Anguish (1987) ****

A genuinely unsettling, tension-fraught, anxiety-inducing nightmare of a film that plays as a cross between Peter Bogdanovich's Targets (1968) (review) and Popcorn (1991) (review). Pivoting from a trippy, hypnotic slasher to a realistic hostage situation via brilliant editing, Anguish (1987) is a hell of a flick to watch in a theater—at one point you realize that you're watching a movie where characters are watching a fake movie (called The Mommy) in which a character is watching a real movie (1925's The Lost World)! Meta much? Zelda Rubinstein and Michael Lerner are appropriately weird and the lesser known actors are pretty solid too. Some of the dialogue delivery is a little creaky, the last few minutes lose some steam, and it's far from a perfect picture, but overall Anguish is a captivating gem.