Arrebato

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.

Iván Zulueta, the madman responsible for Los Brincos' Contrabando album art wasn't just into art; he was mainlining the stuff. His debut flick, "Arrebato", isn't just batting its eyelashes at the medium; it's a full-on, drug-fuelled ménage à trois, a wild ride that transports you straight into Zulueta's transgressive cinema.. We're talking about a movie that flips the bird to narrative rules, opting instead for a glorious, unhinged freefall.

Our dubious hero on this descent into chaos is José (Eusebio Poncela), a horror director whose sunken cheeks and nicotine-stained fingers are a testament to his chosen lifestyle of editing cinematic garbage between heroin power naps. He tumbles headfirst into the bizarre world of Pedro (Will More), a peculiar acquaintance who drops a bombshell in José's mailbox: a confession tape, an audio diary charting Pedro's ever-deepening, almost vampiric love affair with film itself.

From that moment on, it's a tight, airless journey where reality and hallucination start doing a dizzying dance. A relentless tide of heroin pulls José and his on-again, off-again squeeze, Ana* (Cecilia Roth), deeper into its clutches. Zulueta shoots this like someone who's stared into the abyss and found a movie camera. Every frame practically oozes. The camera practically salivates over José's veins as he ties off. Pedro's homemade films hiccup and sputter, punctuated by jarring flashes of red-like celluloid actually bleeding. There's sex, but it's all clammy skin and fumbled attempts at connection. A threesome in an elevator that feels less like an erotic fantasy and more like a macabre dissection.

Pedro isn't just filming; he's striking a Faustian bargain. The camera sips his time, his sanity, his very life force. By the time the credits roll, he's not just behind the lens; he's become the lens. José, of course, follows suit. Because what is addiction, really, if not trading your mortal coil for a sublime, fleeting rush? Zulueta knew this intimately; he was deep in his own addiction when he brought this beast to life.

Ultimately, "Arrebato" delivers a truly singular and unforgettable experience-a straight-up Lynchian odyssey through the darkest back alleys of cinematic obsession. It's where the camera itself morphs into a hungry, vampiric entity, draining the very essence from anyone brave enough to fall under its spell. When it all clicks-when Pedro's flickering films and José's dissolving face meld into the reel-it's more than just cinema. As one character so eloquently puts it, perfectly capturing the film's twisted heart: "All my life, it was like a huge wank without cum."

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.