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Angustia [1986] A real weirdie. It starts out as The Mommy, a sleazo
slasher movie with midget Zelda Rubinstein - the incredibly irritating
medium from the Poltergeist films - as a smothering
mother hypnotising her blubbery psycho son [Michael Lerner] into committing
a series of gruesome, eyeball-gouging murders in true video nasty style.
Then it shifts its layer of meta-fiction to a cinema where another psychopath
has been hypnotised by the film into committing copycat killings, and
goes really crazy when Lerner, in the film-within-film, goes into a
cinema to commit more atrocities and the audience start imitating the
actions of the film. It's a pretentious cocktail of the sort you might
expect if you caught Reborn, Luna's last movie, but in its mix of levels
of reality and use of the cinema setting it's a few notches ahead of
Demons and manages to pull off several genuinely witty/unnerving reversals.
It gets a mite tedious at times with its multiple repetitions, but it's
certainly a worthy attempt to do something different with an often debased
area of filmmaking. Fans of eyeball gouging would be well advised to
check it out. My only real complaint is that Rubinstein doesn't suffer
enough. First Published In: City Limits [issue unknown] Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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