It's difficult when you got to see a film ASAP, and at the same time wanting it to be a title you've never seen before -- with a limited source of money you're taking a risk with films you haven't seen, while you still have those "already seen" DVDs still left to buy.
Last Thursday I ordered three new films from Discshop.se. Since they were quite cheap (not sheep!) I figured: "What the hell. If they're bad, you've at least tried..." First one up -- Jacob's Ladder (1990): How strange I haven't been thinking about this one since it was fresh out on VHS rental at the local store, so long ago. I remember considering this Adrian Lyne flick, at the time, but the thought never really got past the "oh, how interesting" section of my maze called brain... and so...
20 years later I just picked it up, along with two others, quite in a hurry because I had to order before 4 pm to have them in my letterbox the next day. Was I going to regret it? No, far from it. Although, not by a longshot being a bloody horror movie, Jacob's Ladder is, essentially, a psychological thriller about a young man (excellently portrayed by a young Tim Robbins) who, after serving in Nam (or has he, really?), has a growing tendency towards ultimately horrifying experiences of altered realities and states where he sees awestriking demons and where he cannot distinguish between dreams and reality. Jacob is a married man with children while, in another part of his mind, he is divorced and having a lustful lover while greaving the death of one of his sons. At a party he has some bad, psychedelic epísodes, and when the friend of his partner tells him he's already dead -- that's when the fever starts, and the demons come closer and closer...
Jacob's Ladder tells us the story of how the human mind, trying to cope with extreme threats to the well-being and survival of the flesh, in the most intricate and fantastic ways could create different kinds of alternate states of being in order to keep itself and its body well away from the finality of utter death. It could also tell us why and when it's time for this defense mechanisms of the psyche to let go; when there's nothing worthwhile to protect anymore. When the suffering is too great and nothing more will be gained from struggling, you have to move on -- in life, as in death.
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