Eyes of the Werewolf

Eyes of the Werewolf (1999) is a really bad movie. The premise was real good but the overall execution was just terrible. I wished the filmmakers would have taken their time with this project instead of rushing it into production. Some blind dude gets some new eyes, bad thing is that they belong to a mean old werewolf. Nasty things begins to happen to the dude as he turns into a cheesy looking creature. Can he find a cure before his hot girlfriend finds out? Who is that weird little troll who helps him out and what's up with that female cop? If you really want to find out, check out Eyes of the Werewolf!

Not a bad idea for a movie. I just wished the filmmakers would have spent a lot for time in pre-production before they decided to shoot the movie.

I'll admit that exactly how movies like this ever manage to get a proper DVD release is beyond me. My guess is, some distribution company figures that if they throw together a decent-looking DVD cover, they can trick people into thinking they're buying a real movie. This, however, is your standard amateur movie -- the picture quality looks like something you can achieve on home video, certainly not like anything a studio would ever put out. Some of the special effects are terrible, while others are acceptable. I have no problem with all this, I think it's great that people can just come together and make a werewolf movie for the sheer joy of making it, and not actually throw any money at it. But they shouldn't really expect that much in return.

But all that aside, let's judge it on it's own terms. While the script would need a huge overhaul to create something resembling quality, the plot itself has some merit. It involves an unscrupulous surgeon who buys body parts on the black market to use in transplants. One of his patients is a man horribly disfigured in a lab accident, and he unwittingly gives him the eyes of a werewolf, which infects the man with lycanthropy. After committing a string of murders, the man seeks help among those closest to him -- a nurse he has fallen in love with, a determined writer on the supernatural, and a mysterious dwarf.

You can't say it isn't original. And aside from the few plot holes (for example, "I need some help finding a werewolf ... oo, I'll call up my friend, the disabled dwarf!"), it's reasonably entertaining but to be honest a bit trashy. I'm afraid none of the cast have a future in acting. Our hero and the nurse only know each other for about two and a half minutes before jumping into bed together (the actors even manage to have sex unconvincingly), which lead me to believe I might be watching a soft core porn movie with forty minutes of padding in between sex scenes. And the unresolved lesbian sub-plot doesn't help.

My advice is, don't fork out for this one unless you enjoy amateur movies. And if you do, there are better ones out there -- maybe take a look at "Exhumed" first.

Hunters chase what they think is a man through the forest, though the audience sees he is a werewolf. The hunters never seem to realize this, because after they shoot him, he looks normal when they decapitate him.

A doctor transplants the werewolf's eyes into a man who lost his own in a laboratory experiment. The man, Rich, gets to have sex with his nurse (Stephanie Beaton) before he even gets his bandages removed.

After he leaves the hospital, he finds his wife has been cheating on him too. When a smoke machine sends clouds past an amateur painting of a moon (with a fake tree branch on the foreground), he turns into a werewolf! His torso grows larger, splitting his shirt, and he grows a giant werewolf mask on his head that has red lights in the eyes. His pants stay intact. The mouth chews unconvincingly, though some sort of robotics (or hidden hands) in the eyebrows give him a baleful look at times.

Despite the poor werewolf costume, there is a fair amount of blood and gore, and those are fairly well done. There's even a pretty good decapitation later in the movie. However, when a man falls from a height, a rather bad dummy does the job.

Rich has a friend named Siodmak who is some sort of occult expert, and he also accidentally stumbles across a small man with crutches named Androse who is also such an expert. They try to help him a little.

Rich kills people who have done him wrong. A policewoman investigates the murders and tries to hit on Beaton, who doesn't much care for lesbian scenes so nothing comes of it.

Quite cheap, but between the nudity and blood and gore, and a not-terrible story combining (sort of) The Most Dangerous Game with The Hands of Orlac and The Wolf Man, it's somewhat entertaining. Available on its own, or in the box set Scream Queens Vol. 1.