Cheap Anguish (Video) (J.J. Bigas Luna) Price

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Customer Reviews of Anguish

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 you�re 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 it�s 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.

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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.

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Good premise goes to waste.
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).