The Headless Eyes (1971)

From https://img.reelgood.com/content/movie/
71c7fa53-0c1e-4230-9044-e585c0e5c6e0/poster-780.jpg

Director: Kent Bateman

Screenplay: Kent Bateman

Cast: Bo Brundin as Arthur Malcolm; Gordon Ramon; Kelley Swartz; Mary Jane Early

Synopsis: After a bungled home robbery leaves him without an eye, artist Arthur Malcolm (Arthur Malcolm) goes further off the deep end as he secretly kills women for their eyes, using them for his plastic mould sculptures.

The father of Jason Bateman and Justine Bateman, Kent Bateman among directing a few films and television, and producing Teen Wolf Too (1987), also made and wrote this dirty little film named The Headless Eyes. Knee deep in the American independent genre industry in 1971, which writer/musician Stephen Thrower has famously chronicled beyond just that year in the book Nightmare U.S.A., this feels like the weird uncle of Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979), also filmed in New York City. Ferrara's mainstream debut* was a grim-fest where an artist eventually loses his mind and goes on a kill-frenzy with a battery powered electric drill; imagine that with an artist who is already insane here and replaced Ferrara himself in that role with Swedish actor Bo Brundin, who in a really odd but interesting detail learnt for this review got a few mainstream roles from the late seventies into the eighties, one-off roles in major TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and The A-Team. Not bad considering here, with his thick accented English and looming insane look as a deranged eye patch wearing killer who rips eyes out for his art, this is as weird and grimy a movie to appear as you could get as an actor, the kind that with one look at it would cause someone to want to be in the other room for you. As I'll get into later on, that's not a cheap joke at Brundin's expense; instead, it feels appropriate the entire viewing experience that you feel uncomfortable even the how the lead acts.

The film immediately lets you in on what's going to be witnessed in the introductory scene - Brundin's character is introduced over a woman in her bed, with intentions to rob her, only to get the King Lear treatment and have an eye spooned out. The soundtrack from then repeats the same screaming of his, as he flails himself out of her apartment into the street in front of bystanders, the same sound bite over and over again about his eye ad nauseum. This makes one aware as well a larger part of the film's weirdness is it being a very low budget production where logic was a subjective thing, budgets were low and experimentation was encouraged, even if not sure of what it was doing.

Filmed in New York City, the environment itself is part of the feeling of needing a shower immediately after the viewing. A run down metropolis, utterly against sixties idealism already from a few years before just in the atmosphere felt, the hippies long drugged out and in-between claustrophobic rooms to tacky living room aesthetics a sense everyone's trapped in a confined space, something that'd seep even into big Hollywood productions through the decade. Our lead Arthur Malcolm himself, in the middle of this, is already a distinct figure, pronounced accent and forcefulness in his performance alongside the giant black eye patch. The character's also already mad when he starts, after the eye gouging introduction, and whilst it's a series of clichés from past and future films, obsessed with preserving beauty and clearing away "filthy" women, paranoid and proto-Driller Killer angst as an artist, Brundin's performance is legitimately creepy and freakish as he rambles to himself. Partially as much of this is accidental, as I suspect a lot of the film is post-synched in sound, but as much of it is because, whether he could have been a varied actor beyond this one film, he fits here looking and acting like a legitimately deranged person.

Arguably the film's a directionless mess - most of it is lengthy scenes of Arthur Malcolm pursuing victims, eventually becoming obsessed with a blonde female actress which lasts a long time and is the only backbone to a work which feels like a lingering nightmare instead. The film only shows some sense of progression a few times only to uncut them in the lead's sense of isolated psychosis - such as when his girlfriend appears, a middle class figure whose class and his neurosis created a wedge between them, or a young woman who wants to learn his art he tries to distance himself from. Structurally The Headless Eyes is a screenwriting class's worst nightmare as a result. Eventually concluding with the killer finding himself in a meat locker, being creped out by dead animals staring at him when he accomplishes a gruesome murder and eye gorging, the cheap gore and animal eyes certainly gross, the film ends with an anti-climax. A legitimately cold experience unless one was prepared for the ridiculous in odd films like this.

In general, production wise, The Headless Eyes befits this material even if it's a grungy, far from perfect work. Something shot by chance, with "stolen" shots or whatever was available. The music itself kept me on edge too, a druggy seventies mess of post psychedelia and what I expect would be the audio equivalent of taking crack, not since Psyched by the 4D Witch (1973) the burn out of late sixties music felt and staining my ear canals. It's a dishevelled mess which argues that, whilst an ugly mass, technical sloppiness if implemented again on purpose could add a greater sense of creepiness that cannot be mustered with a professional orchestral score exception in the best cases. Here in its accidental form it provides a lot of freakishness even if the material can be unintentionally hilarious.

Abstract Spectrum: Disturbing/Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

In lieu to the long anticipation I had for The Headless Eyes, it's not an American oddity in the truest sense, and I'd advise caution for a film like this one. It's at times a film even at a short length for a feature feels too long and out stays its welcome, but it makes up for it in what a mad experience it is if you can tolerate it. For us who've willingly dived into the currents of US independent made horror, it's a fascinating scuzz fest, one of those films which tap into an actual dark subterranean of their culture at the time.

From https://www.mondo-digital.com/headlesseyes5.jpg

=====

* Note that Ferrara's first feature length film was the porn film 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976). Whilst rumours exist of an actual Western re-release, nothing has materialised in 2019 yet.