Synopsis
He's out there… Out of sight, and out of his mind!
A New York artist gouges eyes out with a spoon after the same is done to him.
The Headless Eyes
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Executive Producers
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Alternative Titles
Headless Eyes, Bloodthirsty Butchers
Genre
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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USA
Releases by Country
USA
08 Jan 1971
- Theatrical double feature w/ "The Ghastly Ones"
Popular reviews
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I was apparently unable to reach the required number of bong hits to make this fully work for me, and yet there's a lot about this grungy, inelegant and slightly experimental little exercise in proto-slasher mayhem, directed by the father of Jason and Justine Bateman (!), that I truly appreciate.
It's a scuzzy, yet arty piece of unconventional celluloid...telling the tale of a struggling artist who, after getting his eye scooped out with a spoon during an attempted robbery, starts stalking victims in order to kill them and take their eyes. The vision providing organs become the centerpieces of his new work (who wouldn't admire a hanging mobile of actual human eyes). Yeah...I like the setup to the plot too,…
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👾Daily Horror Hunt #26 (Aug. 2020)👾
[24] Watch a horror centered around a fear you have (ommetaphobia).Yeah, I can't STAND anything involving any kind of eye gore, even eye drops and contacts sorta freak me out... soooo time to watch the movie where a dirty beatnik scoops out eyes with a rusty spoon I guess? Why not?
A would be artist/thief gets caught during his latest B&E, and his victim decides to give his eyeball the ol' pluckaroo (MY EYE! MY EYE! MY EYE! – repeat x1000), leading to a tormented existence where murder and orgasmic eye de-balling are the only things keeping this lunatic alive. I love the scuzzy 'n' filthy NYC vibe of this flick. Almost like…
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An ultra-gritty early 70s horror film that feels like a cross between Michael Findlay-style sexploitation (it feels incredibly sleazy without even showing nudity), a proto-slasher alá Herschell Gordon Lewis or Andy Milligan and the repetetive boredom of Ray Dennis Steckler's adult films.
It starts strong with a hilarious opening scene in which our main character loses his eye (his single "My eye! AhhhhAAAAhhhhh!" scream is looped about fifty more times before the credits roll) but turns into a rambling mess with plenty of filler soon enough. All scenes involving the killer scooping people's eyeballs out with a spoon are gold, and some close-ups of eyes are borderline artistic, but then you have so much stuff that goes nowhere that it…
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We start this one off with a man named Arthur who is invading a woman's room to steal money...for rent. Instead she catches him, wigs out and starts beating at him with a spoon before gouging his eye out. Arthur's an artist, and well after the accident he seems to have developed a new hobby...guess what it is? I'll give you a hint, it involves a spoon. It's so gosh darned cheap and although the premise should thrill gorehounds, it's more like the red paint type of gore unfortunately. It does have a pretty decent soundtrack for something of this calibre (although my cats would beg to differ), and an oddly sleazy voyeur element somehow. It's shot in New York in the '70s too which is kind of a cool thing, it's also a bit psychedelic in tone and it's mercifully short so I like that too.
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This is the first time I've actually noticed bad camera work, I'm not saying it isn't there in other movies I've watched, but there were at least 2 scenes of people talking and they were missing the tops of their heads in frame. Technical issues aside, I like the scuzzy NYC psychopath trope and the eye sculptures were kind of cool. Lots of movies, like Maniac, have done this better, but I still got a kick out of this one. Plus.. that art student almost begged the grump artist/eye remover to be her friend, it was kind of adorable.
The Code Red blu-ray I watched looks like there was absolutely no attempt to clean up the print, it's a mess, sadly.
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My eye! Aah uh aah uh!
My eye! Aah uh aah uh!
My eye! Aah uh aah uh!I can see why they wanted to copy and paste it a bunch of times, feels good man.
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Film #2 of My Hooptober Halloween Horror-thon
After watching Mansion of the Doomed about a crazy doctor obsessed with perfecting a full eye transplant it just seemed natural to follow it up with a movie called Headless Eyes about an artist/serial killer who goes around killing people and taking their eyes.
This is a rough, early 70's grindhouse flick. It looks like it was made on the cheap but the eye gouges and the actual eye props used are actually pretty damn good.
Our main character is extremely melodramatic which I thought might annoy the crap out of me by the time I was done but it kind of worked. I don't think it was on purpose though...
This is…
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I love pre-Halloween 1970s American/ Canadian horror films. With no formula in place, they did their own thing and have a variety and joie de vivre that is lost once the Slasher Gates come down around 1980. Headless Eyes is a super fun film. It's cheap. It's sleazy. It's ugly, even on the lovely Code Red Blu-Ray. The people are ugly and sweaty. The killings are gross and filled with eyes being plucked out. The main character has several faux-Shakespearean speeches that are wonderfully out of place. There's no real plot (apart from a kind of charming subplot involving an art student who begins a friendship with the killer). It kind of goes along, smothered in wonderful music and the…
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Feels like what would've happened had HG Lewis made a gore picture in New York. Grim and sleazy, but never dull - and with a near wall-to-wall soundtrack that sounds like some primordial incarnation of Can banging out a cover of The Cramps' version of 'Fever.' The ultra-grainy 16mm photography and Richard Jennings-lookalike protagonist make this come off like an icky sexploitation film that went horribly wrong.
Whoever had the inspired idea to pair this up with Andy Milligan's similar Staten Island gorefest, The Ghastly Ones, was a genius.
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The Headless Eyes is a grimy early '70s proto-slasher concerning an artist who is blinded during a failed robbery attempt and who, several years later, takes it upon himself to go on a killing spree and remove his female victims' eyes with a spoon he keeps wrapped up in his pocket.
The atmosphere and aesthetic is very H G Lewis, with more than a dollop of Andy Milligan thrown in... However, the contents and mood of the film never seem to gel together to create an engaging enough and smooth-flowing experience. The film often flip-flops between gritty tension tinged with nastiness, and that of strained absurdity and silliness with our eye-patch sporting killer shrieking about his eyes (of which sounds…
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Apparently, my fellow countryman Bo Brundin passed away earlier this month and I’ll admit, I’d never heard of him before. This film seems to be one of his more famous ones at least and the idea of a man whose gouged-out-eye coming to life isn’t too shabby, but the film has a bizarre lack of setup. This more or less just opens with this man we’ve never seen before breaking into someone’s house and loses his eye. The poster seem to hint at a film about a sentient eye running around and this certainly ain’t it, this is more of a demented depiction of a killer almost feeling like William Lustig’s Maniac.
The film trying to frame Brundin as a…
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“My eyes! My eeeyyyeeeeesssss!”
This 1971 trippy weirdout might be ahead of its time. Not much, just a few years. But this must have been early in the grimy, icky, hallucinatory serial killer movie era.