Review: Five Across the Eyes
Posted by bob in Reviews on September 23rd, 2008
I always wonder about the taste and training of people who review horror movies at other sites. Often I wonder if we’re watching the same movie. Such is the case with Five Across the Eyes, released on DVD today by Anchor Bay. The film, shot for next to nothing, attempts to do an in-your-face horror movie but all you really get is dark, shaky noise.
Five teenage girls are lost after a high school event and wander onto roads unfamiliar to them. After a fender bender, they flee the scene and later seem to be tracked by an SUV with one headlight and a whacked-out driver bent on revenge. Can they find their way home before the driver, a woman with a riffle, gets to them first?
Well, she gets to them repeatedly and inflicts unghastly horrors upon them. What does she do, and how does she do them? That’s awfully hard to tell in the underlit movie, co-directed by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen. The girls encounter the woman, shriek a lot, run around a lot, and wind up escaping a little bloodier and a little dirtier for their efforts but exactly what happens is murky.
The worst problem is that Swinson’s screenplay does so little to make the five girls distinctive so they’re all bitchy, they’re all screaming and none of them can act. We have no idea what they’re saying to one another more than half the time and the rest we can discern and discover we could care less.
There’s the whole notion that five teenagers today would be caught without a single cell phone or that they’d be coming home from high school and find themselves in totally unfamiliar surroundings. And why the bleak, desolate area they’re riding in is called The Eyes remains unexplained.
Shot on video with handheld cameras, the herky-jerky feel grows tedious as you lose focus on what’s happening, where and to whom. As we discover the gruesome things the stalker has done to the others, she grows in our mind as a real threat, but things like whys and wherefores are never forthcoming.
The violence is unbelievably marred by unrealistic makeup effects to match the shrieking dialogue. Every time the girls drive away, their hunter always manages to find them but always is coming out of the shadows which makes little sense given her headlight, backlights and sound of tires on gravel. Our sense of disbelief is never put on the shelf and we’re constantly stopping to wonder how this could be.
And let’s face it, any movie that has five girls stripping down and showing nothing to the audience is an unforgivable cheat.
The ambition is not matched by the execution and all in all, this is a wasted effort and 90 minutes you won’t get back.
