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merritt k4.0

Oh to be a mentally ill twink making his little heroin movies

Edgar Cochran ✝️🍋5.0

The Videodrome (1983) comparisons should not be made. They are misleading and do not make sense.Holy Christ, what a mind trip! I had never seen anything like that!Arrebato (aka Rapture) is an art house, underground-style psychological horror/thriller about a frustrated, low-budget horror filmmaker named José under troubled romantic relationships that meets a man obsessed with achieving perfection in the filming of subconscious frames (bare with me). José decides to help him giving him a device that allows to control time in film. The man then proceeds to film himself while asleep and finds a red frame in the film. Both will descend into a lunatic whirlpool of madness while both try to unravel the mystery hidden behind the red frame in order to see what happened in that instance. The surreal aspect of the film will be intensified when the red frames begin to extend in length.The film, which counts with Pedro Almodóvar's voice hilariously dubbing one of the female characters, was done under the influence of heroin by the director Zulueta himself and many of his collaborators. This caused the budget and planning to increase over the originally planned financing and resulted in the film's experimental nature to be exponentialized, but never losing its focus about being a metaphor on how the audience can be vampirized by subjective interpretation of film and any form of audiovisual communication and expression. Zulueta was later on considered as a "problematic auteur" and the film became a cult classic. It had difficulties to face theatrical releases despite that the Francoist totalitarian dictatorship regime had already ended by 1975. It took one year at least to be released after its completion.The style is absolutely invigorating and the terror is entirely suggested with a score and an editing that border on the immaculate. The horror of the film resides in our minds as we try also to unravel the real intentions of the film. After witnessing these characters being vampirized up to the point of insanity in the act of film interpretation with the influence of heroin and their lives being slowly devoured by cinema, one can only translate this message to the viewer in his/her perspective of either an active or passive observer of filmed events and the extent to which films consumes the time and life out of people. The film, hence, becomes a hallucinatory allegory of artistic interpretation, which paradoxically, is one among many valid interpretations. It's meta-interpretation and life consumption. Wrap your mind around that.Zulueta was an experimental director since the 70s and many of the creepy footage shown at high speed in the film, like if he was a student of Marie Menken, was filmed by Zulueta himself during his first years as a filmmaker. Regretfully, Zulueta's addiction to heroin struck back and forced him to retire temporarily during the 80s. Nevertheless, this remains as a scary testament of the impact of films over cinephiles and other viewers without being supernatural. Truly, an underseen Spanish gem.97/100

Justin LaLiberty4.5

captures an addiction/obsession to cinema better than any other film that I can think of and the dangers of media consumption more aptly than even Videodrome manages to; that it's also simultaneously hyper-erotic and casually terrifying makes it my new favorite thing - wild that I hadn't seen this until now