Product Details

• Actors: Zelda Rubinstein, Michael Lerner, Talia Paul, Àngel Jové, Clara Pastor
• Directors: Bigas Luna
• Writers: Bigas Luna, Michael Berlin
• Producers: Andreu Coromina, George Ayoub, Norm Hill, Pepón Coromina, Xavier Visa
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Fox Home Entertainme
• VHS Release Date: July 7, 1988
• Run Time: 89 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6301035569
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #356,300 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

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

Monsters At Play

"GREAT FUN!"

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars HYPNOTIC !, May 27, 2000

By 

frankenberry (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anguish (DVD)

This underrated horror flick from 1986 should be seen by any movie fan intrigued by the hypnotic nature of film. The movie within a movie theme is taken to an ad nauseum degree in a hallucinogenic rollercoaster of gore and killings. There's a mad killer tearing eyeballs out of people watching a movie ("The Lost World") in a movie theater which in turn is being watched by an audience watching that movie in a movie theater which in turn we are watching (unfortunately at home and not in a movie theater)--what a mind trip that would have been!...and it doesn't even end there! It's a unique thriller which takes a theme from "Demons", but increases it ten-fold. This is a stunning widescreen 2.35:1 transfer....the old P&S VHS release really destroyed the whole design of the film....you need the entire panavison frame to get the complete effect that this is a film about film. Bizarre, gory, hypnotic....but most of all clever....check this one out...and stay for the end credits!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eyes Will Roll!!!, October 25, 2001

By 

Tom (Nashville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anguish (DVD)

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!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very very interesting and clever!, September 13, 2001

By 

"skipmccoy" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anguish (DVD)

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.