Eyes of a Stranger

(**1/2 out of *****)

"The Love Boat"'s Lauren Tewes and Jennifer Jason Leigh (in one of her first roles) star in this derivative, unpleasant, but not-too-bad movie about a serial rapist-killer who makes obscene and threatening phone calls to his potential victims before murdering them (like in "Black Christmas"). One male victim is decapitated and his head is stuffed in a fish tank (like in "He Knows You're Alone"). Tewes plays a local news anchorwoman who suspects that the tenant in the apartment across the yard from hers is the killer, so she spies on him and conducts her own investigation (like in "Rear Window" and "Sisters"). In spite of the obvious influences from better films and the near-misogynistic depictions of women being stalked, raped and murdered, this movie does manage to generate some genuine suspense here and there, particularly in the frightening climax. Tom Savini did the make-up effects, but it looks like a lot of the potentially bloodier stuff was cut out. Wiederhorn also directed the much-better ‘77 underwater-Nazi-zombie thriller "Shock Waves," which, in this film, is shown playing on television in two different scenes (and, curiously, also features one victim being stuffed in a fish tank -- does this recurring motiff make Wiederhorn some kind of an auteur?)

HIGHLIGHT: Alone in the apartment with Leigh, who plays Tewes' deaf, mute, and blind younger sister, the killer toys with her by moving plates and knives out of her reach while she tries to cut a piece of cake.

EYES OF A STRANGER is an effective thriller. It unfortunately does have a TV movie feel/look to it and the slight story takes place only in a couple of apartments and parking lots. But even if there's nothing remotely original or spectacular about it, in the end, I thought it was effective nonetheless. There are a couple of standout scenes, like the head in the fish tank and the scene when the woman is taking a shower and the killer is staring at her with his face pressed against the glass door. Creepy!!! And the scene when Lauren calls the killer is full of tension. The acting by Jennifer Jason Leigh was very good, and to my surprise, even Lauren Tewes was good and nothing like the annoying saccharine character she played on THE LOVE BOAT. I recommend EYES OF A STRANGER to fans of thrillers, slashers or horror films.

"Eyes of a Stranger" is a decent, overlooked slasher that takes place in sunny Miami. A depraved sex murderer is hard at work eliminating the female population, and a hard- driving TV news anchor, Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes of 'The Love Boat' fame) is determined to do something about it, especially when she comes to believe that the killer is actually one of her own neighbours, the bespectacled, corpulent Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti). He's been phoning his victims as a prelude to his crimes, but he soon has the tables turned on him as *she* harasses him with calls. But Stanley soon has another victim in mind, Janes' own sister Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, making her film debut), who's deaf, dumb, and blind because she's *already* had a traumatic past encounter with a predator.

Admittedly, this *is* trashy stuff, but should prove to be adequate entertainment for slasher aficionados. Not that it stands out in the genre in terms of style or content, because it doesn't, but it's still reasonably well done. Director Ken Wiederhorn establishes a respectably creepy atmosphere and gets some great use out of the various locations.

In one twist, Stanley dumps a victim at the beach, where he promptly gets his car stuck, and when an annoyed lovebird who happens to be nearby shows up to give the car a push, it provides Stanley with another handy two victims. An early scene is also amusing for containing a "severed head in the fishtank" gag, just as "He Knows You're Alone", another slasher from the same period, did. Late in the movie, there's one very sinister sequence when Stanley is in the Harris apartment and toys with Tracy by moving objects in and out of her reach.

Tom Savini supplies the makeup effects, which are good but for the most part not among his best work (the final blood soaked sequence is pretty nice, though). For the voyeurs, there are some choice breast shots. One very effective element is the excellent music score by the under-rated composer Richard Einhorn; it's quite scary. The acting is fine from the principals: Tewes is convincing as the impassioned older sister, Leigh is appealing as the younger one, DiSanti is incredibly effective as the murdering cretin, and Peter DuPre does a decent job as Janes' attorney boyfriend. Look for 'Flipper' star Luke Halpin in a bit as a tape editor, and watch out for scenes from Wiederhorns' spooky low budget flick "Shock Waves" (which had co-starred Halpin) playing on TV.

This was one of only three productions for the short lived company Georgetown, whose other credits were the first two "Friday the 13th" pictures.

Seven out of 10.

**A FEW SPOILERS**

I'd recommend "Eyes of a Stranger", a nearly forgotten slasher-style suspense thriller from 1980 that has the distinction of being the film debut of Jennifer Jason Leigh (who gives a terrific performance as a blind, deaf and mute teenager who must fight off an assailant inside her apartment like Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark"), and which also features gore effects by the legendary Tom Savini.

Set in and around Miami (just like director Ken Wiederhorn's earlier Nazi zombie feature "Shock Waves" -- clips of which appear on the television set during the first murder scene), "Eyes of a Stranger" is basically an update of "Rear Window" embellished with references to a number of other suspense thrillers. The opening scene, in which the nude body of a murder victim is discovered immersed in a mangrove swamp, is a direct nod to the opening of Hitchcock's "Frenzy"; and a much later scene, in which the killer furtively watches a striptease dancer undress before (it is implied) he attacks her in a shower stall, is a clear homage to "Psycho".

"Eyes of a Stranger" starts off with the classic slasher premise established by "Black Christmas": the creepy serial killer who stalks and terrorizes young women with harassing phone calls before he finishes them off in person. Despite a trail of bodies with a common M. O., there is no hint of any police investigation in the movie. Likewise, none of the women have any male protectors who can save them from the killer, and the ones who try just end up as hapless collateral damage -- including one particularly memorable (and gruesomely funny) image of a severed head in a fish tank, which is itself a direct steal from the then-contemporary 1980 slasher thriller "He Knows You're Alone".

In terms of its storytelling, "Eyes of a Stranger" is split into two distinct halves: in latter part, the movie deliberately alters and undermines its earlier narrative focus and becomes a different sort of genre picture than the standard slasher exploitation fare, as the killer becomes the person who is spied upon and harassed in his apartment by an inquisitive neighbor (again, think "Rear Window"). By this point, we see that the killer, as ruthless and determined as he is, is not some indestructible bogeyman like Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, or the later Freddy Krueger. Instead, he is revealed to be quite fallible and vulnerable, especially when confronted by the female protagonist (played by Lauren Tewes), who, earlier in the movie, is seen risking her life by breaking into his apartment to search for clues (just like Grace Kelly did in "Rear Window"). For this reason, "Eyes of a Stranger" has been considered a quasi-feminist "rape-revenge" vigilante film (in his book, "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...and Beyond", the late British critic Robin Wood wrote an especially spirited defense of this movie along those particular lines).

The first half of "Eyes of a Stranger" generally conforms to all the familiar narrative clichés of the slasher genre by presenting us with the image of a serial murderer who appears to be endowed with the superhuman powers of an omniscient and ubiquitous bogeyman. This hackneyed "invincible killer" trope is an unmistakable feature of the first two murder scenes, where the killer's presence is only hinted at metonymically -- as a disembodied voice on the phone, as a masked silhouette lurking in the darkness, or in closeup shots of his feet following his prey or his hands brandishing a weapon. Here, we see the killer stalking and entrapping his victims with all the practiced stealth and finesse of a ninja assassin -- an extraordinary ability which the movie doesn't bother to explain or justify in any plausible way. As we watch these scenes play out, our suspension of disbelief waxes and wanes and we are left wondering to ourselves: how did he get inside that apartment or sneak into the back of that woman's car, or obtain the emergency phone number for that elevator?

However, about halfway through "Eyes of a Stranger", the movie's contrived illusion of an omnipotent killer endowed with superhuman competence is quickly and permanently abolished. This demystification first occurs during a scene where his tires get stuck in the mud while disposing of his latest victim, and he is forced to dispatch two potential witnesses who are making out in the car next to him. Here we begin to see that this killer is hardly very subtle or discreet in the way he goes about his business. Careless and impulsive, he doesn't seem to have that much common sense, let alone any sophisticated forensic awareness, about escaping detection or (literally) covering his tracks. All throughout the movie, we see him repeatedly stalk and attack women in apartment complexes and car parks -- semi-public spaces where his suspicious comings and goings could easily be noticed (and eventually are). In fact, he is so sloppy and disorganized that it seems the temporary success of his killing spree can only be attributed to dumb luck and a curious absence of any police vigilance and deterrence. By this point, we come to realize that under normal circumstances, he could be caught in the act at any time.

It doesn't take long before the killer's luck finally does run out, and when we at last see him as he really is, his pale expressionless face, portly frame and slouching gait expose him as the very image of a rather depressing ungainliness and ordinariness (much like Raymond Burr's pitifully inept and desperate uxoricide in "Rear Window"). In the end, there is nothing the least bit impressive, clever, seductive, mysterious or otherworldly about this killer. If anything, he appears dull, clumsy, slovenly, unattractive and very, very common. Indeed, it is in this way that the more fanciful and dubious conceits of the genre are deliberately undermined, and any semblance of the sadistic relish and artfully evinced horror atmosphere that slasher movie enthusiasts may have once admired about the killer during the staging of his earlier murders is rapidly and purposefully dissipated.

This undermining of the "invincible killer" trope is most clearly demonstrated during a brief scene toward the end of the movie in which no physical violence occurs at all. Here, we see the killer stripped of any theatrical pretense of devilish glamour or mystery -- his pudgy plain face and flabby middle-aged physique now fully visible in clear light -- as he casually torments a blind teenager by removing familiar objects from her reach on a kitchen counter. I imagine that the banal viciousness and petty psychological cruelty of this otherwise harmless act was more upsetting and disturbing for most viewers than any of the physically gruesome murder scenes in this movie (which are, of course, standard for the genre and are, alas, to be expected).

As the late Robin Wood astutely observed, the culmination of this studied demystification of the mad-slasher bogeyman occurs in the last reel of "Eyes of a Stranger", when the killer suddenly meets his violent and ignominious end in a shower stall (an inversion of the earlier "Psycho" reference), and the final lingering image of his broken glasses perched crookedly on his bloated lifeless face, with eyes now permanently shut from a fatal bullet wound in his forehead, seems not only a stunning reversal of fortune but a moralistic indictment of anyone in the audience who took a portion of vicarious pleasure in the movie's preceding mayhem.

Set in Miami, Florida, the film follows Jane (Lauren Tewes) a TV news reporter who covers the murders of a serial murderer/rapist. Jane lives with her sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh in her first film role), who after an encounter with an abductor as a child renders her blind, deaf and mute leaving Jane with survivor's guilt. Jane sees suspicious behavior from a neighbor in the adjacent apartment block, Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti), and suspects he may be the killer. Jane's suspicions are confirmed and Jane uses her skills and resources to turn the tables on the killer.

Released in 1981, Eyes of a Stranger marked director Ken Wiederhorn's third feature film following the cult zombie film Shock Waves and forgotten Animal House rip-off King Frat. The film was unique among most slasher films having come from a major studio, Warner Brothers, and forgoing the isolated country sides or suburban settings that defined the ambiance of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and the subsequent films they inspired and went for a more urban environment. Eyes of a Stranger doesn't follow the typical slasher formula wherein we focus on a group as slowly one by one the characters are killed in various fashions, but instead the movie is told from the point of view of Jane as she investigates her suspicions in an almost Noir-ish approach to the material there's a decent story idea at the core of Eyes of a Stranger, but it feels like it's rather unsure of itself as it wavers between traditional thriller tropes and slasher tropes with both ends feeling rather underdeveloped.

I think the biggest mistake the movie makes is in letting us the audience know that Stanley Herbert is a killer from the get go. While initially Stanley's face is obscured in shadow or off camera during the initial kills, the movie eventually drops this and it's made clear he is the killer. The fact we already know who the killer is robs much of Jane's investigative story of its tension as conversations with her lawyer boyfriend where they debate whether he is the killer feel pointless since we already know Jane is right and it's just the movie spinning its wheels until the inevitable climax. The kills are very much inspired by slasher trends and the gore work (in the uncut version I saw) by Tom Savini is par for the course well done and carries weight and impact, but we know so little about the people being killed because they're not main characters and you feel nothing when they die because there's no investment. It's not to say that this kind of framework can't work as there's been a number of Giallo films from the likes of Mario Bava or Dario Argento that cover material in this fashion, but those films usually try to have a sense of moral ambiguity to them with time taken to establish intrigue or character. We do get an idea of the impetus as to what motivates Jane's plan against Stanley, but it isn't all that fleshed out and feels like a footnote. Stanley himself isn't all that interesting and basically plays a standard quiet loner but even with that we don't get much of an idea as to who Stanley is outside his kills. His apartment is spotless and bland with only a Cuckoo clock that serves as a plot point standing out and we have no idea what he's like outside of the killings so he's basically just a murder machine for Jane to fight against.

Eyes of a Stranger is technically superior and has a more interesting story core than most of its contemporaries of the 1980s Slasher Glut, but it doesn't fully commit to being a thriller or a slasher and wobbles un easily between the two not really satisfying the standards for one or the other. The movie does have an intriguing noir-ish style that made the film more visually interesting in comparison to other films of similar ilk and the effects work by Savini is good as usual, but at the end it feels a hodgepodge of ideas from Rear Window, Wait Until Dark, and Peeping Tom with some contemporary gore work added that doesn't give the film much of its own identity. It's serviceable, but I can't give it much more than that.