EYES OF THE BEHOLDER starts off with such promise that its subsequent unraveling is all the more disappointing. With its eerie credit sequence, featuring the art work of the deranged protagonist, its Bernard Hermann-esque score, and chillingly effective tracking shots as the killer surveys
his victims' home, the film promises to be a scary sleeper. But as the plot grows more and more labyrinthine, the movie slowly falls apart.
After forcibly trading places with his psychiatrist Dr. Carlyle (Matt McCoy) at an institute for the criminally insane, convicted psycho-killer Janice Bickle (Lenny Von Dohlen) stays a step ahead of the pursuing police, and several steps ahead of Carlyle, his wife Diana (Joanna Pacula), and
their house guests, Jack Wyman (George Lazenby) and Holly Brandon (Kylie Travis). Nursing a grudge against Dr. Carlyle--a Freudian Frankenstein who helped his colleague, Dr. Medaris (Paul Ben-Victor) tampers with Bickle's brain during some questionable experimental surgery--Bickle murders three
men: Dr. Medaris, a gas station attendant who sneers at him, and a police guard at Carlyle's house. Systematically cutting off his victims from the outside world (abetted by that horror film staple, the thunderstorm), Bickle commences an evening of sadistic fun and games. Shooting Wyman once to
prevent escape, Bickle wounds him again just for giving him backtalk. Maliciously watching his captive audience squirm, Bickle regales them with his longwinded philosophy of life and a series of diatribes against shrinks. After spurning Holly's desperate sexual advances, Bickle drags Diana
upstairs so he can destroy what the doctor loves most. Although tossed off the second story, the injured Carlyle follows Bickle and Diana to a bridge seriously weakened by the storm. After some scuffling, Bickle takes a fatal plunge.
By the time the homicidal maniac takes his final swim, he and the other principal characters have already talked this thriller to death. All those static scenes of discussion about the definition of insanity, all that digression about crime and the creative urge, and all that debate about the
God-complexes of psychiatrists make this stilted psychodrama less a suspense film than a philosophy treatise masquerading as one; the result feels less like a movie than group therapy run by a serial killer. The concept of having the killer be the interlocutor must have seemed promising on paper,
but Bickle isn't flamboyant enough and the neuroses of his victims are listlessly conveyed.
The film attempts to use the Old Dark House setting as a psychological arena in which the characters can fall apart before our eyes; we're meant to feel that they're as threatened by their own imperfections as they are by that maniac holding them captive. Unfortunately, the film keeps repeating
the same points about Dr. Carlyle's lack of ethics and the killer's kinship with the doctor's neglected wife. The film never takes the characters' railing against each other to a deeper level, nor does Bickle truly seem to orchestrate their collapse. The followthrough of his cruel entrapment is
flatly written and crudely directed. As the dialogue strangles the tension out of the film, the camerawork becomes more and more mundane. Oddly, it's as if the madman were directing the film---as his petulant psychobabbling runs its course, the film disintegrates and loses any semblance of
purpose. (Extensive violence, nudity, profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment
