Arrebato

Director, Ivan Zulueta's sublime 'Arrebato' (1979) is an extraordinarily oblique, insidiously disturbing, deliciously deranged Spanish nightmare, and for reasons that still elude me, this psychotronic oddity remains largely undocumented, and is greatly deserving of a pristine, fan-pleasing Blu-ray restoration! This divinely sinister piece of stylish movie macabre, eerily documents the gradual subversion, and inexorable psychological collapse of a young, hopelessly dope-addled, profoundly jaded filmmaker's life. He is pitilessly plunged into a darkly descending, surrealist miasma, over the ostensibly vampiric properties of an especially hypnotic, phantasmagorical super-8 film that once seen is not soon forgotten! To reiterate, 'Arrebato' is a strikingly lucid and fiercely imaginative work of fantastically far-out cinema that includes some genuinely unsettling sequences. The impressively iconoclastic film's singularly intriguing narrative enigma grips you firmly right from the exquisitely terse opening gambit, and then invidiously immerses the increasingly discombobulated viewer into its unrelenting maelstrom of hallucinatory strangeness! Ivan Zulueta's beautifully audacious work of uniquely twisted torment is a sublimely suffocating, chillingly claustrophobic, bravura, B-movie Bunuel for the more diabolically minded, scream-seeking, Euro-cult maniacs to enjoy!

From initial ridicule (despite the official recommendation as a quality feature) to flat-out praise, it took more than twenty years to realize the seminal influence of this film on Spanish production, from Almodovar onwards. It draws many influences from the Warhol-esque New York underground scene but has tremendous scenes.

Whoever wants to understand what Betty Boop was all about, must see Cecilia Roth dance scene, it is fabulous.

Contains a lot of drug addiction references, which should be seen as an analogy to the addiction to capturing moving pictures and watching them. The only way for a film director to get rid of the latter is to dissolve into the industry.

Jose, a director of schlock horror films, is a high-functioning heroin addict who's experiencing a burnout phase in his career, and frustration over a rocky, on-again/off-again relationship he can't seem to terminate. He receives an unexpected parcel from a fleeting acquaintance named Pedro, a cousin of an old flame, who makes raw naturalistic films variably similar to the works of STAN BRAKHAGE. The parcel contains a filmreel, Pedro's housekey, and a cassette tape on which he's recorded himself expounding a bizarre personal odyssey which initialized at a time when Jose had assisted him in matters of interval time filming. The fervid, gravelly-voiced storytelling spans the film's remaining duration, cryptically implying that Pedro's Super8 camera has taken on a predatory sentience vaguely vampiric in nature...by sucking people away from the Earthly plane, and into the cinematic one(a metamorphosis which Pedro insists is sublimely blissful). This outlandish disclosure is confirmed when Jose watches the filmreel, at which point he realizes why Pedro had sent him the key to his apartment. It is there that Jose will face his ordained destiny under the officious eye of Pedro's camera.

That ARREBATO comes from a director with such a minimal body of work is surprising...it's a professionally appointed abstraction which is comparable to little else, though touches of LYNCH, CRONENBERG, and ECKHART SCHMIDT are sometimes evident. It's a cynical, allegorical, and occasionally plaintive excursion into a dreary alternate reality, underscored with notes of homoerotic suggestion, heroin chic, and pointed political commentary.

There's an intriguing mystery in Pedro's prolonged tape-recorded anecdotes...it's an abstruse and strangely tantalizing expository device which juxtaposes the film's deliberately dallying visual tedium. Narcotics are a preponderance of the proceedings, chiefly regarding their potency to electrify creative vitality while simultaneously draining it dry. I might argue that the "vampire" of the story isn't the actual, tangible camera...rather, it is cinema itself. More specifically, it's the ART of cinema, which, like a god, casts judgment in accordance with one's personal filmic refinements (**spoiler**) It would seem that Pedro has been raptured to a higher plane of existence, owing to his impassioned visionary buoyancy. Jose, conversely, has lost that creative brio, and is thus rendered unworthy or ineligible for ascension. He is denied passage, and promptly exterminated.

As extravagantly outré as it is, ARREBATO is handled quite confidently, and the key players vitalize their characters with moxie. Sure, it's blemished, and certainly not for all tastes, but it's audaciously and undeniably sui generis. That's mighty refreshing in a time when remakes of remakes are the order of the day.

7/10...a worthy legacy for its late director, whose too-brief life is said to have had many unfortunate parallels with this film.

Get hold of it if you can. Best vampires movie ever without even showing any teeth...

If you thing you are committed to your work, see the protagonist of this movie.

The director had to adapt to stern constrains in number of characters and locales and still he came up with a modern classic, catching the spirit of the "movida madrileña" ( a musical an cultural boom in Madrid eighties) and providing a metaphor for the trail of wasted talent this outburst leave, because of drugs, diversion and basic human frailty. In my personal top 5 Spanish movies of all time.

Writing this review after watching movie just now. It was a slow,bizarre, unexpected and confused thrill feeling in the end.

Up to 1 hour 30 minutes, i was wondering what is the movie about. Last 30 minutes was making sense or a story or screenplay.

It was a kind of slow paced mystery,supernatural and finally let u guess movie.

I felt good but not a mystery or thriller or supernatural genre.

It is food for movie critics and movie lovers( I am not Either)

Good one but not for Mystery/Thriller entertainment lovers.