The Headless Eyes

Hahahaha! This film is great. If you are looking for low-budget crap from the early 70's, check this grade Z film out. No budget, horrible editing, some atrocious acting, and eyeballs.

The plot is so simple, even a 10 year old could have thought of it. A struggling artist decides to rob a woman's apartment in the middle of the night so he can afford to keep his shop open. In the process of the robbery, the woman wakes up and scoops his eyeball out with a spoon. He gets away, only after screaming "MY EYE! AHHHAHHH my eyeeeee....." over and over again. This whole event changes his life and he decides to start killing woman, remove their eyeballs and use them to further his art career.

This movie is so bad, but I really enjoyed it. The beginning of the movie is possibly one of the funniest moments I have ever seen in a movie. When he gets his eye removed and starts screaming about it, the sound editors decided to loop his scream over and over again, looping it about 6 or 7 times. You just have to see it to really understand.

The gore in the film is hilarious. There isn't a whole lot of it, but there are a few scenes noteworthy. If anything, it is far more bloody then it is gory. Don't expect HG Lewis here, though.

If you like this stuff, it is worth a watch. I thought it was great, but that is just my opinion. 7/10

My eyes! AAOOOAAAUUUGGHH! My eyes! That's what I screamed myself after watching this atrocity of a film. No gore, no effects, no acting, no sense. The movie opens with a guy robbing a woman's apartment while she sleeps, and when she wakes up and screams, he tries to silence her by getting on top of her and smothering her mouth and nose. Fortunately she grabs a nearby spoon on the nightstand and slides it along the intruder's temple – no wait, she actually penetrates his eye socket with it!?! With his eye popped out and dangling by its nerve, the man stumbles out of the apartment, out the hall, down the fire escape and crawls to a stop in the alley. The entire time howling the ever-looped line "My EYE! My eyyyyyye!" In case you miss him hearing it during this opening credit sequence, don't worry. It's played and replayed every 7 minutes for the rest of the film. During which time we see the main character (who happens to be a failed artist of some sort) finally get his comeuppance by cutting out the eyes of women and "freezing" them in blocks of ice (?) as art.

The highlight scene has to be the news report in front of the apartment of one of the killer's first victims. First of all (as someone else has pointed out), nobody shows the first hint of suspicion about the creepy-looking guy with the eyepatch being at the crime scene where the victim had her eyes cut out. Secondly, since when are funeral services held at a person's apartment building, complete with coffin being carried down the steps into the street? And lastly, you gotta love the reporter's interview of the folks. He asks one woman what she knew about the murdered, and her answer is pricelessly generic. Perplexed at the woman's response, the reporter realizes he has lost track of who the actor with the scripted line is amongst the crowd and openly calls out the improvised line, "I understand one of you knew the victim quite well" to find the proper response. Obviously, whoever it was that had the all-important line for the scene was stuck in traffic when it was filmed, because we don't get any good answer for the poor reporter.

Oh, and about the guy who plays the "eyeball killer". He's a lot of fun to watch. I always wondered what it would be like if a burned-out community theatre director played a C-horror serial killer. Now I know. With hilarious monologues and delicious overacting, he hams up everything beautifully in what can best be described as Shakespeare's "Othello" meets Lustig's "Maniac". From victim to victim to potential admirer to the incredibly lame finale, we know this guy's insane because he keeps rambling to himself that he's "got to finish" something or other. My guess is there's only about 15 copies of this movie left in existence. It needs to get snatched up quick and given the DVD treatment, so that low-budget horror fans everywhere can take it home and give it the MST treatment. It is indeed that bad.

Basement grindhouse fare, not as gory as it's reputed featuring an unhinged performance by Bo Brundin as the tortured artist who loses an eye, but discovers a new art form.

Frustrated artists always seem to be fodder for film psychopathy, and 'The Headless Eyes' continues that trend in earnest, assisted by a compelling title no doubt responsible for much of its appeal (that and as other reviewers have remarked, the graphic VHS cover art).

Gritty-looking guerilla-style location photography and some almost avant garde touches in Kent Bateman's directorial debut shows potential, but the novel plot device disappointingly never evolves into more than a just a few random stalk & slash encounters. I'd hoped the art student sub-plot late in the picture might resurrect things, but it looks like the $$$ may have evaporated and instead the film ends quite abruptly.

The incessant shrieking of 'my eye!' will live-on in your consciousness well beyond the meagre 70 mins runtime, an enduring accomplishment few films achieve, but unless you're a devotee of no-budget 70's slashers, I think you could feel underwhelmed by 'The Headless Eyes'.

Long ago(the mid eighties, before it became chic to diss bad movies and glorify their ineptitude), I caught this freaky flick the way nature intended, on a late-night horror show on an independent TV station. Even then, before the advent of our culture of irony, I knew I'd seen something so unrelentingly bad that it was remarkable. This movie concerns an artist who, while attempting to rob a sleeping woman to get rent money, has one eye put out by his victim. Driven insane, he goes about the unnamed city where he lives(New York), encountering various people, killing them, then attaching their eyeballs to mobiles and suspending them in blocks of acrylic. The victims include a boozy, bickering middle aged couple, a prostitute, and a middle-aged receptionist in an office building. The film has very little in the way of a narrative structure; our mad artist basically drifts around in a stupor, encountering people and killing them. This may be part of the director's masterplan; this mess apparently was some attempt to make a statement about the isolation of urban living. Viewers are treated to a bizarre dream sequence in which the artist staggers deliriously down canyon-like city streets barefoot and ragged, stopping to bang his fists against what appear to be the tall wooden doors of a church. Holy Fellini on Ripple! There's also a documentary-like sequence in which the landlady of one of the killer's victims is interviewed by a reporter and spouts bland, insincere compliments about a young woman she probably never spoke to("She was a nice girl, never any trouble," etc.)The entire film has a hollow, detached feel to it, something that can't entirely be blamed on the filmmakers' incompetence. Or maybe I'm just an optimist. Make no mistake, it is bad--crummy sound and cinematography, stilted dialogue(when available), superflous characters(the artist's wealthy former girlfriend, a young art student who wants to take lessons)who must have been inserted to give friends of the director parts, and artsy sequences that were intended to show the filmmaker's vision but only showcase his lack of ability. And this flick was on video at one point, but is undoubtably out of print now. If you have any independently owned video shops in your area and don't mind slumming(you know, the kind that have a back stock of wretchedly bad old videos), look for this one. Rent it, get some of your hipper-than-thou friends together, and inact your own episode of Mystery Science Theatre!

A thieving artist has his eye gouged out by a spoon when trying to rob a woman's apartment. This nutter then goes round New York killing women whose eyeballs he removes, which he uses to create a new bit of artwork back in his studio.

The Headless Eyes is pretty much an example of grind-house exploitation fodder. It's a very rough and ready flick with minimal production values. But then I guess you would expect that for a grade Z movie. However, it does at least make some attempt at being dare I say it, artistic. There are occasional interesting shots, while the music fits with the feel quite well. It has a pretty scuzzy atmosphere overall and is another that utilises the very mean streets of 70's New York to decent effect. It's a clear precursor to Abel Ferrara's very similar movie The Driller Killer which came out a few years later. Unlike that one, The Headless Eyes never did make the video nasty list, which in some ways is surprising seeing as it was available in a striking video cover on home video in early 80's Britain and it also has considerably more mean spirited violence than many films that made up that list. That said it's not exactly impressive. Quite a lot of the time it's pretty terrible in fact, especially that opening looped use of the line 'My eye! My eye!' But the griminess and rough approach do sort of work in its favour some of the time, giving it a sleazy feel that's in keeping with its overall concept.