Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Eyes Without a Face: Countdown to Halloween: (Day 31)

CLICK…WHIR!



BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS
AKA
THE HEADLESS EYES

For fans who howled at THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and DAWN OF THE DEAD, more gruesome gore is in store when blood fills the screen for HEADLESS EYES. An artist turned housebreaker is discovered by his victim. In their struggle she gouges out his eye with a spoon! With the eye hanging down his cheek by a nerve and driven insane by pain and horror, the artist seeks vengeance on the world-and the sex-that maimed him. He stalks beautiful women through the streets of New York, leaving a gory trail of hideously mutilated bodies that makes headlines and baffles police!

He’s out there…
out of sight, and out of his mind!

Too Gory for the Silver Screen!


It’s VHS movie time on this final night of our Halloween Countdown and we’ve saved the most… American of our WIZARD VIDEO tapes for last.  It’s actually a film made in the good ol’ U.S. of A. and it’s made by a man who made some rather fine Americans too… Kent Bateman, father of film and television stars Justine and Jason Bateman.  Producers released it with a self-imposed “X” rating—the MPAA never rated it.

Shot on a bare-bones budget and with the simple idea that this struggling artist becomes a twisted psychopath who kills and steals eyeballs using a spoon and uses them in his art after he looses an eye while trying to rob a lady so that he can afford his rent.  It’s a strange kind of character study of the killer played by Bo Brundin.


Sounds like it’s potentially interesting, right?  Well it’s interesting in a way because it’s quirkier than expected and strange in that the main character is hard to pin down.  He doesn’t really struggle with his psychosis, he simply goes from scene to scene simply because that’s how life unfolds.  Short periods of calm followed by ranting insanity and murder.


A psycho killer doing his thing in the very early 1970s New York City.  It’s simple, it’s to the point, but the ending does leave a lot to be desired.

My Grade:
“C+”

May this videotape sit on your shelf collecting dust for a decade until you rediscover it, toss it out for a DVD version that you find for a buck-fifty at a discount store that you leave in the wrapper until you stumble across it on Netflix streaming and check it out that way and realize that you’ll never watch it again, so you sell the DVD for fifty cents on a yard sale.


Enjoy this taste of ham!





Some of the more insightfully entertaining reviews of HEADLESS EYES can be found here: