn’t able to eat meat because of the mutilated bodies in his movie.  When a yardworker at his home was using a chainsaw similar to one in a scene he had been shooting, his mind snapped and he attacked paint cans.  Fulci saw a therapist who used hypnotherapy to help him.  Only, it didn’t help him at all.  The hypnotherapy made him the lead suspect in a series of murders that were occurring in the local area.  He was experiencing events that seemed straight from his own movies.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve covered a movie where a director played a part in the narrative.  This has happened a couple times before and I think this post would be the perfect place to discuss this story element.  The examples that follow have a meta bent that allowed the director to come into the movie playing themselves.  They partially made fun of their own tendencies.  But they were also trying to tell a story that would be entertaining.  It’s not always successful, as some examples show.  They’re all interesting insertions of the artist into the art, though, and they are worth noting.

30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This was covered for week 10 of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It has been a long time.  I still have a hatred for it crawling under my skin when it is brought up in a post or in conversation.  It was one of the worst, most groan inducing experiences I’ve had.  None of the jokes worked.  Most would have been on a negative scale of comedy, actively taking away from any joy mined out of the concept.  It was a horrendous mess that didn’t know what it wanted to do.

The reason that 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gets into this post is because of a scene in which they broke the fourth wall.  When one of the characters was attacked, he stumbled through the house.  He ended up in the kitchen where the director and crew were behind their monitors.  The victim asked who they were and what they were doing.  They said that they were directing a movie.  It was a small unfunny joke in a movie filled with unfunny jokes.

The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)

When I wrote about The Human Centipede franchise for week 180, I discussed the ways that the sequels delved into meta humour.  The second movie had the first movie exist within it.  Not the story.  The actual movie existed.  When the third movie was made, the first two were movies within the world of the third movie.  The characters in The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) watched The Human Centipede (First Sequence) and The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence).

The second movie paved the way by having the first movie exist.  It also brought one of the actresses back to the franchise, this time playing herself.  It was a hint at what would come in the third installment.  The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) saw many actors return from earlier in the franchise.  There were hints made to them looking like characters in the movies.  When the entire prison population watched The Human Centipede movies, they made comments that were ripped from negative reviews.  Yet the biggest meta moment was when Tom Six was brought into the movie playing himself.

The whole idea behind The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) was to have the population of the prison sewn together, ass to mouth.  The prison warden, played by Dieter Laser from the first movie, wanted to have every prisoner sewn together because they would better obey him.  He asked director Tom Six to be a consultant so that they could get every detail of the procedure as accurate as possible.  Tom Six played Tom Six, the director of The Human Centipede movies, who was consulting on a human centipede procedure because of the experience he had making the movies.  He was a sizeable part of the story, having an effect upon what happened in the prison.

A Cat in the Brain

That brings us to the third and final movie that I’m going to discuss in this week’s post.  A Cat in the Brain, as I’ve already said, was the culmination of Lucio Fulci’s career.  It took the type of movies that he was known for and flipped them on their head by having him involved in that kind of story.  He was making the types of movies that hewais known for, but he was also living through them.  It was an intriguing concept that would have landed better if I was more acquainted with his filmography.

Even having not seen any Lucio Fulci movies prior to A Cat in the Brain, I still enjoyed the story.  Because it was so like Fulci’s movies, it was sometimes difficult to determine what was happening and what wasn’t.  You were going along with the director as his mind spiraled from his work.  Though the audience knew who the real killer was, the movie was so focused on Fulci’s mind that it blurred the lines between reality and fantasy.  He was going slowly insane and we watched every moment.

Some directors are fully aware of their style and tendencies to the point that they poke fun at it.  That is what Lucio Fulci did with A Cat in the Brain.  He made his style the story.  Many tropes from Lucio Fulci movies (which I know through hearing about them, or actual references in the movie) were present.  The entire movie was his look back on his own career and all the tendencies associated with it.  It was a good fictional story about his career.  I hope to watch it again in the future after seeing more of his movies.  Perhaps that will make it even better.

One of the joys of movies is taking a look at the past and using it to make more art.  Few stories are original anymore, and it’s the way that the stories are told that is the original quality.  Great artists know this and are able to play into it.  Wes Craven made New Nightmare as a meta look at the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise that he began.  Clint Eastwood made Unforgiven, which was a culmination of his western career.  Lucio Fulci came up with A Cat in the Brain to look back on his career in splatter horror.  Each artist knew their history and created their own tribute to it.

The great thing about this type of movie is that there is a shared appreciation of film history between the creator and the audience.  The artist (whether director, writer, or actor) knows what the audience knows, or may even be giving the audience a better look into the ideas.  For people who want to learn more about their favourite artists and movies, these are a window into that world.  They’re the best document outside of documentaries of a career, a series, or many other things.  And though some are bad (though I think A Cat in the Brain ended up being fairly good), they are insightful.  What better way to learn about movies than through other movies?  I can’t think of a better way.

Now for some notes:

• A Cat in the Brain was suggested to me by @JonCohen6, who seems to have disappeared from Twitter.  I’m linking to whoever has the handle now.
• One actor from A Cat in the Brain was in another movie.  That actor was Robert Egon, who was also in Captain America.
• I wrote about 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Human Centipede in this post.
• Have you seen A Cat in the Brain?  How about any of the other movies in this post?  Have you seen anything by Lucio Fulci?  If you’ve seen any of this stuff, you can discuss it in the comments below.
• Another thing that you can talk about in the comments are suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts.  If there’s a movie you would like to see me cover, let me know.  You can find me on Twitter if you don’t want to use the comments.
• If you want to see some of the clips from many of the bad movies I watch, consider following me on snapchat.  My username is jurassicgriffin.
• Next week, I will be covering a movie called Perfect.  It stars John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis.  It has something to do with working out.  That’s about all I know.  I’m interested in seeing it, so I’m excited for this coming week.  I’ll bring back a post for you once next Sunday comes.  See you then.

Double Team (1997)

The 1990s were a strange era of movies.  It was the transitional period from practical effects to computer generated work.  Animation was shifting from hand drawn to Toy Story style computer animation.  Disaster movies were released in pairs.  The 1990s also saw a rise in basketball icons becoming the stars of movies.  Michael Jordan made Space Jam, which is still beloved among people my age.  Shaquille O’Neal made Kazaam, Steel, and a few other movies.  Then there was Dennis Rodman, a two time action hero in 1999’s Simon Sez and 1997’s Double Team.

This week’s focus is going to be on Double Team.  It was the story of Jack Quinn (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a special agent tasked with taking down a terrorist named Stavros (Mickey Rourke).  When an attempted capture led to the death of Stavros’s young son, Stavros would stop at nothing to destroy Quinn’s life.  Jack Quinn joined forces with Yaz (Dennis Rodman) to prevent Stavros from harming his family.  Quinn also spent some time in The Colony, an island where retired and presumed dead special agents who were too dangerous to remain in public lived.

Double Team felt like three distinct story ideas that were melded together into one mess of a movie.  None of the stories fit together, instead leaving the movie feeling like a Frankenstein monster of ideas.  The first part was the opening scene, which felt like it was aping the cold open of a James Bond style action espionage movie.  Then there was the primary story of Stavros trying to exact revenge upon Jack Quinn for the accidental death of his son, which felt like a standard action movie.  This was the same story that saw the buddy dynamic of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman.  Finally, there was the Colony portion that felt like a futuristic tech thriller.  Three different movie ideas lumped into one movie, which felt messy.

With this post, I want to go into deeper depth about each of the three story ideas in Double Team.  It played out like three movies put together, so this post is going to be about those three different sections.  There much to talk about with each section.  There will be spoilers.  If you don’t want to be spoiled on the twenty year old action movie that is Double Team, watch the movie then come back to the post.  It shouldn’t matter too much.  The movie doesn’t try to surprise or wow the audience with twists and turns.  It was fairly straight forward.

The Cold Open

Jack Quinn was on a mission in Croatia and had to steal a truck from Stavros.  The truck was filled with plutonium.    It was a government vehicle that Stavros had taken.  Quinn was sent to get it back.

The cold open was an action packed chase scene as Jack Quinn maneuvered the truck around different barricades.  He got around cars, evaded people chasing him, and dodged bullets.  It was a scene ripped right out of a better action movie.  The truck sped down roads and through off-road terrain.  Nobody could stop him.

One notable thing about this early portion of the movie (there isn’t too much to write because it’s a very small scene) is the lack of Stavros.  Though they tried to set up the primary antagonist by mentioning his name, he was not seen.  This could have been any prior mission to what the rest of the movie was about.  Its only connection was Stavros’s name being mentioned.

The Stavros Story – Part 1

I’m going to split the Stavros story into two parts because the Colony section is squished right in the middle of the main story.  The first part of the Stavros story involved Jack Quinn being brought back into the world of counter terrorism, and coming face to face with Stavros for the first time on screen. 

Jack Quinn retired after retaking the truck full of plutonium.  He was at his home in France when another agent visited and told him that Stavros was on the loose again.  Jack Quinn would return to the fray as he headed a team in an attempt to capture Stavros.  They went to a carnival in Antwerp and were about to capture the terrorist when Quinn saw Stavros hugging his son.  Quinn put a hold on the capture long enough for a tiger to alert Stavros to the impending threat.  A firefight broke out leading to the deaths of many agents and terrorists as well as Stavros’s family.  Stavros and Quinn broke off and fought one on one in a hospital.  It ended with a bang as Stavros threw a grenade into an elevator, and seriously injured Quinn.

With that summary complete, let me highlight the stranger things in the first part of the Stavros story that show why Double Team is fitting of its Sunday “Bad” Movies placement.  I’ve already mentioned one.  A tiger alerted Stavros to the special agents that were about to capture him.  This wasn’t some brushed off little accidental hint.  The tiger was fully aware of the agents and where they were hiding.  It got Stavros’s attention then looked in the exact direction where Jack Quinn was hiding with a sniper.  Stavros then shot the sniper right through her sight lens.  The tiger tipped him off and he, with a pistol, shot a sniper at sniper distance.  Through a sight lens.  That’s some unbelievable stuff.

Something I didn’t mention was that the agent who tried to get Jack Quinn back on the job was killed soon after the meeting.  He was in his car when he noticed Stavros behind him.  They talked and Stavros left the car.  A bomb was left behind when he exited, and the car blew up with the agent inside.  It counted 59, 0, and then exploded.  What a weird count for a timer.  It must have been set to a clock that actually did the seconds of a minute, where 60 would be 0.  Anyway, Stavros walked away all cool without looking at the explosion.  It was this event that got Jack Quinn back into his job.

I also skipped over the introduction of Yaz, played by Dennis Rodman.  Before meeting his team of mercenaries, Jack Quinn met a weapons specialist.  That was Yaz.  He found Yaz at an Antwerp tattoo parlor, where he was getting a tattoo around his belly button.  The scene introduced Dennis Rodman and his look without it being out of place.  It was still kind of strange for a special agent to have piercings like that, but whatever.  This movie isn’t full of believable things.  They went into Yaz’s armory and looked at weapons before Jack Quinn accidentally set off a grenade.  That was the introduction of Yaz.

The finale of the first Stavros portion was a fight in a hospital.  More specifically, it was a fight in the maternity ward of an abandoned hospital.  Maybe not entirely abandoned.  There was a baby there.  Jack Quinn saved the baby.  Two important things happened in the hospital fight, besides the destruction of hospital property.  This was the scene when Stavros said that he would get revenge on Jack Quinn for the death of his son.  The grenade explosion at the end of the fight, where Jack Quinn sacrificed his own body to save a baby, was the reason that Quinn was sent to The Colony.

The Colony

We have come to the tech thriller section of Double Team.  Jack Quinn regained consciousness on an island filled with former spies.  The agents who were retired and presumed dead were now forced to work together and solve crimes and conspiracies.  When one crime revealed that Stavros was going to kidnap Quinn’s wife and unborn child, Quinn needed to escape from The Colony.  He constantly worked out and planned an escape route through laser protected waterways and the ever-watching eyes of the people in charge.

The island was designed to hold people that were too valuable to kill and too dangerous to set free.  A few safeguards were in place to keep the agents in the facility.  One was the laser protected waterways.  The island was surrounded by ocean area filled with lasers that would kill anybody caught in them.  This trap came into play later in the Colony storyline.  The other main protection method was to have the agents place their thumbs on a fingerprint scanner every day for a certain amount of time.  If that didn’t happen, their room would be filled with a poisonous gas that would kill them.

The whole point of The Colony was to use these retired agents to figure out the truth behind the lies that the world’s governments spread.  Each agent was seated in front of a futuristic screen and shown videos.  They shared their thoughts and together helped the Colony leader to determine what really happened.  During one of these sessions Jack Quinn found a message from Stavros saying that Quinn’s wife had been kidnapped.  Their feud was still going, even with Quinn presumed dead.

Jack Quinn’s plan of escape was simple, though insane.  Double Team took its time presenting the plan.   There was an extremely long workout montage.  He kicked a hanging pail of rocks that was tied to his legs.  He held his breath in the bathtub to test how long he could last under water.  He cut off his thumbprint and rigged a system that would let place it against the scanner when asked.  None of these match the weirdest moment of training and planning.  In order to build his muscles, Jack Quinn lifted a bathtub full of water.  It looked like Quinn was having sex with the bathtub.  He was thrusting toward it repeatedly.  It was very odd to watch.

His plan went off with only minimal hitches.  When everyone was called to put their thumbs on the scanners, he got his contraption ready.  He went to a cliff and dove into the laser water the moment that the lasers shut off.  The plan hinged upon precision timing.  That would be risked during a fight when one of the other retirees tried to suffocate Quinn (yeah, underwater) with a plastic bag of some kind.  Quinn needed to get to a package pickup location in time to grab onto whatever a plane was picking up.  He beat up the other guy (who would explode when the lasers turned back on) and grabbed hold of the package as it flew away with the airplane.  And thus ended The Colony.

Stavros – Part 2

The remainder of Double Team was a damsel in distress revenge action movie.  The bad guy wanted revenge for what Jack Quinn had done, and Jack Quinn wanted to save his wife.  Quinn brought Yaz along as he hunted Stavros.  The final battle was fought in a coliseum between Stavros, Quinn, Yaz, and a tiger.  Yes, the same tiger from earlier that tipped Stavros off to the location of the people trying to capture him.

Even thinking back on it right now, not too long after watching the movie, this later stuff is jumbled in my mind.  I’m going to hit some highlights of the final section of the movie and describe how insane they were.  I’ll surely be doing a disservice to some aspects, but I want to get into the rest of this movie with some semblance of detail.  Hopefully I cover everything that I want to.  What comes next is in no specific order, except for the final battle stuff at the end.

First thing up is a visit home from Jack Quinn, who was looking for his wife.  He got to the house and saw a nanny putting a baby to rest.  The baby was really a bomb.  Jack Quinn jumped out of the window in time to narrowly avoid being blown to smithereens.  This was followed by a gun battle in which the handguns were way louder than they should have been.  The nanny reappeared with her own weapon.  She looked like she had clearly experienced the explosion.  She was charred with her clothes damaged and her hair every which way.  It was one of the more cartoonish things in a movie that seemed utterly cartoonish.

There was also an underground monk hacker society in Double Team.  Not too much can be said about this since the description sums it up.  The escape from the underground monk place had one of the funnier ridiculous moments, though.  As Jack Quinn and Yaz were leaving, they ended up at a dead end.  They needed to get through.  Yaz pulled three items from his pocket.  One was his lucky quarter.  Okay, that’s fine.  Some people have lucky coins.  The other two items were odder.  The next item was Yaz’s lucky detonator device, and the final item was his lucky plastic explosive.  Why he carried this stuff around, I will never know.  But he had them and they used them to escape.

The only other pre-finale stuff I want to write about is a fight scene.  Double Team was an action movie so there was bound to be fighting.  At one point, Jack Quinn was involved in two one-on-one fights in a row.  The first was against a guy with a suitcase gun.  The guy shot wildly at Quinn, who jumped around a stairwell and kicked the guy into another room.  Another guy knocked that guy out before fighting Jack Quinn.  This second guy flipped a chair in the air then kicked it at Quinn before having a quick martial arts fight.  The chair was an interesting move.  The rest of the fight was standard fighting.  Of course, Jack Quinn won both bouts and lived to fight another day.  Or another person.  Namely, he went on to fight Stavros.

Jack Quinn and Stavros had a showdown in a coliseum.  It was probably meant to be the most famous one in Rome, but didn’t look like it.  In the main pit area, Stavros placed Jack Quinn’s newborn baby in a maze of landmines.  Crosses were placed in the ground to mark where each mine was.  While Jack Quinn tried to get his baby, Stavros released the tiger from the beginning of the movie into the coliseum.  Quinn had to avoid both the tiger (he kicked it at one point) and the mines.  At the same time, Yaz rode into the pit on a motorcycle and grabbed the baby.  The motorcycle didn’t trip any mines the twenty or so times that Yaz rode back and forth.  He took the baby out of the pit and put it in the hallway.  Quinn escaped the tiger and proceeded to fistfight Stavros.  The fight ended with Stavros stepping on a mine because at some point Yaz moved the markers.  The good guys escaped.  Stavros stepped off of the mine before his tiger could bite him.  The good guys hid behind a Coca-Cola machine to avoid being killed in the blast.  Yaz let Quinn flee to safety from the people trying to take him back to The Colony by throwing his lucky quarter, which exploded into a smokescreen.  Then the movie ended.

That last paragraph is a semi-messy summary of the ending of the movie.  Part of that messiness is because it’s Saturday night.  The post is going out tomorrow and I still haven’t finished it.  The other reason that the paragraph ended up that way is that the finale was frantic and insane in a similar way.  It wasn’t neat and well written.  It was a bunch of crazy stuff wrapped up in the final fight between good and evil in Double Team.  They did everything in that last bit.

Double Team was three movie concepts thrown together into an entertaining mess of a movie.  There was a spy thriller, a standard action movie, and a futuristic tech thriller.  Each could have stood on their own as good action fun.  Except they were put together.  The tech thriller and the spy thriller were forced into the action movie in a way that was semi-incoherent while retaining the fun.  That’s the 90s for you.  The 90s were full of movies that are unlike anything that comes out now.  Double Team is one of those movies.  There are few things like it in modern movies.  It is unique while derivative, it is bad, but it is fun.

And now for some notes:

• Double Team was suggested by @jaimeburchardt, who also suggested House of the Dead, Monster Brawl, Simon Sez, and Alone in the Dark.
• Three actors from Simon Sez were in Double Team.  They were Dennis Rodman, Cyrille Dufaut, and Xin Xin Xiong.
• Asher Tzarfati was also in Double Team.  He was the star of a movie called An American Hippie in Israel.
• I mentioned James Bond in this post.  I’ve covered one James Bond movie, and that was Die Another Day.
• Have you seen Double Team before? What did you think about it?  You can let me know in the comments.
• You can also use the comments to let me know about any other bad movies that I should seek out.  If you want to tell me more directly, you can let me know on Twitter.
• I have a snapchat.  The username is jurassicgriffin.  You can find me there if you want to see my stories, which regularly consist of clips from bad movie and television.  Sometimes there’s other stuff in there too.
• Next week’s movie is going to be A Cat in the Brain.  I’ll likely watch it right after posting this piece of writing.  I don’t know too much about the movie, so this is going to be an interesting watch.  We’ll see how that goes in the next post.  See you then.