Bigas Luna is one of the most interesting, eccentric and colorful characters from the world of Spanish film, which is already rich in many types who could also boast similar epithets. Although Luna is today primarily remembered for its erotic, but also ironically charged films from the first half of the 1990s, such as “Lulu”, “Golden Balls”, “The Tit and the Moon” and “Jamón, Jamón”, this vocal designer, painter and conceptual artist began in the 1970s. engage in film. After short, experimental films, usually extremely provocative and controversial, he set out to make feature films, and by the mid-1980s he had apparently become such a skilled director as he confirmed in this grotesque combination of black comedy or horror.
It was “Angustia” or “Anguish” and the first film he made in English with (mostly) American actors, and it’s a film of incredibly interesting structure and hilarious black humor. We follow the film in the film here and the story is structured so that only after fifteen minutes we actually realize that we are watching the same film that the audience is watching in the cinema in the film. That creepy horror movie is called “Mommy” and it’s a story to John Pressman (Michael Lerner), a complex diabetic who works as an assistant ophthalmologist. Progressively he loses his sight, and he lives with a grotesque mother who obviously has some telekinetic powers so she will hypnotize her son to kill people, take out their eyes and bring them to her. But the problem will arise that the events from that creepy and absurd film that the audience watches will be transferred from the movie screen to reality.
John will indeed appear in the same cinema and start killing people, but in addition to him, other killers will appear in the cinema who will start eliminating the audience. The story here is not only incredibly original and complexly structured, but “Anguish” is also one of those extremely violent and explicit horrors in which the author leaves little to the imagination of the viewer. This postmodern horror and a real jigsaw puzzle of horror today enjoys a cult status among horror fans, and it spiced up this whole crazy story with some weird, even sick and brutal black humor and if it weren’t so scary and scary, “Angustia” could be described as hilarious black comedy. Rating 7.5 / 10.
MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: PATRIA (2020, ESP) Series review, plot, trailer, rating