Today see’s the UK DVD release of Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen’s grossly effective slasher-type horror flick ‘Five Across the Eyes’. I, for one, had no idea as to what to expect from this nasty little experience and had only really been drip fed on recent various tele-visual marketing campaigns. From here it just looked like a normal run-of-the-mill screaming teenage girlies running around wildly in the dark trying to avoid their twisted persuer whilst being bested over and over again even though they clearly outnumber the psycho. Well, that isn’t a million miles away from the basic concept of ‘Five Across the Eyes’.
Five teenage girls utilise their women’s intuitions and legendary feminine sense of direction and get lost on what surely should have been a routine return journey from a high school football game. They stop to get directions at an in-the-middle of nowhere type store and are pointed in the direction of an area known locally as ‘The Eyes’ (get it!). After a brief moment of immatureness the girls somehow manage to get involved in a minor collision with a parked car and after some lacklustre acting and dialogue that almost made me roll my eyes and reach for the remote they decide to speed off and to not look back (would a note pinned to the windscreen have really hurt?).
Minutes later they find theirselves the victims of what appears to be a revenge attack from the owner of the recently damaged SUV. And man is she pissed! She chases them down and leaps from her vehicle brandishing a gun and screams for the girls to get out their car and humilate them by undressing and even getting one of the poor bints to piss all over the ready pile of clothes. Why? I’ve no idea. Maybe I should continue to watch, maybe I’ll find out just what this crazeee bitches’ motivation is. Has she just been refused an insurance quote from Sheila’s Wheels? Is it an extreme case of time of the month and the local store was fresh out of sanitary products? Well, let me save you the trouble, because this is one of the unanswered branches of this very strange movie.
The acting (from all 5 girls) is pretty low par. I mean it’s clearly a massively low-budget production from start to end and for some of these girls it’s probably a break in. However, we’re practically forced into watching five mentalists scream and cry for at least two thirds of the movie. Even to the extent at some points I couldn’t even make out what was being said. So that brings me neatly into the production values itself.
The movie is filmed uniquely from the point of view of the inside of the girls car. In fact, from recollection, all the action is filmed from within and the camera never leaves. Some could argue, a great idea, fresh and challenging. But most will likely chalk that down to budget restrictions. The camerawork was dizzying to say the least at times and the picture was constantly grainy. Lighting, sound and camerawork was all pretty shoddy. I even spotted a couple of times the camera lost focus. Think Blair Witch on 8 cans of Stella.
Yet, someone needs to explain to me just why I wanted to watch to the end. For some unknown reason I was drawn into the movie and almost felt I needed closure. I could have turned it off at any moment in pure disgust but something gripped me enough to want to carry on watching and waiting for the overall conclusion (which by the way simply turns out to be a crappy in-joke).
OVERALL SUMMARY
The acting was a bit of a mixed bag and the production was overly amateurish. It could have done with about 25 minutes of less-screaming. ‘Five Across the Eyes’ is quite unique to most things I’ve seen recently, but that doesn’t mean it’s fresh and original by any stretch of the imagination. The flick even manages to squeeze practically every bodily fluid into it…there’s wee-wee, poo-poo, sicky uppy, blood and nastiness. There’s torturous and humiliation scenes and some are a little unsettling and feel a little like an overly forced facility for possible shock-value.
