“Unkempt and gloomy, yet somehow radiant, the mind-bending Headless Eyes is a touch-point for every element that makes nonconformist 70s trash-horror cinema so enduring today. As soon as “The End” rolls around, you’ll want to watch it again.”
BLEEDING SKULL
Who made it? Directed by Kent Bateman | Written by Kent Bateman |
Who’s in it? Arthur Malcolm | Ramon Gordon | Kelly Swartz | Laura Betti | Ann Wells |
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
McCabe And Mrs Miller | Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song | The Omega Man | The Anderson Tapes
Production notes and whatnot
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067192/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Headless_Eyes
What’s it all about?
Ahhh! We are in familiar territory as this ghastly artsy-house over-acting student-style piece of 16mm nonsense kicks off.
The traditional “camera following feet down the dark street” to a doorway. Who can this person be? Not a good guy, as the music has BBC “Generic Spy Theme Tunes by the Geoff Love Orchestra Vol 3” all over it. But no time is wasted as we watch this criminal make his way through the door to the bedroom where a young Amy Winehouse lookalike slumbers. A grab at the costume jewellery on her bedside! She awakes! Screams! Struggles! Sound is cheap and poor but we can make out some desperation in our villain’s shouts: He needs sixty dollars for rent!
Now this should place the movie firmly in the early 70s, as 60 bucks rent in New York isn’t going to get you much these days. Without wanting to go all Monty Python Yorkshiremen, maybe a shoebox in the middle of t’motorway.
But our damsel in distress, (not “dat dress, ‘dis dress”) puts up a fight. Reaching out desperately to her dresser she grabs a nearby…spoon. Where’s a machete when you need one? (In the shed in Mario Bava’s upcoming 1971 Bay Of Blood it turns out. Stand by for that).
A spoon however is all she has. In the struggle she does her best and – among screams and shadows and hands over faces – sends the assailant spiralling away with gasps and hollers as she appears to have gouged his eye out.
Now THAT’s how you start a movie.
And we are in, our now obligatory horror-movie font with the required drippy bloody effects, to the world of 1971’s Headless Eyes.
(We will address that the movie would make more sense as “eyeless heads” at a later paragraph. I mean ALL eyes are headless. They’re eyes. You might as well call it “spleenless elbows.” Sigh.)
So we meet our “anti-hero.” Or killer. Or leading man. It’s not clear. Are we rooting for this chap? We are certainly meant to feel sorry for the blighter. I mean not even $60 to his name. Poor bloke Forced by Nixon’s economic plan to a life of eye-patches, petty theft and escalating sexual assault. All this while having to go through life resembling a genetic mash-up of Donald Pleasance, Michael Ironside and a whole dollop of Rob Reiner.
We can be thankful however that Amy Winehouse went with the “spoon to the eye” defence, rather than, say, biro to the testicles, as we are now going to drown in well over an hour of zoomy, dreamy focussed, swirling “eye” symbolism. Dots, circles, balls, mobiles, globes, spheres. You name it, the director Kent Bateman never misses an opportunity to zoom in and out of eye-imagery to hammer (horror) home the point. He’s lost an eye. He has one eye. He is monolcular. 3D cinema would be wasted on him. A monocle would be a lovely xmas gift. Rayban Wayfarers are 50% too unnecessary.
So. Where are we now?
Well the music is now a jazzy, gamelan plinky-plonky Doctor Who weirdness, much like bored teenagers tuning up before an ill-advised concert for the parents. Overture for theramin, triangle and empty bean tins. We are with our “hero.” He is a beatnik-type New York Greenwich villagey- art installation type. He has his own studio, his ow artsy gallery. A courdory jacket. The sort of nonsense favoured by Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. I mean, “straight out of Diane Arbus but with none of the wit.”
Better than that plexiglass sculpture.
Our hero however, since the spoony-eye-incident, has gone nuts. Proper psycho bat-shit bonkers. Toys in the attic. We’re not sure at this point if he was ALWAYS a straight-jacket mannequin, or if this one turn of eye-gouging has tipped him over. But either way, as he sits in his studio playing with eyeballs, frozen eyes in ice, eyes in Ziploc bags and scalpels, it’s clear he’s skipped his meds.
To better demonstrate his looniness, the director opts for rambling monologue voice-over. He sits, he cuts, he carves, he drools – all the while voices in his head muttering and mumbling. An understated Anthony Perkins performance this ain’t.
Interrupted from his ramblings, a drunken couple giggle and flirt and shriek and stumble at the window of his studio. He sneaks downstairs to watch them. They are rich and sozzled and ghastly. He is not a fan. And we’re about to find out how little a fan he is of this pair.
The non-descript pair of sauced-up socialites head back at their New York apartment as they bicker. A knock on the door and it’s you know who. Patch Adams. So they invite him in, as you do. No prizes for what happens next.
Out of his neat little suede “eye-gouching blade” pouch comes his knife and it’s ketchup and red paint akimbo as he brutally fights and struggles with them both and takes another set of orbs for his growing collection of ocular trophies for his fridge freezer.
He’s back on the street. Bloodied, bothered and bewildered. Thankfully befriended by that cinema staple, the hooker-with-a-heart. Seeing his distress, he is lead back to her apartment for brandy, a sit down and some Kleenex. But doh. His eye-collecting is far from sated so the poor prozzie gets a knife to the socket while she screams and flails in a bath full of red paint.
Next we get some context. A-ha! These are not his first victims. In a handy bit of newsreel exposition, we discover “Eye Killer Slays 14th Victim!” in a bold banner newspaper headline. Yep, looks like this has been going on the whole time we were distracted by the title sequence.
The next visitor to his studio/museum of optical atrocities, doesn’t fare much better. Although she find herself on the end of a ranty screaming self-indulgent poor-me tortured artist lecture, rather than on the end of a knife. This, y’see, is his ex-wife. She pleads with him to “get over” his eye loss and come back to society. But no. He is too far gone and bellows at her for five minutes about being “understood” and such. He doesn’t want her money, he doesn’t want her help. He is an artist! Just as Bob Hoskins once tried to explain to a hotel owner about a clearly deranged Bob Geldof in Alan Parker’s “The Wall”. “’Ee’s an arrrrrtist!”
But the investigation continues and TV reporters and vox-popsing New Yorkers about how they feel with this maniac on the streets. One can only assume these are actual New Yorkers, given their stilted and confused appearances. If they’re actors, he’s been over-charged.
Oddly, one of them looks very, very much like Jeff Goldblum. But I can assure you it’s not him. As a huge Jeff Goldblum fan completist, I’d have known if he’d been in this. JG doesn’t appear on the silver screen until Michael Winner directs him as “Freak #1” in 1974’s Death Wish.
But I digress.
He is on the run, being followed it would seem, just out of shot, by a jazz percussion band. All crazy booming timpani and crazy wah-wah Hendrixy Stratocaster action.
The music then, in a pleasant respite, goes all Howard Shore and we get a sort of version of The Fly score. Great score. Made me want to stop watching and watch Goldblum in The Fly. A feeling, to be fair, I get 6 or 7 times a day. Or an hour. Here it is. Glorious.
Our “hero” is now on a dusty sun-baked New York rooftop. I’m not sure why. On the run still I guess and staying out of the way. He follows a young lady (a blondey model-type) to an office. A lengthy sequence as he skulks and dodges her in lifts and corridors to a meeting, where he eavesdrops outside. She is indeed a model (yay). She has a portfolio. A chap on the phone argues about scripts and whatnot to an unseen writer. The woman wants work. The man asks to see her body.
It’s that sort of studio. Nice.
Finally, to a bongo-groove out, in case we forgot it was New York in 1971, she scuttles off to a pimpy looking dude in his pimpy looking dude car.
So Mr Eyes takes advantage and is back, at yawning length, to the office, to the lift, to return to find this woman’s contact details in a filing cabinet. His is disturbed (or should that be, further disturbed?) by a frumpy secretary. You remember the estate agent lady in Ghostbusters? That sort.
Anyway, he strangles her, because it’s that sort of movie. More crazy mental monologing ramblings. But to stress his mental state, he at least gives sweaty, gasping apologies as he does so. He doesn’t want to kill her. He’s sorry. But he’s going to strangle her anyway. Sorry.
He then cuts her eyes out for fear that we might have forgotten what the film is about. (What IS this film about? Well, it’s about 80mins too long).
Still, stay with me. Not much more to go. And keep repeating to yourself “he watched this so I don’t have to…he watched this so I don’t have to…”
Back home. Over more crazy Ginger Baker snazzy jazziness, he washes the eyes in one of those big “art room” school sinks. The muttering and mumbling continue to suggest this is all very much against his will. Not quite the split-personality set-up of Psycho, but he’s clearly a tormented fellow, rather than the bloodthirsty relishing of a Lecter or Krueger.
The director has much sixth-form film-student fun showing us his craziness with zooms and swirls and spirals and woozy walks to give us a sense of his fractured mind.
But meanwhile, he gets his third visitor of the movie. Unwilling to talk, he dismisses her but she leaves a note. She is a keen young art student who loves his work.
Well he has no time for that nonsense. He has graves to rob.
Yep. Graves to rob.
At this point we get the nearest thing to suspense as our “hero” and his incredibly obvious mid-afternoon grave-digging catches the attention of a dull, off duty cop.
Whoops. Much gun waving and arresting and apprehending follows.
Well, for about 2 minutes, because our hero overpowers the cop and pounds him to death with rock. So much for a twist.
Back at the studio, his female admirer has left a note and arrived to talk. She wants to learn his techniques! She admires him! She has so much to learn! Initially unresponsive to this request, our hero tries to limply sell her an eye in a cube (“Eight dollars…”) but she is persistent. Do we see a crack in his craziness? Is this young wide-eyed padowan the woman to change his ways? It seems so, as he agrees to meet her to “talk.”
And we get a lovely, almost Ephron-like Romcom walk and talk around New York as the couple meet and wander and discuss art and life. I mean, he’s no Billy Crystal. And they don’t even discuss whether hieroglyphics are an ancient comic strip about a character named “Sphinxy.”
But they are getting along. Could this be redemption?
Well not with another 20minutes to go in the running time, no.
So back to the model (remember her?) With her new found stolen address, he prowls about and finds her home. Up on the roof he overhears her making plans. “Meet at the Dock at 2pm.”
So we now get the obligatory stalking scene, straight out of Carpenter’s Halloween. The model (nobody has names in this movie) takes a nervous, guilty, scuttling, look-over-your-shoulder run to the docks, followed at snail’s pace by our plodding villain. They arrive at the set of West Side Story, it appears, and there is a chase through warehouses and ladders and docks and wharves and New York whatnot. Fearing for her life, our heroine ducks into a meat-locker. Old Eyeball follows and we half expect to catch Rocky Balboa practising his punches on the huge slabs of dead meat on frozen hooks. But the chase continues. Tension “mounts”, but it’s a bit late at this point. More Gamelan music clonks crazily, meat-knives are grabbed from workbenches, screams and fallings-over. He attacks! She fights! The dead creatures stare down at him, echoing Norman Bates’s parlour once more.
A door slams! He is locked in the freezer. “But I haven’t shown my art yet!” he pleads.
And then it’s The Shining nine years before The Shining.
Freezer door opened hours later. The eyes wide frozen body of our killer collapses, stiff as a corpse, speckled with ice. Dead. Credits. Breath out. Check watch. Eject.
Is it any good?
It’s an odd one this. Writer/director Ken Bateman has much more going for him, for better or worse, than your standard “stalk and slash” ketchupy killer thriller on the loose. Here’s a chap who has been to film-school. He has more to say than all the Friday The 13th relentless-psycho-with-a-knife teen shockers. What Bateman is doing here, in his intention at least, is to show a film about art and madness.
Our villain is an artist. A sculptor. A creativey type. There are no hockey-masks or razor gloves. Driven to desperation to survive in the world who clearly couldn’t give a flying arse about his work, his desperation leads him to a dumb act of petty theft. We discover his wife has been supporting his “failed career” all this time, a fact which fills him with frustrated rage. The stupid theft, ending with a loss of an eye, is the last straw for him, tipping him into madness. A world that cares nothing for him, a man who lives only for his art, to lose an eye. What is he now? He was very little before. Now after? Just rage and hate, bitterness and violence.
It’s a credit I think that this amount of thought has gone into creating our villain. Bateman has given him motives, means, a backstory and we have what could have been – in other hands – a terrifying story of frustration, artistic drive and psychopathology. In the hands of De Palma, or even the artsy swirling palette of Argento, this might have been quite something.
But it was in the hands of Ken Bateman. Idly doodling on the back of a pack of cigarettes, he’s hit all the cliché “how to show madness” tropes of a 17yr old goth art-student who’s been leant a cine camera for a weekend. Artsy zooms, swirling skies, booming score, focus twists, woozy wobbling sweeps, ranty voice-overs, sweat and shadows – it persistently hammers us to death with uninspired visuals that are trying so, so hard to give the film an art-house aesthetic, to raise it above Gordon Lewis’s gratuitous drive-in Blood Feast of a decade earlier.
He is let down too by performers on the lower-end of the budget, who demonstrate rage and melancholy with pantomime staring and ranting, teeth gritted eyes-wide mania. One can almost picture Bateman shouting “more! Again! With more yelling! Shouty! More shouty!” at his cast, desperate as he is to demonstrate all the clichés of “madness.”
Because take this am-dram, film-school, shoot-it-with-your-mates aspect out of it and it’s just a drive-in, killer on the loose movie. And not a very good one.
The music is doing most of the heavy lifting and comes from the “more is more” school of piling-on drums and sound effects. The lighting is all glaring shadows, over lit and under lit.
The “frozen in the freezer” ending, coming eventually when it does, is a long breathe out. Not from suspense. But just the tired, stretchy “thank god” end you feel after an 8hr plane journey.
But finally, what really marks it out as an ambitious dud is the confusion between “suspense” and “boredom.” Given we know at the end of each, achingly long tortuous scene of following up and down stairs, corridors, in and out of lifts, up and down streets, in and out of cars, is another off-screen bloody squirty murder, we just want the film to bloody well get on with it. A great script and director could have a man following a woman in an elevator as nerve-shredding, pulse-pounding edge of your seat “quick! Run! He’s behind you!” and the longer the scene, the more tense we’d get.
Sadly this is an art and our director doesn’t have it. Waiting for a lift in Headless Eyes is duller than actually waiting for an actual lift.
Hitchcock knew how to create tension and suspense. Sadly Kent Bateman is no Hitchcock.
Hell, he’s not even Kent Brockman.
Nasty?
It’s not pleasant. But it’s far from gory. Yes, the attacks – as we are discovering on this journey – are agressive madmen on screaming women which is unstomachable for many and part of the banned-video stable of tropes. Not sure if you can have a stable of tropes. Collective name for tropes? A cliché of tropes? Anyhoo. The tension is zero so it’s fine in that respect, and all the murders/eye gougings actually appear, as it were, off screen. At no time do spoons touch eyes, it’s all shot from behind and created with the suggestion. Blood, scream, growling, writhing. And then pull backs to reveal blood-smeared faces. In fact the scenes in the producer’s office are shot with the victim actually off screen and out of frame. So yes. Nasty. Not one for BBC Xmas Day viewing. But you’d be hard pushed to find a still image of knives and flesh.
Ban worthy?
Tch. Rediculous. Just, as we’ve said, keep it on the top shelf. And choose other films. So far, from what we’ve trawled through, it’s one of the less bloodthirsty. We’ll talk more on this page later about how and why movies were banned during the 1980s. How tastes changed, how authorities had sketchy lists based on rumours and cover-art and scaremongering. But infinitely tamer than the Rob Zombie tortury “Hostel” stuff that’s now available on Netflix to anyone with a remote control.
What does it remind me of?
Headless Eyes nods along to many other pictures, riding a wobbly Fail-Army wobble on the coat-tails of some classics.
The pleading and sorrow of our killer as he murders against his will is reminiscent of the glorious Richard Attenborough weeping and apologising and “shush”ing his victims in 10 Rillington Place.
The footage of New York is lovely – all handheld and echoing traffic honks and steam-billowing grates and lovely 70s nightlife hipsters. Both Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver) and Ralph D Bode (Saturday Night Fever) would enjoy the groovy images.
The ending, as mentioned, is a pre-empting of The Shining. But the aesthetic actually is nearest to a fine bit of British comedy you may have missed. Writer/comedian Matthew Holness has an alter ego (based apparently on novelist Shaun Hutson), named Garth Merenghi. You can see his pastiche of flimsy Brit sci-fi “Darkplace” here.
But what some won’t know is another one of his comedy characters Randolph Caer, a washed-up actor and “star” of some nasty exploitation movies called “Bitch Killer.”
The love and care put into these mock-trailers by Holness and co is a delight. Anyway, point it, Headless Eyes is pretty much what Bitch Killer is parodying.
Where to find it?
It’s on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvPi9G09jDM
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 