Friday, October 5, 2012

Anguish (1987)

International Spectrafilm
Directed by Bigas Luna
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Blue Underground)

This is actually two movies in one. It starts out as a silly slasher film called "The Mommy", about an optometrist's assistant who is obsessed with collecting eyes from his victims. Zelda Rubinstein is his mother, who dotes on the grown manchild and communicates with him through hypnotism and seashells. After about an hour of this nonsense, the film comes to a grinding halt when it is revealed we are actually watching it with another audience. Two teenage girls squirm in their seats watching the killer carve out eyeballs. One of them goes to the lobby where a killer with a gun starts shooting employees and hiding them in the restroom. He goes back into the theater where he takes a hostage and shoots more people. It becomes a little too real in a post Aurora, Colorado, world. The only problem is neither movie on display is very good, both are entirely predictable with stereotyped, shallow characters. As I watched the credits roll on "The Mommy" in the theater, I realized that the "real" credits for "Anguish" should have appeared superimposed on top of them, since they were not known to the fictional movie.

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