True to its title, Cat in the Brain opens with close-up footage of a cat (puppet) wolfing down on (obviously fake) bloody brain matter. And we would expect nothing less from Italian gore king Lucio Fulci. When someone who hates horror movies asks, “What kind of sick mind would make such a thing?,” now you can answer, “Well, this guy.”

The film certainly pokes fun at his image, as Fulci more or less plays himself, a middle-aged bearded man who wears sweaters over shirt and tie, wears glasses and makes really sick flicks where the gallons of spilled blood look like someone bought red paint in bulk. In this meta work, where Fulci is “overcome with a sense of repulsion,” he visually links onscreen acts of horrific violence with eating raw meat — a chunk of flesh equals stark tartare.

Pretty quickly, Fulci goes mad as the felonious behavior of his films seeps into his daily life and he experiences disturbing visions, like the slaying of a whore in broad daylight (and a nipple-muncher under the cloak of darkness), and an orgy in which a billiards player redefines “corner pocket” with the nude woman draped across the pool table. Many, many clips from his previous films — from Sodoma’s Ghost to Touch of Death — are utilized.

It’s all very nasty stuff, that even heavy use of Edvard Grieg’s classical-music hit “In the Hall of the Mountain King” can’t serve as a reliable salve. It really is like a proto-Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but one that most video viewers won’t have the stomach to take. I can’t say I really blame them. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Unleashed the same year as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s made-for-TV Invitation to Hell is another dark look at American suburbia, only without all of the good stuff that made his feature effort so memorable. Whereas Elm Street gave us Freddy Krueger, Hell does its best with soap star Susan Lucci, who is admittedly pretty terrifying, but not for the reasons the producers were thinking.

Lucci plays Jessica Jones, the vaguely ethnic-looking owner of an exclusive country club whose members all enjoy incredible prosperity and fortune. This is because she’s Satan, and the club’s members all have sold their souls to her for pool privileges. Everyone in the local community thinks she’s awesome, except for Robert Urich, who’s just been hired by Kevin McCarthy’s tech firm to develop a new space suit for NASA.

Urich is forced to watch helplessly as his wife (Joanna Cassidy) and kids (Barrett Oliver and Soleil Moon-Frye) are corrupted by Jones’ influence and sell their souls to her behind his back. Without any other option, he does what any good father would do: Don his experimental space suit and go down straight to Hell to rescue them. It goes without saying that he is able to do so by defeating Lucci through the eternal power of love.

Those of you familiar with Craven’s oeuvre know some films on his résumé that exist purely to pay the bills. Of these, Invitation To Hell is nowhere near the worst (Deadly Friend and The Hills Have Eyes Part II are tied for that title), but like all of the others, it’s clear he wasn’t prepared to do anything but the bare minimum to keep the money folks happy. Unlike 1978’s Stranger in Our House, which proved he could transcend the TV medium if he wanted to, Hell ranges from limp to laughable. His game cast does the best they can with the material, but it isn’t enough to save the film from descending into the kind of unintentional camp that can only come from a talented director working with a script he obviously thinks is ridiculous. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.