Deadly Eyes (1982)

After a very dry, but stern, lecture from the amiable Professor Louis Spencer (Cec Linder), high school (?) teacher Paul (Sam Groom) plays dumb (it’s actually more like he’s simply disingenuously oblivious) to the amorous advances of student Trudy (Lisa Langlois).  Off to a good start.  Meanwhile, Department of Health worker Kelly (Sara Botsford) condemns tons of corn contaminated with steroids (she doesn’t need to test it to know there’s ‘roids in there) and sets it all on fire at night (maybe because she hasn’t been to a bonfire in years and wants to relive some of her youth?).  What does this all have to do with mutant rats?  Well, the rodents were living in the corn (surely they realized this gravy train wouldn’t last forever) and now they have to move on and find different accommodations.  And food.

I have never read James Herbert’s The Rats, the novel on which Robert Clouse’s Deadly Eyes (aka Night Eyes) is ostensibly based, though it has been on my list of things to do for some time.  Truth be told, I have never read any of James Herbert’s work, but from what little I know of him, I imagine his style and approach to horror is similar to that of Guy N. Smith, an author whom I have read.  As I was watching this film, I was put in mind of Smith, and I believe that his pulpy, exploitive approach (and I can only assume Herbert’s by extension, because these are the sort of tenuous connections that partially ameliorate my existential angst, and, to be fair, exploitation in pop culture has been around about as long as pop culture, so…) is what informs much of its appeal.  In a Smith novel, there is a bland protagonist.  Said protagonist has at least one child (almost invariably one child) who will be placed in harm’s way.  The protagonist has marital troubles.  The protagonist is seduced by another woman and, at least in Smith’s world, succumbs.  There’s some torrid sex (with the temptress or not, but usually with).  There are graphic scenes of violence wherein background characters are ripped to shreds by whatever beastie is the antagonist.  This extends to the idea that absolutely no character, young or old, man or woman, is safe (one of the more interesting aspects of things like this).  The protagonist does something mildly heroic to defeat whatever malevolence he confronts.  Life returns to some semblance of normality, though it’s still pretty bleak, all things considered.  All of these elements are represented in Deadly Eyes, if not specifically, then at least in as much as they can be in a mainstream horror film.  Let’s take them one at a time.

Paul is dispassionate.  He’s as go-along-to-get-along as a person can be.  The main excitement in his life is deciphering the instructions on a Hungry Man frozen dinner.  He is an Everyman to the nth degree, and rather than allow us to empathize with his workaday life, his monotonous existence simply bores (Paul, all you have to do is look at the photo on the box to determine which compartment on a frozen dinner tray houses the dessert).  Paul has a son, Tim (Lee-Max Walton), who is just as uninteresting as his old man, but Paul needs a direct reason to get involved in what’s going on in his city, so Tim is present in the story. Plus, children in peril equal instant dramatic tension.  Paul has an ex-wife whom we never see, but we’re told that all she does is harangue Paul with ex-wife things.  Trudy is hot for teacher, and she handles these feelings with the subtlety of a compound fracture.  She fantasizes about banging him, because she thinks that older men are all that, and dumb teenaged boys (like her current beau Matt [Joseph Kelly]) are immature (mentally and physically [read: boys just want to party and have sex, a theory which makes little sense since Trudy just wants to party and have sex but with an older guy]).  In fact, she goes so far as showing up at Paul’s apartment and hanging out in his bedroom in nothing but her skivvies (while clueless Timmy sits in the parlor praying to the church of the cathode ray).  She even makes a show of bending over to pick up her jeans for both Paul and the audience (in classic Eighties fashion, they’re brown).  Paul is tepidly exasperated by all this.  Yet, it’s the taboo angle of this subplot that generates interest (prurient or other, but mostly prurient), even if it’s not developed or paid off all that well (not that they had to have sex, but that it’s all so blindingly superficial, something for which we can’t really hold an exploitative horror film accountable).  Kelly is the other temptress (if one can be tempted away from an ex-wife), but at least she is age appropriate to Paul.  I was a little surprised at how salacious their sex scene is (nipple sucking is involved, something I can’t think of happening all that often in mainstream cinema, even on the low budget end, but I admit I’m pretty naïve sometimes).  Just about every character we meet in the film is gnawed on by the rats, and there is blood galore.  Early on in the film, a toddler is killed (offscreen), so we know that everyone (including dull, wee Timmy) is on the menu for the rat feast.  Paul has a swift, entirely not-thought-all-the-way-through brainstorm on how to defeat the rats, which anyone with half a brain would realize likely wouldn’t be as thorough as Paul thinks it will be.  Finally, you get the bludgeoningly (I’m just making up words now) obvious “shock” ending; perhaps the only facet that strays (just a little) from the work of Smith and company, but this is a horror film from the early Eighties, so fair play.  Thus concludes this study in parallelism.  

Films like this are the filmic equivalents of “beach reads,” and on that level, they typically work fairly well.  I found myself enjoying much of Deadly Eyes, though whether this is because of my interest in pulp horror or not is a bit muddy in my head.  I don’t think that you need to like books like Night of the Crabs in order to like this film.  The film ticks all the boxes it needs to tick for exploitation/horror fare, and though it and books like it are close in method, they are far enough apart to intrigue in slightly different ways (while still fulfilling the same fantasies).  I also thought the special effects were effective, even knowing that the rats in long shots are small dogs in large rat costumes, and the puppets for the closeups were repulsive enough to please my gorehound side.  The big issue with the film (and unfortunately it’s big enough to drag the experience down, the same of which can be said of novels of this ilk) is that it’s poorly structured.  We get a little exposition, a little melodrama (none of which is handled here with anything approaching the appropriate level of emotion), and a little exploitation (sex or violence or both).  Anything that may have been intriguing to develop (including and especially the characters’ relationships) remains unmolded.  After much build up, the Trudy subplot is forgotten about for longer than it should have been, and then is dispatched out of hand simply to set up one of the big, chaotic set pieces of the climax (which also feels more obligatory than anything else in the sense that teens in horror films need to be punished for being teens).  So, while I like this film, and I do see myself revisiting it, I can’t say it reaches pantheon levels of low budget horror.  Unless you’re a fan of dogs in rat costumes.

MVT:  The rat attacks work well.  They’re nasty enough and revolting enough and bloody enough, and that’s really all they need to be.

Make or Break:  The attack on the child was somewhat shocking (and rather deftly handled), and it lets us know the high stakes of the film’s threat.

Score:  6.5/10

The Nest (1988)

Cuckoos are arguably the most interesting of birds one can imagine (feel free to debate this amongst your friends).  They are not especially attractive, to be sure, and they are most popularly known as the signal for the start of a new hour on some old-fashioned clocks (you know, those things that used to tell time for us and that made the Swiss so very famous according to Harry Lime [okay, among other things]).  Even more striking though, is the connotation attached to these avians as symbols of insanity (and this is even sometimes tied in with their role as alarms; just look at any one of dozens of cartoons for further proof).  What a lot of folks don’t think of, or maybe just don’t know, is for some cuckoos’ propensity for brood parasitism.  For you non-ornithologists/zoologists/what-have-yous, this refers to their practice of laying their eggs in the nests of other bird types and allowing those suckers to raise their young so the cuckoos can go along their merry way, whooping and partying it up.  Naturally, these parasites are something of a danger to their hosts, and if the animal kingdom (and yes, even the humans in it) has taught us anything, it is that nature can be both beautiful and brutal, and often both at the same time.

Cockroaches (maybe not so much like the ones in Terence Winkless’ The Nest) don’t (to my knowledge) engage in brood parasitism, but they do have a much more aggressively invasive policy, and due to their dietary/hygienic habits, they are typically seen as vermin and worthy of extinction.  I know I see them that way (especially after the time one scuttled across my face while I was  sleeping [many moons ago when I was living in a basement apartment; never do that if you can help it] and then survived my smacking it with the flat of my palm).  I’m sure there are those who would frown upon violence to these exoskeleton-having Larry Dallases.  I’m not one of them.  

In the small Massachusetts (?) town of North Port, hunky sheriff Richard Tarbell (Franc Luz) maintains homespun order over a plucky cast of characters (read: future victims).  When ex-squeeze Beth (Lisa Langlois) arrives back on the island after four years gone, Richard has to figure out just what he wants (and seeing as how he’s dating the island restaurateur Lillian [Nancy Morgan], he would do well to get his shit sorted out).  It doesn’t help any that Beth’s dad Elias (Robert Lansing) hates Richard with a fiery passion or that there are flesh-eating cockroaches plaguing the community.  Did I bury the lead on that last one?

Being an amalgam of so many films (The most prominent of which being [again] JAWS, with everything from the everyman cop character to the score, to the tourist concern of money over safety, to the coastal town setting, to the spirited secretary doling out the lowdown on various town denizens [and whom we never know as anything other than a voice]), The Nest’s charm lies in its tone as a “summer read”/”beach read” film (not surprising, since it’s based on a novel by Eli Cantor, and no, I have not read it).  These are the kinds of stories that don’t require much in the way of heavy lifting (not to say that they’re empty).  They are loaded with melodramatic elements, a little (sometimes a lot) of sex, and a little (sometimes a lot) of graphic violence.  But more than that, they are largely about stringing together sweet spots into a (usually) coherent whole that passes the time nicely.  

Going a large way in accomplishing this is the colorful cast, all of whom are archetypes bordering on stereotypes, and all of whom are individuated by their exaggerated appearances and their firm roles as likable monster chow (again, mostly; there are, after all, exceptions to every rule).  So we get folks like Church (Jeff Winkless, who I’m thinking is related to the director somehow), the short order cook who wears a dopey hat and hovers over his grill with a stogie perennially stuffed in his pie hole.  We get folks like Jenny (Heidi Helmer), the dimwitted teenager, who flits around on roller-skates, radio headphones plastered to her head (the better to ignore looming danger).  And lest we forget, the town lush/cuckoo Jake (Jack Collins), who spends his time cackling, stealing crap, and shooting rats in his junkyard home.  Nevertheless, while they’re all cartoons to some degree or another, they are never offensively so.  Consequently, they make for memorable victims.  We’re not overly saddened to see them go, but we do think back to their time onscreen, and it doesn’t feel entirely wasted.  Of course, it helps a lot that the how of their deaths and the aftermaths of them are nigh-equally notable.  I don’t know a great many people who can name the old man who first comes into contact with 1958’s The Blob (it’s Olin Howland, for your information), but I do know a great many who can recognize him on sight and could describe in detail everything that happens to him once that meteor splits open.  These characters could be anyone, being little more than plot engines, but they are just distinct enough that we remember them to some extent (maybe not forever and ever, but still…).

There is also a nice little psychosexual element, and it’s embodied primarily by the antagonists.  The relationship between Elias and Beth is, to put it mildly, icy and awkward.  We are given a rather dark explanation for this, but I am convinced there is something else under the surface of it; something more incestuous.  This is only augmented by Lansing’s presence in the film (and the man looks as if he would like to be just about anywhere else), his oddly guilty, hangdog performance, and a payoff that makes the threat physical (and just a bit creepier).  More overt is the character of Dr. Morgan Hubbard (Terri Treas), the scientist in charge of the roaches.  She delights in thumbing her nose at Richard and Elias, claiming a masculine side to rival theirs (and unlike the other two women in the film, she has no stated interest in any male in the cast).  Most intriguing, however, is her interaction with the insects.  As they bite into her hand, her expression takes on a gleam of sexual stimulation.  Observing the roaches further mutations, she reacts as if she’s taking in a particularly tasty piece of eye candy.  This could explain her rather erratic behavior in the film, but between cuckoos and cockroaches, I suppose personal preferences are bound to vary.

MVT:  I absolutely adore the physical effects in this movie.  They’re gruesome, and imaginative, and just delightful whenever they appear.  But I love physical effects, so I’m biased.  

Make Or Break:  The first kill in the film is the Make for me.  Between the solid editing, the bug’s eye POV, and the grisly results, it satisfies like a Snickers.  It doesn’t hurt that I found the victim more sympathetic than most.  You’ll see what I mean when you watch the film.  

Score:  6.75/10