This gritty low-fi teen terror flick features five young girls on their way home from a football game who find themselves being chased across an area known locally as The Eyes by a psycho lady trucker whose car they’ve damaged.
The film is of the lowest possible quality with no real production values. Instead, every shot is taken from inside the protagonists’ van with only car lights and flashlights to highlight the action.
The five young girls who are all newcomers do alright, but at times are too screechy and made to endure stupid script moves, such as the lady who runs into barbed wire and then decides to cover her entire face in sticking plaster with her back to the killer whilst she is rampaging around nearby with a shotgun.
The villain is seven kinds of crazy and is actually quite memorable; making the ladies do all kinds of nasty, scuzzy things such as (beware of spoilers) “tinkle on their clothes”. That’s just for starters too, and it doesn’t take her long to warm up, as she’s soon ripping out teeth with pliers and raping them with screwdrivers.
Five Across the Eyes is incredibly gritty and would have been completely shocking had it not been for an unbalanced tone which sees the girls fleeing in terror one moment and then laughing about things as they toss their own faeces onto the antagonist’s windshield in a car chase, spouting choice nuggets (pardon the pun) of dialogue such as the comments made to the young lady who had just (and I’m paraphrasing here) snapped off a cigar in her own hand.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Most horror critics who have seen this film have been overwhelmingly positive about it and most horror fans have hated it. I am stuck somewhere in between. FATE (as the filmmakers call it) is a surprisingly different, highly ambitious, decidedly sickening tale of terror. It’s also poorly made and at times poorly written, opting instead to use its indie card to achieve sympathy and cult status.
