Part of Midnight Movies
John (Michael Lerner), a loutish optometrist orderly, makes a mistake at his job and is dismissed. His odd little mother (Zelda Rubenstein), using a form of hypnosis, sends him out on a killing spree — starting with Caroline, the woman who caused his dismissal. But this is all just a movie titled THE MOMMY being shown to a small matinee crowd at a seedy movie theater in Los Angeles. As it happens, two teenage girls in the audience, the strong-willed Linda (Clara Pastor) and the squeamish Patty (Talia Paul), discover that one of the patrons sitting near them is a real maniac. In the old movie, when the scalpel-wielding John enters a movie theater and begins killing the patrons and theater employees one by one (and removing their eyeballs for his mother’s collection), the killer in the audience begins dispatching the patrons and employees of the theater in a manner which parallels the action on the movie screen.
“Stylistically ANGUISH is layered and sharp. Visually it's beautiful, haunting, and a little bit gross. Tonally, it's strange beyond belief and consistently creepy. What else could horror fans ask for?” —Michael Gursky, MovieWeb “Comparable to Brian De Palma’s work in its over-the-top suspense set pieces and its hall-of-mirrors plot.” —Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader
