Terror Eyes

My review was written in January 1989 after watching the feature on AIP video cassette.

"Terror Eyes" is an uneven video program incorporating a slight premise (writers' strike impact on horror film production) with a couple of student films for ballast.

Vivian Schilling is the project's mastermind, portraying a budding screenwriter summoned by the devil' envoy (hammy Daniel Roebuck) to pen a horror script during last year's WGA strike. She also doubles as star opposite Lance August in a very chintzy opening segment wherein they're a young couple handed a Book of Life which disconcertingly tells them their future.

Best segment is the finale, a shot-on-videotrape (rest of pic is filmed) episode reminiscent of the classic "Epic" segment of the British tv series "The Avengers", wherein evil toy magnate Phil Lowey torments femme chess champion Diana James with a real-life violent game to the death, after she bad mouths his videogames to the press. USC student tape (with classic helmer Edward Dmytryk as faculty adviser by Michael Rissi shows promise.

Middle segment, another short film by Steve Sommers, is a hopelessly padded attempt at film noir with Dan Bell as the fall guy in a robbery and murder scheme.

Ramshackle structure fails to knit these disparate materials together and mixture of film and video doesn't come off. Makeup effects stress gore for its own sake.

This a great movie. It is very scary. It is one of the scariest movie. I have seen. See it. It is not a 4 out 10. It is a It a 7 out 10. It is a very scary movie. A lot better then The silence of the lambs. A lot better then Saw. Also a lot then the 2010 remake of Nightmare on elm street.

A young woman is hired by Satan to write a movie script for a horror movie.She and the group of her friends go camping and tell cheesy horror stories which we the viewers are about to witness.The last story which involves unlucky female chess master and labyrinth of traps becomes my instant favourite as it predates concepts used in "Cube" and "Saw"."Terror Eyes" by Eric Parkinson and Michael Rissi is pure 80's cheese.Vivian Schilling's presence is incredibly sexy,the acting is fairly decent and there are some great one-liners.There is no nudity and only a little bit of violence,so fans of more exploitative horror will be disappointed.If you are deeply into 80's horror "Terror Eyes" is a perfect way to kill some time.7 horror stories out of 10.

As its on-screen caption 'HOLLYWOOD Writer's Strike. No More Movies...No More Horror! What's the Devil to do?' began, I found myself asking "What the Devil is this? This isn't the 1980 Rachel Ward movie I was searching for!"

Film opens with distorted, point-of-view shots of Hollywood Blvd, weird blue- and red- lighted smoke, soft focus; bleached-out, or just underexposed? Or was the lighting intentionally too hot, and for what reason? (That's the second film I've watched recently with this problem. The first was the non-James Cameron 'Terminator 2', from Italy)

Once guy and girl set fire to something called The Book Of Life, the smoke effects begin, the disgusting fire effects begin, and the film becomes very weird, as it is explained away as being merely a dream, from which the girl (Vivian Schilling) wakes up from and writes down, convinced it will make a good horror movie. Apparently, Schilling's character is a horror film screenwriter, and the first half hour of this student film is vignettes dreamt by her, and typed later for use as potential ideas for new horror films. A disembodied hand punches through the door of her office, then rips the door off its hinges to get to her- but it's all just another one of her dreams.

She and her friends go camping and tell each other weird stories, which she also thinks will make great material for the horror movie she's writing. Here is where the film becomes slow moving and plodding, with the typical grotesque 80s clothes only serving to annoy.

Chick's chase through checkerboard hallway mazes while being followed by a rabid dog is surreal and eerie; but its effect negated by dated computer graphics, and bizarrely out-of-place ragtime piano music, as she suddenly appears in an old west ghost town.

A twist says that the entire film is the work of Satan, telling tales around a campfire to Schilling and the rest of her friends. Schilling then wakes up, turns these events into a screenplay, and becomes a filmmaker with a huge hit from it, in a supremely bewildering ending.

"Student Produced at USC", this has a few interesting ideas and camera shots, but painfully slow pacing, and not much action for a horror flick. It would have worked better as a 30-minutes long short film.

Now I know that the eighties spawned a nearly immeasurable amount of dumb and low-budgeted horror movies, and that it's practically impossible to have seen them all, but still I'm somewhat surprised that this particular one never caught my attention before. I'm a tremendous fan of the genre, the decade and particularly anthologies, and the list of '80s anthologies isn't that enormous after all. Considering the fact that I've struggled myself through some truly bad ones that are less obscure, like for example "Shock Chamber", I had very little hopes that this "Terror Eyes" would be worth checking out, but my second pleasant surprise was that I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. "Terror Eyes" is an incredibly cheap and amateurish, but the lack of professionalism is widely compensated by the spirited acting performances, the ingenious wraparound story and – most of all – the astoundingly clever short stories. The segments are curious and compelling, all three of them, and I certainly didn't expect that they would also be tense and well-scripted. The wraparound story introduces a young female marketing executive who, strangely enough, is charged with writing a horror screenplay. She's inexperienced and frustrated about this, but she finds inspiration in her nightmares and around the campfire during a trip with her friends. At some point during the camping trip the lead actress' boyfriend even gets possessed by a sort of rancid demon, but even that bizarre plot twist results in a couple of funny moments. The first story, which is definitely my favorite one, introduces the marginal couple Troy and Starla Floyd. They are offered a book by a strange door-to-door salesman and discover that it very accurately describes every move they make and every word they say; even stuff that hasn't occurred yet. The second story deals with the difficult themes like time loops and altering history, but the narration is light-headed and unpretentious and thus very easy to follow. In order to pay off his debt, a loser gambler is sent to rob the house of the creditor, allegedly so that he can recover the insurance money. Once there he witnesses the murder of his creditor's wife, but when he flees he ends up in the exact same place and the exact same time as the day before. As he's reliving the same experience multiple times, he discovers who the murderer is and why. The third and final story revolves on Alex Bender, as she just the world's first female champion chess player. Alex also happens to be a truly devoted and feminist opponent against violence towards women in video games and grabs every opportunity to criticize the famous Rubinstein Game Corporation and its CEO on national television. After another fierce press interview she gets kidnapped and ends up in the mansion of the deranged CEO – Martin Rubinstein. Alex now becomes the lead character in a very vivid violent game herself, and the price of defeat is death… I can't emphasize enough how deeply I'm impressed by the originality and the freshness of the little stories featuring in "Terror Eyes". That alone makes it easier for me to overlook the poor technical aspects and micro-budgeted production values. Most of the actors/actresses appear in various roles and clearly enjoy themselves a lot. One of the actresses, Vivian Schilling even co-wrote the better-than-expected screenplay. Talk about multitasking!