The eyes have it in Anguish, a perfectly oddball horror film from Spain that’s obsessed with all things ocular.
Oh, and snails. It also really digs snails.
Future Oscar nominee Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) is John, an optometrist’s assistant and all-around schlub who lives with his kooky, bird-loving, pint-sized mother (Zelda Rubenstein, Poltergeist). John’s losing his eyesight, so with the help of Mom, who specializes in psychic hypnosis or something, he collects the peepers of other people. It’s good to have a hobby.
Nearly a third in, writer/director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) pulls quite the fast one on us, revealing that all the action we’ve been watching is taking place on a movie screen. Within the rapt audience, one teen girl is particularly freaked the fuck out.
She has good reason to be, as her fellow moviegoers begin to be killed, just as John is offing innocents onscreen. If Luna’s trying to make an “art imitates life or vice versa” statement, it gets a little lost in the mess of the meta, but Anguish is really kind of ingenious and definitely ahead of its time. It would make a good double feature with Lamberto Bava’s Demons from two years earlier, which also plays with the trapped-in-a-theater concept.
When I was in high school, a local mom-and-pop video store was having a huge sale on posters, and I bought dozens, plus a weird countertop box advertising the VHS release of Anguish. It directed you to peep through a cut-out hole at its top, and any curious customers who did were greeted with a still of the film’s graphic scene of eye surgery. Just thought you’d like to know. —Rod Lott