Anguish
1987 ‘Angustia’ Directed by Bigas Luna
Synopsis
The eyes of the city are mine.
This gruesome horror film is about a mother-fixated ophthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in eyeballs and goes on a killing spree to collect human eyeballs for his mother's collection. But this is all just a horror movie viewed by a small crowd where a very real killer in the audience begins killing the patrons one by one paralleling the action in the other movie.
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What do you get mix the spirals of Uzumaki, the overbearing mother of Psycho and the claustrophobic location of Demons? Anguish.
One of the most original horror films I've seen from the 1980s.
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The film starts with a health warning alerting the audience to subliminal messages and the possibility of mild hypnosis. Of course the warning is pure hokum but it does provide an indication to the type of film that is to follow as a Mummy’s boy, under the hypnotic power of his crazed mother (played with relish by Zelda Rubinstein), goes on an eye-gouging killing spree. Yet, Anguish is no simple slasher movie; it is a weaving and woozy film-within-a-film as the action shifts to a movie theatre with an audience watching the same serial killer film. To explain more about the plot would spoil the journey but it’s safe to say that Anguish is one of the more interesting self-referential…
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This is one of my all time favorite films. I actually own it in 3 formats: VHS, DVD, & 35mm. I showed it to some new friends last night and it blew their mind. One of the things I love about it is that it's one of those rare films that really requires being seen in a movie theater, to fully appreciate it.
"Anguish" is really quite remarkable; it's a Slasher film, a Dark Comedy, a Thriller, and above all else, a movie-going-experience. In this age of home theaters and creatively lazy multiplexes, it difficult to go to movies and have significantly different experiences from week to week. Rarely does a movie offer something that's completely different from everything else, and…
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So fucking good.
Zelda Rubenstien is pure evil in this movie. It's a shame there never was a full movie for "The Mommy". I should also add this is a perfect example of a multi-layer narrative actually working unlike other more recent attempts by bat obsessed directors.
Not a movie for everyone but if your that 1% of cinephiles that loves challenging cinema, this is for you.
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Two horror movies in one, both of them unnerving in their own ways. Saying anything else will ruin the fun of Anguish. Don't read anything up on the movie before watching it, as all the fun comes from the concept.
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I fell asleep.
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The poster for this film was one I grew up with. Every visit to my local video store, I would notice the poster of Zelda Rubenstein's face overlayed with a giant spiral. Weird, the little psychic from Poltergeist, I used to think. Fun movie; without going into spoilers, the concept is a bit more interesting than the execution at times.
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Morbid story of serial eye collector and his domineering mother pulls out to reveals itself as a horror film playing in a half-full movie theater. When a crazed viewer starts a murderous rampage among the aisles, two girls try to stop it - and events on and off screen increasingly mirror each other. Experiment in cinematic mise en abyme, it's nevertheless more fun as an idea than as a feature film because the intellectual pleasure of the detournement quickly stifles any actual excitement.
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Two horror movies in one, both of them unnerving in their own ways. Saying anything else will ruin the fun of Anguish. Don't read anything up on the movie before watching it, as all the fun comes from the concept.
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wow! habe den film geguckt ohne auch nur irgendetwas darüber zu wissen. würde ich jedem empfehlen!
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A derranged mother telepathically controls her son to kill. This is a strange, hypnotic and effective horror thats worth seeking out. Oh and Zelda Rubinstein is in it what more do you want? "The eyes of the city are mine......"
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Anguish is a pure cinematic experience that plays with multiple levels of reality, and has a thing for eyeballs.
The film ends up spiralling delightfully out of control much like its central imagery. The film doesn’t quite have the required payoff and a major dream sequence is a certain low.
The Reverence: The foreshadowed scalpel in the eye.
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This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
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To be fair this was the last film in a 24 hour movie marathon so I wasn't exactly loving life. But fuck me I hated every second of it. It just goes on and on, and it's all so stupid and loud and irritating, like nails on a chalkboard. It plays with the idea of a movie within a movie, but because the movie within the movie abides by retarded movie logic, and the main movie also abides by retarded movie logic, the result is a kind of supersayan doubling of retarded movie logic. It basically means that nothing makes sense, characters behave like total asspots and I honestly just wanted all of the "protagonists" to hurry up and die so that the film would finish sooner.
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An incredibly unsettling horror film that is way ahead of its time. As an avid watcher of horror films I am rarely actually freaked out by a film but this one really got to me. A truly masterful exercise in suspense and terror.