Classic Bigas Luna slasher that i've missed to view until now, cleverly made on a low budget. The film is supposed to
take place in some Californian city but were filmed entirely in Barcelona, Spain . Luna constructed a piece of a US
street with a US looking cinema, street signs, police-cars and policemen and it looks pretty convincing. Great stuff.
When this film was released in Germany on a Blu-ray it was for the first time anywhere (says the sleeve) and it has got
an interview with the friendly and likeable catalan director and screenwriter Bigas Luna (R.I.P. 1946-2013) probably
made in 2012. He tell us that he lived in LA and prepared the film there but moved production to Spain to get finance.

.......... BEWARE OF SPOILERS BELOW ..........

Turnable sleeve

Dr. John Pressman (Michael Lerner) is an eye surgeon working at a renowned private hospital who has acted more and
more strange and started to scare the patients. He's sacked and his freak dwarf mother, The Mommy (played by the
strange Zelda Rubinstein with that grating squeaky voice of hers that resembles nothing else ever heard on film ... yuck!)
sends him on a murder rampage by using hypnotism and telepathy. The Dr. is on a Eye Hunt, he kill people and cut out
their eyes, but the surprise twist is that this is only a movie.

Patty (Talia Paul, on the cover) and her friend Linda (Clara Pastor) are watching the film "The Mommy" in a cinema, and
they feel more and more nauseated by the Gore and the Hypnosis scenes, with probable subliminal effects, on the screen.

Talia Paul and the Killer watching the film within the film, picture from the Spanish DVD

Patty's worries don't get better when the Dr. in the movie suddenly enters a cinema, where they show an old dinousaur
creature film "The Lost World", and starts slaughtering the audience. She watches a man in the next row behaving more
and more ominously and soon a "real" killer starts to murder the audience watching The Mommy.
The Lost World is a legendary 1925 silent movie with stop motion dinousaurs based on an Arthur Conan Doyle novel.

When the end credits are rolling Bigas Luna shows us that the "real happenings" were also only a film. Luna seems to have
had Fun making this film and he constructed it as a Chinese Box with a film within a film within a film.

Bigas Luna from the Spanish 2004 DVD

Warning for being hypnotized though, that spiral going round and round with Zelda shrieking hysterically, and there's actually
a warning written on the Blu-ray sleeve and probably it were too at the start of this film when shown in the cinemas.
Ha, ha, the film within this film is The Mommy and directed by Anul Sagib (read that backwards). This film was great fun to
watch and with lots of murders, hysteria and chaos. Talia Paul suffers a nervous breakdown all through the movie.

widescreen 2.35:1, english audio DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (with german subtitles only).
Extras: German trailer, teaser and TV spots, Interview with Bigas Luna (22 minutes) in English, and probably made
some year before his death in his home in Barcelona and he seemed to be a very likeable man

.................................................................

The old 2004 Spanish El Pais DVD edition has the same ratio but a 2.0 stereo spanish audio without any subtitles
and as extras a Presentacion de la pelicula: Entrevista con el director, Comentarios y Anecdotas, a trailer and a filmography
and a biography, tecnical info and an insert with text. The presentation by Bigas Luna lasts for about 8 minutes