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Arrow Video: Death Has Blue Eyes (1976) - Reviewed
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Courtesy of Arrow Films |
The folks at Arrow Video have made it
their life’s mission to bring each and every one of maverick and cult Greek
director Nico Mastorakis’ pictures to blu-ray disc in lavish restored deluxe
editions. With over twenty films to his
credit, the cult filmmaker has treaded similar ground as such fellow offbeat
auteurs as Brian Trenchard-Smith and Jack Hill, combining his own homegrown
mixture of regional exploitation, softcore sex and genre bending to form his
own unique cinematic vision.
While known for his infamous video
nasty Island of Death, The Zero Boys and Hired to Kill,
the filmmaker actually started in 1976 with the weird and confounding genre
hybrid Death Has Blue Eyes. A
film that looks like a straightforward giallo from the outset but in actuality is
a smorgasbord of soft porn, science-fiction, supernatural thriller, espionage
and action chase sequences all thrown into the kitchen sink. It doesn’t really work put together but as
such is a curious start to a checkered film career and demonstrated early on
the director’s talent for framing a shot and exploiting scenic Greek locations
for the camera.
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Courtesy of Arrow Films |
Neighborhood gigolo Chess (Hristos Nomikos)
and his friend Bob (Peter Winter) are two crooks who spend their pastime
scamming people in between womanizing as many women as they can. Their path leads them to a wealthy elderly
woman named Geraldine Steinwetz (Jessica Dublin) and her beautiful daughter
Christine (Maria Aliferi). Soon however
it is revealed Christine has telepathic abilities which she uses to blackmail
the two men into protecting her and her mother from gangsters who want them
dead. The duo reluctantly agrees not
knowing Christine’s mother is harboring deadlier ulterior motives including but
not limited to multidimensional political intrigue and varied assassination attempts.
An uncategorizably overstuffed mishmash
that’s not really giallo, not really porn, not really science-fiction and not
really a political thriller either. It
is all of those things at once and nothing.
It is a wacky, perplexing and curiously sexy film that mixes together a
number of disparate elements that don’t really go together but for the maverick
provocateur’s first-time effort it remains deliriously entertaining and
fascinating.
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Courtesy of Arrow Films |
The actors are decent though the film’s
casual sense of nudity gives the underground drive-in indie something of a
playfully erotic flavor. As a narrative
this is all over the place and the editing cuts from points A to D faster than
a William Friedkin film, but as a slice of forgotten 70s English/Greek
exploitation filmmaking it still packs a weird incongruent punch. Visually this is rough around the edges but
has enough scenic beauty in it to balance out the shoddier elements. One thing is for sure, you won’t see another
film quite like this in your lifetime outside of, maybe, an Andy Sidaris or Russ Meyer picture.
--Andrew Kotwicki