Anguish

Amazon.com

Michael Lerner (looking uncannily like Roger Ebert) is a clumsy eye clinic intern under the sway of his psychic, psychotically vindictive mother (Zelda Rubinstein, the diminutive spiritualist from Poltergeist). "All the eyes in the city will be ours," Mom commands, declaring war on the orbs of humanity. Hypnotized by swirling spirals and screechy bursts of electronic wails, the dutiful son packs up his surgical tool set and goes out collecting. Suddenly we pull back to find ourselves staring at the nervous reactions of a matinee movie crowd watching our same horror flick (though it's entitled "Mommy"). The audience watches Lerner carving skulls onscreen (in a darkened movie theater, of all places) while a killer obsessed with the movie unleashes his own rampage on the unsuspecting patrons. Soon it becomes clear that the parallel plots lock together in sinister synchronization. It's one of the most original uses of the movie-within-a-movie device, and an ingenious avenue for exploring the hypnotic power of cinema. Director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) makes the two killers symbiotic blood brothers, the "real" killer feeding off his cinematic inspiration. It's often more cerebral than scary, and the home video experience unfortunately robs the film of its final layer (this movie within a movie was really meant to be seen by moviegoers). But it's smartly designed and stylishly directed, and Luna delivers the horror movie goods--plenty of suspense, buckets of blood, and more gory ocular excavations than eye-obsessed Lucio Fulci managed in his entire career. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

A Movie Worth Experiencing.......2006-07-10

They sure did a great job at cleaning up the picture and sound for this 1986 flick. Zelda Rubinstein is a trip in this movie. Well the movie itself is quite a trip. This movie deserves more credit than what it received. You can really tell that alot of effort and thought went into making this movie. So as a viewer and customer of the dvd I can appreciate that. You should try too.

Way cool frights, but listen!.......2005-12-31

I saw this in the movie theatre when it came out. I was looking around in my seat a bit. You had to see it in the theater to really appreciate it, and if you did you know what I mean. Also, Michael is a close personal friend of mine, so for me, it was especially frightening to think that my good buddy..."gulp"...would...do that...could do that...to ME while I watched it in the theater was intensely wierd. I have paranoid schizophrenia, as well, so it was gripping, and very hard for me not to acknowledge the "real" possibility of a grand-scale evil joke being played on me personally. Whew! It's hard to explain, but in the end, all things considered, I decided it was a way cool experience. I am going to buy it for nostalgia's sake, and also because I like watching movies with people in them that I know, especially strange people like Michael. His very strange personality also shines through in "Barton Fink", and an episode of some serial show like "Dark Shadows" or something like that, I can't exactly remember though, in which he plays a unique sort of ice cream man. Oh gross!

A Bit Different.......2004-01-17

This hypnotic horror film from 1986 is for the movie fan with a different taste. The cheap blood and guts scenes are worse off because of the roller coaster movements. The interesting but nauseating movements of the camera are intense if youýre stuck in the eighties. In my opinion they could have cut the fat and made this a short 30 min. T.V. show. One plus is that itýs a little freaky which makes it scary to a degree. The other plus is it get boring when you give up trying to understand the movie in a movie concepts they intend to entice you with. I watched this with my girlfriend so when she got bored with the movie or somehow scared by the odd images, I was there to hold.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE.......2002-11-18

A middle-aged momma's boy runs rampant in a movie theater cutting out patron's eyeballs, while the movie onscreen depicts the same man as an optometrist who is driven to his evil acts by his overbearing, overweight squeaky-voiced mother. (The film's movie-within-a-movie THE MOMMY).
An interesting idea is well played out even if the end result is rather awkward. There is one funny scene of one of the victim's slobbering before having his throat slit with a scalpel. Presumably it's just a matter of taste. All in all, ANGUISH isn't a bad movie, I just expected it to be a lot better.

Good premise goes to waste........2002-09-08

Anguish begins by introducing us to Michael Lerner as John, an eye doctor, and Zelda Rubenstein as his overprotective mother. It turns out Lerner has an obsession with cutting out people's eyes, possibly because he's losing his own eyesight, and he also happens to have some kind of telepathic bond with his mother.

But wait, the camera pans back to reveal all this to be a movie that an audience is watching. The main focus is now on two girls in this crowd, one of which happens to be frightened out of her mind by the picture. When she sees Lerner on-screen enter a movie theater and kill off the audience, she begins to believe someone amid her own crowd is about to do the same. What do you know, she's right.

Anguish has a good premise, doesn't it? Too bad it fails to gel. First off, there are the hypnosis scenes in the first twenty or so minutes. Rather than being disturbing or visually entrancing, it's just hilarious. Watching Lerner wave his hands in front of the screen while he spins over and over is a pretty funny sight. The yellow-tint cinematography is more annoying than atmospheric, making the film look as if though it were covered in butter.

Once the twist reveals itself to be movie-within-a-movie, things don't get better. Our protagonist, named Patty, happens to be a terrible actress who isn't the slightest bit convincing. Sure, many slashers star actresses who aren't particularly talented, but they can usually get by with good looks and gratuitous nudity. Admittedly, around the forty minute mark, things do get slightly suspenseful once the killer in the "real" audience starts knocking people off one-by-one, but it's pretty disappointing to see him use a gun rather than a knife, and the theater is too crowded to gain maximum creepiness. Almost as detrimental is the fact the film is set during daytime, which destroys the chance for inescapable atmosphere.

The last fifteen minutes degenerate rapidly, not making much sense at all, though I gather that was director Bigas Lunas' intent. The final scene is a big shaggy-dog joke and you get the feeling Lunas is trying to make some kind of commentary on how blurred fiction and reality can get, but it's all muddled nonsense. As I recall, only one horror film ever accomplished such a task, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, a fun, unique rollercoaster ride that was genuinely frightening not only with its explicit frights, but the implications of them. That film also managed to develop a sense of chaos while following a srange form of logic. On the other hand, Anguish is an entirely forgettable slasher that's no better (and less enjoyable) than some of its more "low-rent" cousins (such as the Friday the 13th and Slumber Party Massacre series).

Average customer rating:
Anguish [Import]
Director: Bigas Luna
Manufacturer: Works
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Art House & International | Genres | DVD | Video
Thrillers | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video
General | Foreign & International | Stores | DVD | Video
ASIN: B000MSRDBE

Product Description

Poltergeist-purger Zelda Rubinstein toplines this interesting, twisty psycho-thriller from Spain, which makes clever (though repetitive) use of its movie-within-a-movie premise. As the star of the horror film "The Mommy," Rubinstein plays a mother who hypnotizes her son (Michael Lerner) into seeking more victims to supply her growing collection of human eyeballs. "The Mommy" seems also to exert a weird hypnotic effect on the audience watching it, particularly one impressionable fellow who mirrors Lerner's actions by stalking fellow movie patrons... just as the onscreen murderer is entering a movie theater to do the same thing. If this sounds confusing, that's probably because it is. The interesting premise wears thin about halfway through, with the relentless attempts at viewer disorientation becoming more tiresome than frightening. Brazilian import, has words in portuguese on the cover.

DVD:

DVD

DVD