Sorry, this movie sucks

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I was pleasantly surprised while watching this, finding it highly engaging. For a low budget movie, it is well-acted, well-scripted, and well shot! My only complaint is that, to me, it ran on a bit long towards the end. Pacing was good up to that point, but towards the end it felt redundant and labored. But that's a minor point on an overall fun film. Very glad to have found this gem!

Wow, this was one crazy and memorable film, to say the least, and that final shot was the icing on the cake.I've seen too many movies with great premises that wind up underutilizing them, but this one more than lived up to its own. Zelda Rubinstein creeps me out in every film I see her in, and this was no exception. Every time she appeared on screen, I wanted her to get right back off, a similar feeling I had while watching her in "Poltergeist". Except here, I got the sense that she was born to play that role. The movie just wouldn't have been the same without her....presence. In fact, she's the most memorable actor in it. The whole movie's a mind-bending experience though, and one that's best not to read about before watching. It's simply hard to look away. The piercing screams, the building suspense, the cool visual tricks, and the idea that every character in the film is in deep trouble all made me feel apart of the experience. I was completely sucked in. Hopefully other people who see it for the first time have the same sort of attachment to it. Things get chaotic fast early on, and it just continues to get more and more insane before reaching an ending I honestly didn't expect. This is the type of film that Scream 4 tried to be, but failed.R.I.P. Bigas Luna. In a way, the man was ahead of his time. Those who are fans of David Lynch and surreal films in general should definitely seek this out.

Geeky and bespectacled mama's boy orderly John Pressman (an excellent performance by Michael Lerner) is hypnotized by his evil and domineering mother Alice (a deliciously creepy portrayal by Zelda Rubinstein of "Poltergeist" fame) to embark on a vicious killing spree and pluck out the eyes of his victims. Meanwhile, the audience watching this gruesome picture in a movie theater are terrorized by another deranged maniac (a frighteningly intense turn by Angel Jove) with similar mommy issues. Writer/director Bigas Luna makes crafty and inspired use of the nifty film-with-a-film premise (at one point Pressman goes into a theater to bump off patrons just as the other lunatic in the theater begins doing the same thing!), does a bang-up job of creating and sustaining a tense, freaky, and unnerving atmosphere, and stages several of the effectively bloody and brutal murder set pieces with real flair and style (the graphic moments of gory eyeball violence are very nasty and nauseating). Moreover, this film culminates in a positively nerve-wracking last third as all hell erupts in the theater and concludes with a truly unsettling ambiguous open ending. Better still, this movie even works as an interesting, intelligent, and provocative meditation on the slippery, subliminal, and manipulative nature of cinema itself. Both Joseph M. Civit's lush widescreen cinematography and Jose Manuel Pagan's spirited shuddery score further enhance the overall fine quality of this highly recommended cult favorite.

John Pressman (Micheal 'I shoulda called Ditech' Lerner) works at a doctor's office as an orderly. His mother (Zelda 'Poltergeist' Rubenstein) hypnotizes him to off the people who see thinks wronged him. But this turns out to be a movie within a movie, but the lines soon blur as John goes a movie theater to kill. Prompting a guy who's watching the movie to do the same. Lerner is suitably over the top in this, but Zelda repeats lines of dialog over and over again. That gets annoying fast. But not as annoying as the two girls who are watching the movie within a movie.As a horror film this one fails, it's too busy trying to be clever, trying to impart a message and seems to forget a slasher film must evoke a sense of tension, or at least a jump or two. No, what we have here is the worst kind of slasher: An art-house one.My Grade: D+