Baby Blood (1990) dir. Alain Robak

a.k.a. The Evil Within

Logline: Yanka (Emannuelle Escourrou) is a circus performer who becomes the unwilling host of a parasitic, telepathic, prehistoric creature who wants nothing more than to be born. Unfortunately for all the men in Yanka's world, this baby needs their blood in order to grow strong.

The constant spray of arterial blood throughout its running time may belie Baby Blood's more passionate concern: exploring the rotten, unfortunate position of women in "a man's world." The world that Yanka, our heroine, occupies is nightmarish in its treatment of the female sex. Its men prey upon its women without mercy or cognizance of their shared humanity. But when Yanka begins to turn those metaphorical tables by becoming a sexualized predator herself, dispatching men in the goriest of fashions, this lack of human empathy makes sense, for this may be a man's world but man is surely an animal. The intimations of humankind's bestial nature are bubbling just beneath the film's surface, discernible through symbolism (the large, predatory circus cats going wild in Yanka's presence, just as the men do) and a bit of provocative lip service. This latter hint appears in a discussion between Yanka and the telepathic spawn residing in her womb: Yanka admits to liking men "who look unhappy," while her parasite questions whether or not "unhappiness is a sign of intelligence," pointing out that the primary difference between humans and animals is that animals don't know that they're unhappy. The blind, unemotional sexual compulsions of the film's various men make it apparent that any sort of self-awareness is beyond their ken, but the tragedy lies in the fact that Yanka's own awareness of her situation is eroded over the course of her travails. She trades one form of violent male dominance for another, as she smiles blankly through the numerous murderous transgressions her situation forces her into and only intermittently pauses--bathed in blood--to realize her own unhappiness.

She's unhappy, at least partially, because the men in her world are extremely unpleasant creatures who beat her, gawk at her, control her, swindle her, and attempt to rape her. Up until her final moments on screen, the men of her world objectify and devalue her. Regardless, it seems a little too easy to read Baby Blood as an unsubtle, tactless horror film that celebrates the violent reprisals of women against male violators, propped up under the banner of some skewed male notion of feminism. (Director Alain Robak is, of course, a man). I'd argue that Robak's film is a more complicated and nuanced (though maybe ultimately more ambivalent) iteration of the same female revenge theme present in a film like I Spit on Your Grave (1978). In the latter film, no matter how queasy such revenge can be, one never notices the film questioning Camille Keaton's character's actions; her rapists are awful human beings, and her violence against them is "justified" in the narrative's logic. Baby Blood's narrative is less certain of Yanka's bouts of murdering, as is--occasionally--Yanka herself: few of the male characters are at all sympathetic, but should they be killed for eying her breasts or agreeing to sleep with her?

Yanka is less in the position of doling out revenge than aggressively preying upon men. She tempts several men to their deaths in order to feed her parasitic child (and sometimes kills total innocents to protect him), but most of the time she's initially reluctant to do so. The only man who has seriously wronged her is her boyfriend back at the circus, who would beat her and keep her confined to their trailer, and she actively struggles against her creature's telepathic influence when he commands her to kill him. At the same time, she's not totally without culpability: her murder of a man who proposes to her is one of only a few that are not egged on by her child's bloodthirsty voice-over, perhaps implying that (parasite or not) she is independently resistant to men trying to dictate the course of her life. This all leads to the film's central irony: Yanka violently revolts against the control of men while under the control of a man. True, her child parasite is a prehistoric creature, but he's certainly coded as male and even intimates throughout the film his essential human characteristics. (Not to mention his creepy, phallic implantation of himself inside of her and the fact that he can writhe around while in there in order to give her pleasure). So, because he physically tortures Yanka (ripping at her insides, causing her to spit up blood) whenever she disregards his orders to kill, we see him as only a further extension of the selfish, thoughtless abuse men have brought upon her (because, as he tells her about another man's cruel actions towards her, "that's the way things are in a man's world").

Because of her lack of autonomy, Yanka's experiences don't restore order or deal out justice. They are, in the scheme of things, meaningless, making of her not an avenging angel but an empty host. (Chillingly, when asked by another character what she's accomplished in her life she responds, "Nothing. In my life I've done nothing"). Her unhappiness (and so, by extension, her humanity in an inhumane world) is what's at the center of the film's thematic concerns. She dislikes being abused and controlled, but she's also not a fan of killing in retribution. She maintains that not all men are evil, though every one that she encounters is a disappointment. She has hope for her totally hopeless world, so much so that in the film's final moments it appears that she doesn't wish to see this new organism she's birthed take it over (though it's fair to admit that the conclusion is a tad ambiguous on this point). If Baby Blood is a feminist film (which I'd argue it is), then it is so because of its rather harrowing representation of the emotional effects of men's abuse of women, not because of any celebration of slaughtering.

Baby Blood is a dour French horror film, it's general melancholic air standing in weird juxtaposition next to its manic, cartoonish intestinal splatter. I think the default--and faulty--reaction would be to read the film as a trivial bit of nonsense. This is, after all, a movie about a woman who is having conversations with her homicidal, blood-guzzling belly. Its many unexpected moments of sudden and copious gore give the film a late '80s/early '90s visual aesthetic somewhere between the works of Frank Henenlotter and those of Tromaville. (Though the film does, intermittently, shoot for a surrealism a bit more firmly placed on the artistic side of things; see: a Fantastic Voyage-esque journey through Yanka's innards down to her heart). But even total cartoon moments--like when Yanka kicks the head off of a man she's driven against a wall with a taxi cab--are never funny. The film plays everything completely straight, excepting the boorish performance of Yanka's weaselly admirer, Richard (Jean-François Gallotte), who I suppose we can call the comic relief. The sombre tone is a benefit, reenforcing the themes mentioned above while using its brutal, bombastic aesthetic to jolt the audience out of its complacency. That the violence may sometimes seem comical is an unintended effect of its morbid excess. In a lot of ways, Baby Blood is a film working in the same mode as Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), though it's a bit less frenetic than that earlier film's domestic grand guignol. As Isabelle Adjani does in Possession, Emmanuelle Escourrou powers through her every scene as a force of nature, giving everything to her role with nary a concern that she be presented in a flattering light. Her arc is a fascinating one, with her beginning as a repressed and demure kept pet and ending up as a powerful but conflicted woman. (Especially at the film's start when she's creating psychic connections with tigers and leopards, Escourrou resembles--in both appearance and demeanor--Nastassja Kinski in Paul Schrader's Cat People (1982)). But what's most remarkable is her ability to remain distant and aloof throughout this development. But then, I suppose Robak intends the entire film to be distant and aloof-- an art film dressed up, unabashedly, in incongruous B-movie clothing.

Sorority House Massacre II (1990) dir. Jim Wynorski

Logline: A sorority buys a new house for cheap, disregarding the fact that five years back a madman murdered his entire family there. Now someone is picking off the gals one by one and yeah you've probably figured out how these things go by now, huh?

Crime in the Past: So this part is pretty incredible: the inciting Crime in the Past for this Sorority House Massacre II is re-used footage from the film that this duology sort-of spun off from, Slumber Party Massacre. Literally the entire climax, cut down to about two minutes of footage. Except, it's not as if Jim Wynorski's film is purporting to be a direct sequel to the first Slumber Party Massacre-- instead, Sorority House Massacre II takes the footage and creates a totally new story for it. The mildly iconic Driller Killer is now the coincidentally identical Hokstedter, a man who goes mad, hides under a rug, and kills his whole family (the slumber partiers are now his daughters). What a sublime display of Jim Wynorski's insatiable desire to save a dollar or two.

Bodycount: 6, never to shower topless or wear thongs with nighties again.

Themes/Moral Code: Haha.

Killer's Motivation: Though the film tries to convince us throughout that the killer is the greasy, obese, raw meat-chewing neighbor/Jess Franco stand-in Orville Ketchum (Peter Spellos), it--of course--is not. The killer is Hokstedter's ghost, summoned by a Ouija board and possessing the body of Jessica (Melissa Moore). Why not? Hokstedter kills because that is what he does. His ghost is also very agile, slipping into Linda's body and then Ketchum's before the credits role.

Final Girl: Linda (Gail Harris), who sports an English accent and is one of the two non-blondes, is our final girl. She spends the majority of the film complaining and being a scaredy cat. Not bashful in the least, she's topless about as often as the rest of the ladies, so it's nice that the film doesn't condemn her for that, I suppose (though, nix that, she does die at the end). She gets the requisite "gosh, we're making a slasher film in 1990" metamoment when she spouts: "I feel like I'm in a horror movie." And despite her shaking knees, she does emerge as a heck of a brawler in the final act, kicking the crap out of the much larger Ketchum (pronounced, apparently, "Ketchup"), who she believes to be the killer. Really, she does a number on him-- strangling him, Slave Leia-style, with a chain and smashing his head repeatedly into a porcelain toilet. And she does it all while only wearing panties and a belly shirt, too.

The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese:  Jim Wynorski is an interesting fellow. Having recently seen Clay Westervelt's documentary on the man and his filmmaking philosophy, Popatopolis (2009), I now have a certain appreciation for Wynorski's lack of scruples and boundless enthusiasm for trash cinema. (For one, I adore the fact that the man's kitchen cupboards are full of VHS tapes rather than food). His films, especially some of the early ones (like 1986's robot slasher extravaganza Chopping Mall), are fantastic romps with a smidgen of satire lacing them. But the man has directed nearly a hundred films over only thirty years, so (like with his spiritual filmmaking sibling Fred Olen Ray) we're lucky if even a few of them are any good. Sorority House Massacre II is not one of those rough gems. It doesn't have anything at all to say thematically, and I would guffaw at anyone who described it as a "romp," but I suppose it's not totally without its own skewed charm. It is a Wynorski film, so it features his usual obsessions: tall busty woman (mostly blonde), toplessness (failing that, the skimpiest of lingerie), big fat sweaty men, cheap murder scene cutaways, the repurposing of footage from other films, and constant stock establishing shots. Part II features the corny humor that's all but absent from Part I, much to its (ever so slight) benefit. (My favorite pun issues from a sorority girl mistaking an "Irish name" for an internal organ: "Colin? YUCK!"). At the same time, it's a great deal more exploitative than its predecessor; here, the shameless leering at massive mammaries is undoubtedly intended to excite. But it's a sort of objectification that's hard to be offended by-- other than being able to watch all of these (much too old) college girls take showers and run around barely-clad, the film lacks any other sexual content. In fact, prominent male characters total in at exactly two, so this is clearly more the ladies' show anyway, which means all of the near-nude gallivanting is fairly innocuous. This is the first and only '90s slasher I've covered this month, but being filmed so close to the end of the previous decade prevents it from distinguishing itself in any meaningful way. It's stupid, trashy, cheesy, and cheap-- which, in some ways, makes it a perfect summation of this month of on-a-budget murder. Farewell, Slashtober-- I've sent you out with a meat hook and an oversize brassiere, and I know you wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

Sorority House Massacre (1986) dir. Carol Frank

Logline: After the sudden death of her aunt, Beth (Angela O'Neill) is invited to sleep over at her friends' sorority house until she can get things settled. Unfortunately for her generous pals, Beth has established a psychic link with a madman who is hellbent on tracking her down and finishing a mission he started long ago. It's lights out at the sorority house on this night of ice cream gorging, fashion shows, and murder.

Crime in the Past: Thirteen or fourteen years ago (give or take a year), a man named Robert Henkel (John C. Russell) murdered his mother, father, and five of his sisters before being caught and put into an asylum. His sixth sister escaped with only a scratch.

Bodycount: 9 pledges pledge no more. Hazing is rough on the pulse.

Themes/Moral Code: Sorority House Massacre does my work for me. About half way through it points out what I'd already taken note of: the fact that all those wriggling knives poking out from walls, mirrors, and desks in Beth's dreams sure do seem sort of phallic. The film establishes this same point when the sorority gals gather around a book that helps its reader interpret dream symbols. Their little game of pop psychology results in the exclamation "the knife is a phallic symbol!" and the question "are you afraid of sex, Beth?" She claims she isn't, and we're left at that. This whole cheeky scene attempts to throw a little monkey wrench into such an easy reading of the slasher film's visuals (while it then attempts to be a more mature psychological thriller--key word "attempts"), but there's no escaping the fact that the film certainly makes some rather phallic use of its knives.

Also worth noting is that while there is a smattering of nudity early on from some of its sorority sisters, none of it is particularly sexualized. The camera doesn't linger as these girls geek out and lose their tops while trying on an array of eyeball-scarring pastel trash bags masquerading as '80s fashion. It's difficult to imagine such nudity was intended to be titillating-- it feels naturalistic and matter-of-fact, a middle ground between including the required nudity and keeping the show tasteful. I suspect this was writer/director Carol Frank's choice, and it's welcome.

Killer's Motivation: Robert "Bobby" Henkel escapes from his asylum to track down and take out his only surviving sister, Beth (though not before stopping off at the hardware store for supplies). He has a psychic awareness of Beth's location, so he finds it easy to track her down. His motives differ slightly from the typical crazed slasher villain's: in another (perhaps intentional) twist on slasher movie morality, Bobby isn't killing all the sorority sisters because of their sexual liaisons, but because he mistakes them all for his actual little sisters. He's driven to kill the morally innocent, rather than the morally guilty, presumably to spare them from something. What that something is we're never told, though whatever it is encouraged Bobby to wound and destroy his own ears way back when. (As the doctors helpfully explain, he heard something "he couldn't unhear").

Final Girl: Beth, with her androgynous haircut and wardrobe, makes a rather typical final girl. She's plagued by dream visions of a knife trying to catch her. It's revealed (as if we couldn't tell) that she's the killer's sister (in a twist ripped straight out of Halloween II (1981)). In every way she's typical of her character type. She's somber and moody, never participating in any of the other girls' activities. For these attributes she survives the film (at least as the credits start to roll), but they also prevent her from becoming of any interest. At one point she's kind of snuggling with a guy on the couch, for which he promptly is stabbed in the back-- Beth is quick to blame herself for his death. She's right: she understands slasher conventions, and her role within them, all to well.

The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese: Sorority House Massacre is as silly and superfluous as its title would make you think, but I'm worried that no one told director Carol Frank. The film is decently enjoyable and more than occasionally (especially during Beth's surreal dream sequences) filmed with some skill, but it's apparent that it takes itself much more seriously than we do. With talk of "psychic bacon," a dress-up montage, and lines like "I remember lime jello," it's surprising that it shoots for the sophisticated thrills of a Halloween (1978). This film tries its hardest, I suppose, but never allows us to forget that what we're watching is, at its best, a loose spinoff of the Slumber Party Massacre series. That trilogy understands its satire of the subgenre-- but this film merely motions towards it while aspiring to heights far out of its own reach.

Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) dir. Romano Scavolini

Logline: George Tatum (Baird Stafford) is a foaming-at-the-mouth psychopath haunted by nightmares of his past who, after being "cured" by a new "secret experimental drug program," begins stalking a single mother and her three children.

Crime in the Past: A young boy in a cute little suit and bow-tie kills his parents with an axe after walking in on them performing some kinky sex. He then licks the blood he's covered in and, you could say, develops a taste for it. They always said he was a sensitive lad.

Bodycount: 8 brains damaged irreversibly.

Themes/Moral Code: A particularly gruesome murder scene (the film's first) demonstrates a gross inversion of the typical slasher's moral code. Instead of Sex being a prelude to and justification for Death, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain informs us that Death can also be Sex. This first murder scene, unlike virtually any other I can recall in slasherdom, is highly and explicitly sexualized to the point of discomfort. Generally, the sexual component in slasher killings is to some extent subdued in favor of the anger and frustration that the stoic, asexual killer expresses-- though their weapons of choice are often phallic in nature, it is their inability to derive any sexual satisfaction from their actions that defines them. This is not the case with Tatum, who, as he straddles his female victim, grunts and plunges the knife repeatedly into her lower abdomen. He does this not with swift, blind, or emotionless fury, but slowly and methodically, wracked with sexual agony. He resembles a man in the throes of guilty passion-- the fact that he collapses onto the body after he's spent, weeping and apologizing to the woman's corpse, confirms as much. It's rare that a slasher villain will express any sort of satisfaction in his or her kills (besides, occasionally, the satisfaction that comes along with sticky revenge), and here we see why: such satisfaction, derived by sexual means, makes the killer in question a whole new breed of monster, one that makes him a bad fit for any appearances on collectible trading cards.

Killer's Motivation: George Tatum is an amnesiac recently released from an asylum after successfully being pumped full of experimental drugs that are supposed to keep him sane and not at all murderous (they don't). His murderous proclivities are triggered by, wait for it, sexual activity. Seeing sex either makes him collapse and start foaming at the mouth or start his stabbing. What's clear to the viewer pretty much from the word go but is obscured and torturous for poor Tatum until the end is that he's haunted by the murder of his mother and father, which he committed as a child after catching them having, wait for it, sex. His goal throughout the film appears to be a reconnecting with his ex-wife and three children by murdering them. How he managed to start a family while being insane is beyond me, and it's never made clear why he's decided they're better off dead. Insanity, I declare.

Final Girl: Like Death Valley (1982), we're given a final boy in lieu of a final girl. C.J. (C.J. Cooke) differs from little Peter Billingsley in that he's rather overtly labeled a Bad Seed child by the film. We have the impression that C.J.'s about one bad report card grade away from some slashing of his own, and so we're never quite sure if he's intended to be our hero or not. He pulls dreadful, near-sociopathic pranks like frightening the babysitter into quitting and covering his shirt in ketchup while pretending like a man on the street has stabbed him, giggling when his mother and her boyfriend arrive back home, having rushed recklessly through traffic to get there. He's a little brat, basically, but not one you'd want to tangle with: when Tatum breaks into C.J.'s home to commit his evil deeds, C.J. pulls out a handgun and shoots him multiple times. Then, when that doesn't seem to keep the resilient psychopath down, C.J. whips out a shotgun and knocks a few more rounds into him. There's very little emotion displayed on C.J.'s part, even when the climax's major revelation takes place: George Tatum is C.J.'s father, bringing the story full circle and employing that old adage, "like killer father like killer son." C.J., sitting in the back of a squad car, gives the audience a knowing wink before the credits role. We knew it.

The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese:  I was quite taken with Italian director Romano Scavolini's proto-slasher A White Dress for Mariale (1972) when I watched it earlier this year at the tail end of my giallo moviethon. I noted in my capsule review for that film that it left me quite anxious to check out this later slasher of his, and now, having done so, I'm well satisfied. Nightmares in a Damaged Brain has a certain reputation because of its inclusion on the banned U.K.Video Nasties list back in the '80s. In some ways, its spot on that list was probably a boon. For as much as I enjoyed the film's sensory whirlwind of psychosis (with its hectic editing and nearly beatific central double murder set piece), I fear the film would be a great deal less well known today if those stodgy English censors had smiled on it with kindness. It strikes me as an accomplished film, but one that's just slow and contemplative enough to alienate the genre's more testy viewers. Though it's a swarthy, greasy, ugly film, it's never as grimy as contemporaneous films like William Lustig's Maniac (1980) or Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper (1982). In fact, though it begins with Tatum stalking through a perfectly slimy and fluorescent early '80s New York City (like those two aforementioned films), the location soon shifts to sunny Florida, which is obviously incapable of producing the same sort of atmosphere. While it's fun to see our sleazeball killer stalking his targets on the beach, it cannot help but make him appear like a shark stuck flopping about on sand. But this paradoxical set-up is perhaps appropriate considering the manic, hyper-stylized approach to genre filmmaking that the film displays. I appreciate Nightmares in a Damaged Brain's labored pacing and extended running time (just shy of an hour and forty minutes)-- it strands us in this aberrant cinematic world, one that quite fittingly resembles the jumbled content of a nightmare from a damaged brain, and it keeps us there just long enough to allow us to foster a new appreciation for our slightly saner world.

Anguish (1987) dir. Bigas Luna

a.k.a. Angustia

Logline: Mother (Zelda Rubinstein) and her adult son John (Michael Lerner) live together in a house full of birds and snails. Mother has hypnotic, telekinetic powers and compels John to stalk about the city, scooping out innocent victims' eyeballs for their growing collection. This is the first act of the film The Mommy, which we watch before switching perspectives and beginning to watch the audience watching the cinematic exploits of Mother & John. Patty (Talia Paul), a young girl in the audience who is devastated by the brutality she's seeing on screen, begins to believe that the film is seeping over into reality as the crowd watches. But it's just a movie... right?

Crime in the Past: The crimes in the present are too pressing to worry much about the past. That said, it's clear that The Mother and her mouth-breathing son have been collecting "the eyes of the city" for some time.

Bodycount: 18-21, let's say. It gets a little hectic.

Themes/Moral Code: The back text blurb on Blue Underground's DVD release of Anguish refers to the film as "an otherworldly twist of reality in the William Castle tradition." I'm not sure that's quite accurate. Castle, bless his raven-colored heart, was a huckster and a gimmick man, and his films (whatever enjoyment they provide) largely reflect that. Anguish has aspirations to mean something, even if that something isn't as developed or as clear as it could stand to be. The Castle comment is there because Anguish does have a "gimmick," if you'd like to call it that: its metafictional layers of films within films results in us (as the audience) watching an audience watch a film. But this fact isn't revealed until roughly half an hour in; up until that point, we've been merrily viewing The Mommy, that delightfully gratuitous and overblown film within the film. When it makes its narrative shift, and we begin to watch the reactions of the audience watching The Mommy, we're of course made aware of our own positions as audience members watching a film, and perhaps (or perhaps not) feeling the same discomfort as the diegetic audience. This reality-bending twist is all well and good, but what's the point? What prevents it from being nothing more than induced cinematic navel-gazing?

Things get interesting when a deranged man in the theater watching The Mommy decides to mirror the actions of John (the killer who he's watched countless times on screen) as he kills several victims in a movie theater. (Yes, that's right: in the latter half of Anguish we're actually watching an audience watching an audience watching a film. It's almost a shame the layers stop there). The "real" killer's actions bring up some interesting though thin thematic content: has his obsession with the violence in the literally hypnotic The Mommy directly inspired his own violent crusade? This seems like a tough point to counter, as we see that this killer mimics John's precise actions as he sees them on screen, even occasionally lapsing into speaking John's dialogue with him and reacting to the other projected characters. So what relevance does this have to our reality? Is Anguish agreeing with the concerns of lawmakers like those in Britain during the earlier Video Nasties moral panic, those that purported the ability of violent films to corrupt the minds of upstanding adult citizens and (especially) youths? Or, rather, is it sticking its tongue out at such an extreme notion, building a complex funhouse mirror that reflects society's anxieties while displaying how ridiculous they look, stretched far out of proportion to the actual situation?

My major complaint would be that Anguish never makes it totally apparent how it feels, either way. I'm afraid it becomes too caught up in its technique to resolve this theme in any way that eschews ambiguity. But we do receive at least one indicative hint towards its position: the film's closing credits are situated in a way that allows us to view from behind a new audience, one that is (presumably) intended to reflect us, as they watch the closing credits for Anguish. In singles, couples, and clusters, the audience members file out of the theater in silence-- all except one. This figure becomes the only soul left in the theater, sitting in rapt attention as the credits role. Momentarily, we begin to ponder if this figure is not unlike the killer who idolized John, who viewed The Mommy a hundred times and kept coming back for more until it convinced him to kill. We consider all this until the credits finish, and the man stands up: he's an unassuming old man who before leaving slaps a hat back onto his head. He's the sort of audience member who stays to the end of the credits out of habit and respect rather than homicidal intentions. In a moment like this one, Anguish both has its fun and bothers to make a comment about the world outside of it. It's not the film's obligation to have that sort of depth and relevance, but it sure does help.

Killer's Motivation: We never exactly discover what drives John and Mother to kill, but-- in consideration of the film's larger concerns-- the methodical stealing of the city's and particularly a movie theater audience's eyes is, I feel, of rather obvious symbolic significance.

Final Girl: Patty is our final girl and, in a move that falls far outside the tradition, she spends the majority of the film as a quivering wreck, spellbound and horrified by the graphic violence of The Mommy. Her mounting unease and paranoia does render her able to observe the bleeding between fiction and reality before everyone else in her theater does (an ability which also anticipates the closing twist that makes this point explicitly). In a way, she's a direct audience surrogate; unfortunately, that means she has to sit still for the duration like we do.

The Good, the Bad, & the Cheese:  Anguish is my kind of movie. If I'd known about the central metafictional conceit before the film thrust it before my helpless eyes, I would have watched it a lot sooner. As it stands, I'm pleased to report that it's very nearly a great film. Despite my qualms with the rather limp thematic conclusions, there's no denying the craftsmanship on display. Director Bigas Luna is a radical Spanish art house filmmaker, and he brings his surrealist sensibilities to the genre slasher, transforming it into something that isn't at all outside of his purview. His production of layers upon layers of narrative mediation make Anguish one of the more disorienting films I've seen in horror cinema. The fact that the narratives weave in and out on the visual level, cutting directly from one to the next with nary a signal of warning, demands a certain level of audience awareness and engagement that's quite unlike the typical passivity that horror conventions engender-- to make heads or tails of what's happening, one needs to be as attentive as Patty, frozen and bleary-eyed but unblinking in her theater seat. This observation makes an even stronger case for Luna's brilliancy when we consider that the two primary narratives featured in Anguish are rather conventional on their own. It's his ability to weave them together through his rampant cross cutting and overlapping audio design (which allows for dialogue from each narrative to make peculiar entrances into the other) that elevate the material above what would otherwise be common genre fare. The film makes us aware of the division between its two narratives' diegetic realities, then deliberately attempts to confuse and conflate them in our visual and aural perceptions, forcing us to move our minds against such actions. Anguish is, as its opening text warning informs us with a smirk, an attack on the senses. I'm rarely this pleased to be attacked.