Eyeball aka The Secret Killer aka Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro

I just love 70s Euro horror films. Seriously, no matter how crap they are, I'll watch 'em.

From Italy, filmed in Spain, comes the 1975 quasi-giallo Eyeball. Someone is stabbing women on a tour group to death, one by one. Even a young servant girl who comes in contact with the group is killed. Worst of all, the killer gouges out each woman's left eyeball before she is killed.

They did things a little differently in the 70s. If you couldn't sleep, anyone with whom you were acquainted could lend you a tranquilizer. Hotel desk clerks would let you go up to a guest's room, even if you didn't know quite what name they'd registered under, if you claimed to be married to the guest. And a tour by bus wouldn't be cancelled and a suspect detained until the second person in the group was murdered; the first murder just meant everyone had to have a drink and try to put it out of their minds.

Did Umberto Lenzi see Don't Look Now a couple of times? Who is the killer? The cop about to retire, or his successor? The priest who always seems to be near the crime scene? The abusive lesbian? The guy with the old head injury from the war? His wife, a mean lady who I keep hoping will be the next victim? The man who stands over his sleeping granddaughter with a razor? Or is it the obvious suspect, the crazy woman whose husband remembers seeing her passed out with a bloody knife near the scene of a similar murder last year? Or maybe his jealous secretary with whom he's having an affair? Most importantly, do I care? And how did I manage to choose, out of two hours worth of trailers, the one Italian movie I hadn't seen even as it was masquerading as an American movie?



P.S. I watched Autopsy again after Eyeball. The piece I wrote on it for one of my other blogs never gets many hits, but it got one while I was watching Grindhouse Trailer Classics and writing the accompanying post over here; the reason I know it got a hit was because someone found that blog by searching for "fat woman dead on morgue table." I figured it was a sign I should watch it again, and it's always good to have a giallo double feature. It's just as gross yet enjoyable in that special giallo way as I remembered it being.

Grindhouse Trailer Classics

Out of all these movies which make up two hours worth of trailers, I've only seen:
Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things
Blood Sucking Freaks
I Spit On Your Grave
Autopsy
The Street Fighter
Don't Open the Window (actually one of my favorite films of all time, which I own as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie)
Zombie
Coffy
And, just for the record, I would never watch I Spit On Your Grave again!

I only have an interest in adding to the list of those I've watched:
Torso
Eyeball
Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde
Master of the Flying Guillotine
They Came From Within
God Told Me To
Bury Me an Angel
Dr. Butcher, M.D.

While most of the trailers run together in one's mind as a lot of pathetic substitutes for porn from a time before home video, a few are notable. The double feature of I Dismember Mama/The Blood Spattered Bride is presented as a news report outside the theater where one man is brought out in a strait jacket and another seems to need one. The Executioner trailer features the oddly upbeat song "Tik a Tee Tik a Tay." Zombie ends with a notice that a barf bag will be provided upon request. Satan's Sadists advises squeamish viewers to head to the concession stand rather than watch the trailer; it also has an inappropriate song, a swingin' version of "Is It Better To Have Loved and Lost." Both Switchblade Sisters and The Big Doll House have scenes of someone getting their head stuck in a toilet. Caged Heat and It Came From Within both feature the lovely Barbara Steele.

The Single Girls describes the killer as "a boobie snatcher, a tit maniac" and promises that the girls will "tingle your dingle." Like Secrets of Sweet Sixteen, The Single Girls looks like a sex comedy but then they hit you at the end with a sort of "oh, and by the way, they're being stalked by a satanic cult/killer." Why bother? Were there really guys who were willing to go look at teen boobs but drew the line at a horror movie and so needed to be warned? Love Me Deadly has a little bit of fine print under the title card that reads "A film about necrophilia (sexual attraction for corpses)." I wish I lived in a time when necrophilia wasn't common knowledge, but instead had to be explained. But hey y'all, this is the internet. Nothing is obscure.

And now, thanks to the goddamn internet, on to my first viewing of Eyeball.

Aerobicide

Aerobicide, Lord!
Tight butts in spandex; burned boobs,
Death by safety pin.

Death Spa

As the title suggests, this is a movie about people dying at a spa, which is what they sometimes called a gym in the 80s. More specifically, the owner's dead wife's ghost (played by the fake Ashley who was on The Young and the Restless for a few years while Eileen Davidson wasn't) is killing them while possessing the body of her twin brother, who still works at the spa because he's the only one who can operate the Electric Dreams-like computer that runs the place. The computer which of course is helping the Wonder Twins kill people. People who work out entirely too little for a movie about a gym.

Spoiler alert: this is an AWFUL movie. That does not mean I don't like it. I enjoyed it quite a lot. I just wish the person who wrote the incredible line, "I'm beta and you're VHS," spoken by a gay man brushing off a predatory woman, had written the rest of the screenplay.

It totally stands to reason that I could only purchase this movie as a Japanese bootleg, because it seems like something they would go for, what with the scene in which a man is sucked into a freezer and then bitten to death by a zombiefied frozen fish.

At least there is lots of gore and plenty of naked women in a group shower. I was looking through the credits and noticed Tane McClure's name. I said to my husband, "I didn't see Tane McClure in this movie," and he said, "I'm sure she was in the shower."

This has all the great 80s horror conventions. You know who the killer is from the beginning, someone gets killed being seduced by a ghost, someone uses food as foreplay, somebody gets killed while sneaking off to meet someone they shouldn't be meeting, a tanning bed scene, a sauna scene, bodies that are never found after days of lying around in the health club, and the whole thing leads up to a party that can't be cancelled where you know everyone is gonna die. There's even a song at the end that describes what went on in the movie. Then there are the bonuses: a hand in a blender, an exploding hand, an exploding torso, and Merritt Butrick rolling around on the floor in drag.

But with all that, it still manages to be only fit for those who seek out bad movies on purpose. I would say this would be great for a remake, except that you couldn't make this today. Remember, the whole plot hinges on the spa being run by a computer that only one person can operate and he's evil. Nowadays you could just fire him and bring in your second grader to run the computer for a dollar a day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and watch Aerobicide.

Fiend Without a Face

I must admit I went into Fiend Without a Face a bit reluctantly. I’m not a huge fan of 50s monster movies even under the best conditions, which would for me be such a movie presented as part of an MST3K episode. But I wanted to join the 50s Monster Mash Blogathon over at Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear because I had so much fun meeting all the classic film bloggers who participated in the Queer Film Blogathon in June. So, I chose the only 50s monster movie I could find which 1. hadn’t been chosen already and 2. was released as a part of the Criterion Collection. As it happens I chose wisely, and I’m ready to give some other monster classics a chance.

See the rest of this article at my oldest blogchild, In It For The Kills.

The Shining

Resetting the counter on this one. I wonder how many times I have seen this movie. Probably more than any movie other than Dirty Dancing, or would it be Poltergeist, maybe Every Which Way But Loose...anyway, resetting to one.

I am very excited because I saw an orb in the movie. During the scene where Wendy is talking to Danny in the apartment in the Overlook but Tony won't let Danny talk, you can see it move across her face from the top right of the screen down towards the bottom left, then across her chest from the top left to the bottom right. I don't know what it could be. I don't really believe it's a ghost. I don't know why Kubrick the perfectionist would have a little light moving around in the shot. It doesn't move in a drifty way like smoke or a dust mote; it moves purposely. What could it be? Did people know about orbs yet, and Kubrick put it in so the viewer would be like "ZOMG ghosteses eleventy11!1111?" I don't know, but I am excited.

I also noticed that the bathroom in the Overlook apartment figures very prominently in every scene in the apartment. That door is always open and sometimes the bathroom on the side takes up half the shot during a conversation. Is it foreshadowing to Jack chopping down the door, etc.?

Bathrooms in general are such a huge part of the film. I don't know what bathrooms represent in literature. Waste, wasted lives, cleansing? Sound echoes in bathrooms=echoes of events that took place? Bathrooms are cold and ghosts need cooler temps to manifest? Bathrooms are private and each of these three main characters are so alone and isolated in their own way? Some movies never show a toilet, for example (and neither did the entire Brady Bunch series) but this one has two toilets, a bidet, and a row of urinals. Not to mention the bathroom in the original apartment in Boulder in which we first see Danny talk to Tony while Jack is on his interview.

Anyway, here are some dream interpretations for dreaming about a bathroom: basic needs/desires, need to cleanse, need to release negative feelings. Doesn't really fit. Wish some English professor would tell me, or the ghost of Stanley Kubrick. But only in a dream with the Kubrick ghost thing.

People think that the scene in which Nicholson chops down the bathroom door is the scariest, but it's not. The scariest thing is the woman in room 237. I still have to check behind the shower curtain in strange bathrooms sometimes for that woman.

American Samurai (1992)

American Samurai wasn't even able to hold my attention long enough for me to take the piss out of it. I let the whole thing run, but I just couldn't focus on it. I was expecting a cheesy Best of the Best knock off and I got the cinematic equivalent of TGI Friday's appetizers from my grocer's freezer. And I say that with all due disrespect to the Iron Chef chairman who played the antagonist.

1992 is not a year I remember for good movies. Are there even ten movies I'd watch again that came out in 1992?

Okay. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Candyman, Monster in a Box, Shakes the Clown, Unforgiven, Once Upon a Time in China II, Wayne's World, Police Story 3, Ghostwatch, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Making that list took me at least thirty minutes and at least ten searches. What the hell was going on that year?