EYES OF A STRANGER: They Don’t Stalk & Slash Like This Anymore

The mas­sive glut of slasher films unleashed dur­ing the first half of the 1980’s tend to linger in the col­lec­tive uncon­scious of hor­ror fans.  Everybody into this era of the genre has favorites, non-favorites and odd­ball obses­sions that they take a shine to for their own per­sonal rea­sons.  Eyes Of A Stranger is a good exam­ple of the lat­ter cat­e­gory.  It’s not quite a clas­sic but it has enough quirks and inspired touches to stick in the memory.

For exam­ple, the setup offers some inter­est­ing twists on the boil­er­plate slasher setup.  As expected, there’s a killer (John DiSanti) who directs his rage into sex­u­ally assault­ing and killing women.  This time, it hap­pens in Miami instead of a sum­mer camp.  Reports of his crimes are a fix­ture of local news and a par­tic­u­lar obses­sion for Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes of The Love Boat).  She has her rea­sons: her younger sis­ter Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) was kid­napped and assaulted as a lit­tle girl, caus­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal block that has left her deaf, dumb and blind.  Jane soon dis­cov­ers the killer lives in her dual-tower apart­ment build­ing.  She starts to call him anony­mously and the killer takes it very personally…

In key respects, Eyes Of A Stranger is a con­ven­tional slasher: there are plenty of cat & mouse sequences com­plete with gra­tu­itous nudity and P.O.V. cam­er­a­work, a few gory slash­ings (includ­ing a severed-head gag), a scene in a strip club with a really wild dancer and lots of ladies in dan­ger.   On the other hand, it has main­stream thriller ambi­tions inspired by better-known films, like a third act that cribs heav­ily from Rear Window and Wait Until Dark.  This odd dual­ity came from the film being begun as a straigh­for­ward thriller, only for the pro­duc­ers to decide to make it a slasher mid-production and bring on FX whiz Tom Savini to beef up the gore con­tent.  The shifts between these extremes is often jar­ring but that adds to the excite­ment of watch­ing it — you never quite know if you’re going to get grind­house thrills or Hitchcockian sus­pense around the next corner.

The script isn’t par­tic­u­larly sharp in terms of dia­logue or char­ac­ter­i­za­tion but it off­sets these flaws with the afore­men­tioned unique plot hooks and a clean, direct style of sto­ry­telling.  Lauren Tewes over­does the wide-eyed emo­tion­al­ism in some scenes but oth­er­wise makes a com­pe­tent lead.  Better yet, she is backed up by fan­tas­tic per­for­mances from DiSanti and Leigh.  The killer is writ­ten as a repressed schlub who strug­gles to keep his impulses under wraps instead of a rant­ing loony and DiSanti gives the char­ac­ter a nicely under­played per­for­mance that sim­mers with ner­vous ten­sion.  Leigh is sim­i­larly sub­tle in her depic­tion of her character’s hand­i­caps and does some won­der­fully expres­sive non-verbal act­ing when endan­gered.  The third act is prac­ti­cally a two-hander for this duo and they give it their all.

However, the best part of Eyes Of A Stranger is Ken Weiderhorn’s direc­tion.  Even with the producer’s inter­fer­ence, he man­ages to cre­ate a nice bal­ance of shocks and sus­pense as he cre­ates and sus­tains a gen­uinely unnerv­ing, dread-filled atmos­phere from start to fin­ish.  His key tools are a shiv­ery musi­cal score from Richard Einhorn that blends strings and elec­tron­ics to omi­nous effect and moody, skill­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy by Mini Rojas.  Rojas in par­tic­u­lar deserves spe­cial praise for his work: each set­piece is lit and shot with great care, jux­ta­pos­ing shad­ows with bold splashes of pri­mary color to often daz­zling effect.  Weiderhorn uti­lizes the skills of his crew with great pre­ci­sion, cre­at­ing a film that is far more craft-intensive than you would expect from a slasher-flick quickie.

Thus, hor­ror his­to­ri­ans are likely to find Eyes Of A Stranger to be a solid choice when they are in a nos­tal­gic mood for early-1980’s chills.  It doesn’t rein­vent the sub­genre but the results cre­ate a spooky mood that sticks with you afterwards.