Anguish
Anguish
A film-within-a-film thriller about two teen girls among a small group of people who are terrorized in a movie theater by a killer while watching a horror film about a murderous optometrist who stalks his victims in a movie theater in the film.
Kevin Ward reviewedJuly 2, 2025
My turn in the rotation to pick the slasher of the week, I went with this Meta-slasher, for it’s eye violence, movie theater setting, movie-within-a-movie narrative, and the iconic Zelda Rubinstein. And I loved it for all of the above reasons even if it’s not the best slasher flick, per se. It’s definitely a little disorienting at first as there isn’t a clear delineation between the film’s narrative and the nested film’s narrative. The blurring seems intentional, though, and once you kind of get your bearings, everything starts to fall into place. A couple of friends are at the local cinema watching The Mommy, where Zelda Rubinstein has tasked her son with collecting people’s eyeballs from….the local cinema. But as the friends are watching The Mommy, some things start to happen in the very theater that they’re in. The nested film, The Mommy, reminded me a lot of The Last Matinee (another great cinema set, eyeball centered slasher). While we certainly see some of the aftermath of some eyes violence, there isn’t actually as much depicted on a screen as I was expecting (read, hoping 😈). Really enjoyed the movie though. Fantastic final scream and I loved a lot of the movie-within-the-movie touches, like the poster and the final credits. Really fun stuff.
Random musing. My biggest memory of Zelda Rubinstein for some reason is from The Seven Dancing Princesses which was one of the Faery Tale Theater series hosted by Shelly Duvall. It was one of my favorites of the entire series, and seeing her and hearing her voice kind of instantly took me back.