[.ca] Anguish (Widescreen) (ISBN 6305839999)

From 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

Very very interesting and clever!:
Great little cult film about a movie within a movie(which you don't find out about until 20 minutes in-very cool). Both Michael Lerner(BARTON FINK, SAFE MEN) and Zelda Rubinstein are effectively creepy in the movie that is being viewed by the theater which is taken hostage(sort of). My strongest suggestion for those who've seen the movie and are presenting it to their friends for the first time is to NOT tell them what it's about. Just say that it's better if they just watch and see.

The one chick is seriously hot:
Holy crank. I remeber when I first saw this movie when I was like 14 or something and the one girl in it is also probably about 14. She was so damned cute I wanted to find out everythign about her. I still do, but she hasn't done anymore movies. She's one of the reasons I even moved to L.A. but now I can't find her. At any rate this movie is seriously good. Maybe don't get it because it's too good.

Eyes Will Roll!!!:
A meditation on the interrelationship between spectator and display, this astonishing film covers the same territory (although in a different way) as Psycho, Rear Window, and Peeping Tom as tissues of reality and reference shift and change like cornea transplants. What is Real, what is illusion, and in the final analysis, does it matter? Throughout the film the address of the eye is undercut by other sensory cues, most memorably in the scene when audio surround information suddenly reframes our "reality" as part of a movie in a movie - a moment which somehow relaxes our tension and increases it at the same time. I'm reminded here of the astonishing scene in Fritz Lang's 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse when the audience discovers an entire frame of reference beyond the surface reality it had assumed was in place. The brilliant climax of the film predates the one in Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery as cinema becomes real becomes cinema - chinese box fashion. As a vitally important experiment in film narrative technique, Anguish is required viewing for anyone who loves the movies. The DVD is wonderful, but this is a film which for best effect should be seen in a theatre (as Videodrome should really be seen on video). I had the GREAT good-fortune to see this film in such a theatre. A small twin theatre in my town was playing both Anguish and Alien Nation (Imagine the fun the box office cashier had answering the phone "Tonight we have Anguish and Alienation!"). The theatre manager must have been the spiritual brother of William Castle because during the midnight show I attended, audience members (who were in on the joke) turned the movie in the movie into a movie in a movie in a movie in a theatre. On the screen, The Lost World was playing to an audience, before the screen, in The Mommy, Michael Lerner was menacing the heroine, before the screen in Anguish, the unnamed psychopath was menacing the heroine, before the screen an audience member was holding another audience member hostage while uniformed (costumed) policeman were invading not only both theatres in The Movie, but the actual theatre where I sat!!!!! Memorable, disturbing, brilliant, freakish. See it. Your eye will shake your hand!

AN EYE FOR AN EYE:
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.

A Bit Different:
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 youï¿1/2re 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 itï¿1/2s 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.