Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

The Slice Is Right

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)
2017 Argentina Directed by  Ezequiel Endelman & Leandro Montejano
Screening 27th August at FrightFest 2018

Crystal Eyes was the last movie I saw at this year’s FrightFest and, like four out of the five I saw this year (excepting the wonderful Luciferina, which I reviewed here), it’s not actually a horror movie. That being said, I did get a little fright when, as I was waiting for Alan Jones to do the opening with the two writer/directors, I felt something moving past my feet and get stuck against my legs in the near darkness of the cinema. I looked down to find it was a black guide dog that had escaped from the owner and crawled under everyone’s feet to get to a spot where my bags and feet were... but it gave me a fright for a moment. After the owner had been reunited with her dog, she went down the front row with it and then, after Alan Jones had given out some free FrightFest perfume to some of the audience (I am now the proud owner of some Eau De Gore... which my mother liked fine when I gave it to her), it was time for him to do his opening spiel. That’s when the brilliant dog got loose a second time and was shuffling around Alan’s feet and running around until it could be settled. Alan had a brilliant come back to being upstaged by this handsome creature, however... he said something along the lines of “Don’t worry. It’s not exactly the first time I’ve had something warm and friendly at my opening.” it was a good line and it got a big laugh from the audience. Then, after a brief intro to the film and a quick discussion with the directors, it was down to business.

Crystal Eyes is pretty much a modern attempt to make an Italian giallo set in the 1980s. As such it was probably my most anticipated film of FrightFest although, in the end, it turned out to be the one I got the least from. That being said, it was still a good movie, especially considering the miniscule budget and I’m pretty pleased that I managed to see five relatively good ones this year... I’ve not always been that ‘on the nose’ with my FrightFest picks, it has to be said.

So you know where you are right from the start with this movie as a nasty but incredibly popular fashion model with the almost too perfect cliché of a name, Alexis Carpenter, played by Camila Pizzo, dies accidentally by her own hand when some circuits short out and she manages to start a fire which leads to her being burnt alive (which doesn’t quite look that realistic but one wonders if the way the film makers achieved this effect is a similar nod to how a director might have solved the same problem decades ago). The scene is interesting but annoyingly busy as the directors give us something which definitely feels like an early 1980s version of the giallo, more akin perhaps to some of the works of Lamberto Bava than those of Dario Argento or Mario Bava... although those two directors are referenced quite a lot in this.

The rest of the film is set one year later, when what appears to be a fashion mannequin goes on a killing rampage when a bunch of people try to put on a show as a tribute to the life of Alexis Carpenter. There’s not much plot, to be honest and there doesn’t have to be. The film takes it’s inspiration, after all, from a bunch of very stylish movies which weren’t all that strong on plot in the first place. If you are not into gialli, though, you might find the film a little wearing in places.

The film is obviously homaging the beautiful colouring in the films of Argento and Bava but, I have to say, I thought the greens and purples used to ‘gialloesque’ up the ante seemed a little faded throughout the picture, it has to be said. The Argento references come thick and fast but the two directors don’t limit themselves just to his giallo films either... there are substantial references to Suspiria all over the picture, including the look of the office of the head of the fashion house putting on this show. Actually, the office set was basically the front room of the house of one of the two directors which they’d tricked out with false walls and it really does show you how you can work with a tiny budget (and over a great period of time) if you have to. The fact that the name of the character of the head of the fashion house, played here by Silvia Montanari, is named Lucía L'uccello, shows you just how ‘behind’ the Argento vibe the directors were here.

That being said, while the feel of the film is more Lamberto Bava than his father Mario, there are some obvious and definite homages to Bava senior, such as  having a giallo set around the fashion world, including mannequins, being an obvious reference to Blood And Black Lace (which I reviewed here). This is further re-enforced with a drowning scene which, I’m pretty sure, closely mirrors the one in the aforementioned Bava masterpiece. That being said, the little add on sequence at the end of the movie, when all seems to be finished but then... oh no, it’s not quite... seems more in spirit with an American director who I’ve always assumed was heavily influenced by gialli anyway. I’m talking about Brian De Palma here and the tone of this last scene seemed to me more like something you would get in one of his early, Hitchcockian thrillers such as Sisters (reviewed here), Dressed To Kill or Body Double and I suspect the directors of this movie are more than familiar with his work too.



And, of course, this being a gialloesque movie, the while thing is given a score, written by Pablo Fuu,  reminiscent of a certain period of that genre, although again it doesn’t quite follow the style of the classic late 1960s/early 1970s gialli such as the jazz infused atonal gut punches of Ennio Morricone or the progressive ‘slasher rock’ of Goblin. This was more like something, again, of the 1980s, with a splash of Goblin’s ‘moved on’ Claudio Simonetti cross pollinated with the sort of sound you’d get from Stelvio Cipriani tackling similar material... at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

Not much else to say about this one. It didn’t quite light my fire like some of the others I’d seen at this year’s FrightFest but it was still a nice ride and the mannequin costumed killer had a kind of iconic look to it, to be sure. That being said, once the mannequin suffers from some major damage towards the end of the movie, it did kinda look like one of the band members from the old 1970s pop group KISS was chasing people around with a straight razor but, you know, there’s not really much wrong with that either.

Crystal Eyes is a good bit of fun and kind of a love letter to Italian giallo with a few horror nods thrown in for good measure (much like Videoman which I saw the night before was, although that’s an entirely different kind of experience... see below for a link to my review). If you like this kind of cinema and are on the look out for new stuff in this vein... well it’s not the best I’ve seen but it’s certainly not the worst either and it’s probably something you should check out if you get the opportunity.

And that’s the end of my personal coverage of this year’s FrightFest (I’m way too poverty stricken to be able to afford a weekend pass to one of these things). I hope you liked my reviews of some of these and I hope you stick with the blog for a while if you’re new to it. Lots of interesting stuff to come still.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

Last Caress (aka Glam Gore)

Caress Whisper


Last Caress (aka Glam Gore) 
France 2010
Directed by François Gaillard & Christophe Robin
B Films Region 2

Last Caress is a movie I picked up on DVD as a (fairly) rare blind buy at this year’s London Film & Comic Convention in a truly beautiful and very limited, numbered German edition (only 2000 copies have been pressed for the market, apparently) under the title Glam Gore. I was told by the particluar stallholder, who knows me by now and is pretty knowledgeable about the various niche markets of exploitation cinema, that this was made as a new giallo and was, in his words, “really good.” I had to admit, the book style packaging with the full colour booklet bound into it was very special to look at but I still wasn’t sold on getting this one for what was, frankly, a little higher than I like to pay for my DVDs. But then the stallholder remembered my particular weakness and pointed out to me that the DVD also came with an additional CD of Double Dragon’s music for the movie (a composer or composers of whom I can find no real evidence of, so to speak, on the internet). This pretty much hooked me in because, when the soundtrack CD is included with the DVD, it’s rare for that score to be released as a stand alone, from what I’ve ben able to make out.

True to the stall holder’s word, Last Caress is, indeed, a pretty good movie. It’s got some slight problems for me in terms of an all round film experience but, if you like the giallo form of cinema, you certainly can’t help but be a little impressed by this movie because it really “goes for it” in terms of utilising a giallo format. There are absolutely loads of references, mostly visual and musical, which many fans of the likes of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Luciano Ercoli and Sergio Martino will get a real kick out of. This, generically, comes through in the form of the brighter-than-thou drenched colour splashes of Dario Argento, filtering through from Mario Bava’s influence, which really does push the boat out in terms of lighting and camera movement.

The homage conitinues in that many of the gory murder scenes are also direct references to specific giallo movie murders and, in the case of the “first” murderer, the specific look of the killer... which in the opening of the movie is a direct reference to Bava’s Blood and Black Lace with a touch of Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage thrown in for good measure. The film continues to pile on iconic references at a steady rate of knots, a particular highlight which the director keeps coming back to is a variant of the spiked metal glove which made a brief appearance in Death Walks At Midnight. Even the iconic shot of the womans head and shoulders laying backwards through the broken glass from Tenebrae is dutifully referenced in a similar pose.

The movie doesn’t stop at pure giallo though... while it plays with echoes of the supernatural powers of the first victim in Argento’s Profondo Rosso (aka Deep Red), it also comes back to the supernatural themes quite heavily in both an early seance scene and at the movies denouement... so there’s a little bit of worship going on of the Italian horror movie too (which Argento and, to more of an extent, Bava, both indulged in from time to time in their respective bodies of work). If you’re one of those movie watchers who loves playing along with the writers and directors in a movie, and you know your Italian exploitation cinema... then you’ll have a fairly good time with this one I think.

As I touched on earlier, the music by somebody called Double Dragon is also very rooted in the Italian giallo for its tone. Now they (I’m assuming Double Dragon is a they) could have gone one of two routes with this score, or possibly even gone a third route and mixed up different gialli musical styles. As it happens, they’ve jettisoned the Ennio Morricone/Bruno Nicolai approach to scoring this kind of film and gone with the Claudio Simonetti/Goblin approach for their score... with maybe just a dash of Cipriani thrown into the mix. What does this mean in terms of adding to the overall tone of the piece? Simple... this score “rocks” and I’m very grateful to have the "free" soundtrack album which came with it and which I’m listening to as I type these very words.

However, I have to say that, apart from all the positive stuff I’ve mentioned here, I did find something a little amiss... and I’m having some trouble putting my finger on what that something is. The performances, from what looks like a fairly unknown cast... are all pretty good and they seem to be taking their various roles quite seriously. The lighting and colours are all great. The score is pretty good. But I think, there are two things which made it less a great movie and more just an interesting curio for me.

One thing is the fact that, although the plot is as simplistic as its references, it just feels like it needs a little more substance.  Yeah, yeah. I know. Crazy right? The giallo format almost prides itself in having no real substance but I think this expectation came from within me as a response to the context of watching a contemporary movie and this lack of substance, combined with the next thing I’m going to mention, is probably not something I should even worry about in relation to a genre where style plays such an important part at the expense of the other. But I’m going to anyway.

The other thing is... although pretty much all the shots look absolutely beautiful and nicely designed, everything seems to be just a bit too “high definition”. That is to say, even though I know a lot of the shots in this are actual location shots... the sharpness and quality of the picture almost makes everything feel like it’s been shot on a very fake set. It’s just too darned focussed. It needs a little cinematic distancing on the appearance methinks. Smear some vaseline over the lens like they used to do for soft focus shots in the old days maybe. Or perhaps a deliberately degraded look akin to what Rodriguez did on Planet Terror perhaps?

As it is, the whole thing reminded me, as much as the genres they were going for (and they really do go for it in this movie, I assure you) like an exended version of one of those old 90s Redemption Films introductions that used to air on the Bravo cable channel or play before the main feature on the VHS cassettes. Something with Eileen Daly in it dressed as a vampire or a nun... or possibly a vampire nun... rolling around with a half naked lady with a bared and highly unmissable chest partially covered in blood. Remember those? Well I think this movie has some of that kind of vibe to it too... especially in a flashback scene involving accusations of witchery, a naked gal and some prominently placed barbed wire... which I’m sure was cheap at half the price in the middle ages. Nice as it was to pass the time, this style of shooting did kind of pull me out of the whole giallo thing which the directors had spent so much time setting up.

All in all, it’s not nearly as great an homage to the genre as the truly wonderful Amer was a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of 1970s Italian thriller or horror movies and you want a quite beautifully shot, good sounding film to pass the evening with that features naked, bosomy women, lashings of boody violence (probably a lot more than actually featured in a lot of the films this one is aspiring to be, actually) and a hefty dose of the old “guess-the-giallo” game thrown in, then you really can't go wrong with Last Caress/Glam Gore. Grab one of these limited edition copies with the bonus CD soundtrack while you still can.