Geeky and bespectacled mama's boy orderly John Pressman (an excellent performance by Michael Lerner) is hypnotized by his evil and domineering mother Alice (a deliciously creepy portrayal by Zelda Rubinstein of "Poltergeist" fame) to embark on a vicious killing spree and pluck out the eyes of his victims. Meanwhile, the audience watching this gruesome picture in a movie theater are terrorized by another deranged maniac (a frighteningly intense turn by Angel Jove) with similar mommy issues. Writer/director Bigas Luna makes crafty and inspired use of the nifty film-with-a-film premise (at one point Pressman goes into a theater to bump off patrons just as the other lunatic in the theater begins doing the same thing!), does a bang-up job of creating and sustaining a tense, freaky, and unnerving atmosphere, and stages several of the effectively bloody and brutal murder set pieces with real flair and style (the graphic moments of gory eyeball violence are very nasty and nauseating). Moreover, this film culminates in a positively nerve-wracking last third as all hell erupts in the theater and concludes with a truly unsettling ambiguous open ending. Better still, this movie even works as an interesting, intelligent, and provocative meditation on the slippery, subliminal, and manipulative nature of cinema itself. Both Joseph M. Civit's lush widescreen cinematography and Jose Manuel Pagan's spirited shuddery score further enhance the overall fine quality of this highly recommended cult favorite.