What a cute cat 🥰 I’ve only seen a handful of films by the maestro Fulci myself, and whenever I’m reminded of this master of supernatural fetishes and grotesque impulses, the urge to dive back into his filmography grows all over again. So if you have any suggestions for where I should start with his movies, I’m all ears. I’ve seen beyond, zombie, and new york ripper (and maybe more, I don’t remember), but it’s been quite a while since I watched any of them. So I’ll take any recommendations you’ve got, with the taste of blood in my mouth.Here, we start the story by following it through the eyes of a mysterious black cat, where the mystery of the murders comes as no surprise to anyone. The real surprise lies in what this black cat represents. Fulci takes Poe’s pawprint and runs it through his own Italian genre machinery, this time pointed toward the English countryside. You can almost immediately see that this is Italian in style through its awkwardness, which I absolutely love. But what stood out to me, and what I found most interesting, was the way Fulci “colonizes” england and transforms it into something with such a distinctly Italian vibe, using his own decayed, rotting hand and an atmosphere that does the heavy lifting all the way to the end. Two cultures, each doing their best to keep their masks on.Fulci’s direction is assured first-person fever dream, combined with zooms into the windows of the soul and a repressed past lurking underneath everything. The characters are a little too monotonous, and the plot structure is messy, and although I just praised the atmosphere, its heavy lifting can’t quite save the film from its own stiffness.But a solid 3 stars are easy to give this one, because the entertainment value is right where it needs to be, and the unintentional and intentional comedy on the side lets our cat scratch everything bloody enough that at least some kind of scar, with its memories attached, remains behind. The film wander, but Fulci’s genre instincts keep dragging it back toward the grave, the corpse, the occult and that peculiar Italian fascination with death as something almost tactile.Sooo.... good gothic fever dream. Fulci walks in with a wine glass in his hand, exploiting his own genre, staining it with his own decayed fingerprints. The mystery becomes secondary to the atmosphere, and the black cat becomes the little creature carrying all these contradictions around in its fur. 3 stars.62/100
