★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Austin Jennings
Eight Eyes is about an insufferable hipster couple named Cass (Emily Sweet) and Gav (Bradford Thomas) who are traveling in Belgrade, Serbia. They crash a wedding and the next day run into one of the guests who introduces himself to them as Saint Peter (Bruno Veljanovski) and offers to show them around. This being a horror movie, they decide to abandon their scheduled sightseeing plans to go with him and soon find themselves in a nightmare they can’t escape. Vacation horror tropes ensue…
Eight Eyes is shot on 16mm as an homage to the cinema of the 70’s. It has top notch performances from Sweet and Veljanovski, but it never really “goes there” in the extreme way I expected and hoped for. What drew me to this was the description that the film was “shocking and sure to disturb” in the festival program, but it did not meet those criteria.
The climax of the film, while visually pretty cool, didn’t land for me and its mind-bending turn felt weird for the sake of being weird rather than serving the plot. Perhaps I am just way too desensitized because I can’t help but think the film tried so hard to be edgy but watched like Hostel lite with sprinkled with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…This film will definitely find an audience and I am so disappointed that I’m not going to be in it because I had such high hopes for this film.
Eight Eyes had its World Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival and it is the inaugural title for Vinegar Syndrome Pictures. Stay tuned to The Scariest Things to find out when the film will be headed next.