For all its bargain-basement production values, the 1999 sci-fi horror The Killer Eye, directed by David DeCoteau under the pseudonym Richard Chasen, looks more expensive than the assembly line of talking animal movies and homoerotic fantasias that DeCoteau has been churning out for the last 20 years. But despite a strangely innocent vision that seems perplexed by the way the world (and human desire) works, the movie doesn’t have the unusual charm of the director’s more conventionally terrible but kind-of-great movies.
The minimal plot is set in motion by mad scientist Dr. Jordan Grady (Jonathan Norman), who’s picked up a street kid (Ryan Van Steenis, looking like the typical androgynous DeCoteau hustler) and took him to his lab. As is his wont, the street kid offers to perform his usual services for the doctor, but Grady has something else in mind: a guinea pig to whom he will give the power to see into the eight dimension, whatever that is.
Meanwhile, the distracted doctor has neglected his sex-starved wife Rita (Jacqueline Lovell), who has resorted to getting it on with neighbors Joe (Roland Martinez) and Tom (Dave Oren Ward), two reportedly straight men who spend the entire movie inexplicably shirtless and hanging out in bed watching television wearing nothing but boxer briefs.
As Rita engages in some kind of semi-nude but oddly asexual cavorting with Joe (or Tom) while Tom (or Joe) watches, Grady watches as another experiment goes wrong; worse, he’s inadvertently killed his subject, whose left eye has escapes his lifeless eye socket and grown to a gargantuan size, wreaking havoc on the household for the rest of the film.
These are the bones of a basic creature feature, but with some curious subtext that goes beyond sexual ambiguity. It’s no surprise that DeCoteau has contributed commentary tracks for films by Andy Milligan, a similarly maligned director who, unlike DeCoteau, has seen an uptick in critical respectability. DeCoteau here taps a favorite Milligan theme: the corruption of innocence. So it’s apt that an eye that crawls out of a corrupted street waif (echoes of a pivotal image in The Innocents?) turns into a sexual monster. Is the Killer Eye a stand-in for creative talent bowdlerized and cheapened for the sake of a quick buck or a money laundering scheme?
With its sprawling tentacles, the eponymous eye would fool nobody except the women of this movie, and the meat, as it were, consists of the creature stalking them one after another. It proceeds to mesmerize each of them, sending its chorizo-like tendrils between the women’s breasts to be blindly fondled as if they were alarmingly functioning genitalia. Which doesn’t sound like much fun, but it sounds more entertaining than the experience of watching the movie.
Believe it or not, the special effects are several levels above the typical DeCoteau joint, and the acting and sets are no worse. But there’s something more threadbare about a setting where every room looks like a soundstage wallpapered with plastic wrapping. And while the director pads the 72-minute feature with looped footage–awkward sex scenes circle back on themselves with neither tension nor payoff—the cut-corners don’t come near to approaching the surrealism of the seemingly endless Easter egg hunt in DeCoteau’s infamous Easter Bunny Puppy; that unlikely holiday staple is so bad it’s good; The Killer Eye is merely bad.
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