MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

adriangr "The Hypnotic Eye" is a fairly effective B movie about a spate of self-mutilations by beautiful women who appear to be in a trance when they do the deed. A detective tries to unravel the link between the victims and a stage show that features a hypnotist that they have all attended.A lot of what appears in the movie is fun, although "The Hypnotic Eye" is barely 70 minutes long, and a lot of this is padding, featuring several needlessly long looks at the "hypnosis" act, as well as a very tiresome sequence set in a beatnik bar where we have to watch the whole show of beatnik music and poetry. It's a shame, because these really slow down the action. Surely it would not have been to difficult to make the actual storyline events take up some more time.The acting is ok, although a little hammy. The story actually has a really brutal side to it, as the methods the ladies use to self-harm are all pretty twisted. We don't witness many of them happening, but seeing somebody screaming with their hair fully ablaze is quite something for 1960 (even if it's not very realistic). Some of the "after" make up of the others victims is also pretty good.If all the padding was stripped out, this would rattle along and be a lot more fun, but it would be over in less than an hour! The plot really is tiny and there is barely any quality time given to the climax, in fact events dash to the closing credits with far too much haste...a little time spent on a proper ending and explanation would have been nice. Still, it's pretty entertaining while it lasts.

calvinnme ... and that's too bad since for schlocky horror at its spartan best you just can't do any better than 50's and 60's vintage films like this one, Macabre, and From Hell it Came. This was never intended to compete with the likes of Universal's Frankenstein.The central issue of the plot is that the great beauties of the town are mutilating themselves. One puts her face in a running fan, another washes her face with acid, another shampoos with the flames of a gas stove. None of the girls remembers doing what they did much less why they did it. Police detective Steve Kennedy is running into a bunch of brick walls in his investigation when one night his girl takes him to see a show featuring a hypnotist. The next day the girl that was with them during the show, and one of the guests that was invited on stage as a subject for hypnotism, is found mutilated too. The detective and his girl begin to suspect the hypnotist, but still the questions remain - why and more so how, since all of the girls were found alone.The film is full of the kind of stream of consciousness dialogue and wooden acting that was a trademark of Jim Abrahams and the two Zuckers, except they were doing this kind of thing on purpose often as a spoof of these kinds of movies, and in these old B horror films it works well. Plus this old film is loaded with scenes that were knocking on the door of breaking down the old production code once and for all such as Desmond the hypnotist putting his subjects in a sexually receptive trance so that he can make out with them while a deliberate yet passive Justine looks on vicariously. The film has been splendidly restored by the Warner Archive, and I highly recommend that copy as everyone else who is peddling DVDs of the movie is using third rate unrestored copies. Not just for Halloween, this one is for anytime you're in the mood for a guilty pleasure.

plum-blossom The new burn-on-demand DVD from Warner's has a solid, widescreen print with only minor speckling and one or two "cigarette burns" - a surprisingly good remaster of a loopy shocker that I've been waiting to see in a good print for years. Allison Hayes is luscious and sinister, Merry Andrews reminds me of Simone Simon in profile, and although I had a crush on the Great Desmond when I saw this as a youngster, Jacques Bergerac is just plain oily now, although possibly the perfect actor to play the part. A silly, but fun, bit of psychotronic fluff that's best viewed with a wide-open mind and one's critical faculties set at their lowest point.

dphelan-1 I just heard Michael J Weldon of Psychotronic Video talk about this on a podcast interview. It reminded me of the first time I saw this on television ( sometime in the 1960's I guess) on the late night Friday Chiller show. The woman burning herself, her hair catching fire, etc. was really terrifying. The film is kind of a B-Movie horror-noir with the oily continental Jacques Begerac performing that Hypnotic Eye thing and causing all manner of mayhem and mutilation. Then there was the wonderful Allison Hayes just 2 years past The Attack of the 5o Foot Woman giving another great performance and of course, my favorite, Merry Andrews from TV's How to Marry a Millionaire. They just don't make them like this anymore. A campy horror classic!