A deliberately rough and ready low budget survivalist horror flick that unfolds in real time. On the way home from a high school football game, five teenage girls get lost and wind up in a minor fender bender with an SUV when they stop off for directions at a store in the middle of nowhere. Driving briskly away from the scene of the accident, they cross over an area known ominously to locals as “The Eyes”. Soon after they are confronted by the deranged, shotgun-wielding female owner of the SUV they damaged. The madwoman makes them strip, calls them sluts and home wreckers, shouts a lot, forces them to piss at gunpoint and, after leaving them stranded for a while, returns for further violent torment.
Striving to capture the kind of intensity levels achieved by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in its portrayal of humiliation and brutality, FIVE ACROSS THE EYES appropriates the grainy handheld lo-fi look of 70’s grind house horror and exploitation movies. Bled of color and shot in long, often wobbly or out of focus takes, the movie looks amateurish on purpose. Rather than giving it a raw visual edge, this just means the experience of watching FIVE ACROSS THE EYES is akin to viewing your younger brother’s home-made torture porn films.
Talking of torture, there’s a fashionable, post-SAW emphasis in this movie on suffering and sadism, but the real suffering is felt by the audience who has to spend an hour and a half with what may be the five most irritating female protagonists in a horror movie this decade. Abrasive, constantly screaming or bickering, this shrill, whiney bunch are annoying and unsympathetic from the very start – though they’re admittedly not helped by the dire-logue (“You just don’t do that….you don’t make someone urinate over their clothes!”). Spending the entire movie with them, mostly inside their van, is arguably more of an ordeal than anything they go through.
Momentarily, the movie comes close to achieving a portion of the nasty impact it strives for. There’s a grim torture sequence conveyed entirely via horrid sound FX and a distressing reaction shot of a gagged girl. The denouement (which heavily echoes that of SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE in the same way the wrap-up of DEATH PROOF seemed inspired by the 80’s slasher) has at least an ounce of real power as a group of ordinary girls kick, stab and bludgeon the shit out of their tormentor.
Sadly, these are fleeting bright spots. The film has good intentions of being an unrelenting ordeal-horror in the vein of CHAINSAW but it comes off as obnoxious rather than intense. The dizzying no-budget “style” wears thin very quickly and the performances are horrible : even Veronica Garcia’s central nut job – who could have been a Mrs. Vorhees for the You Tube generation – overacts wildly to un-frightening effect.
Fans of screaming young women and on-screen vomiting (“God, I thought that was a sneeze!”) may get a kick out of this headache-inducing movie…but not even the Marquis De Sade could get a masochistic thrill out of the absolutely dire choice of music.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
