Arrow Video: Death Has Blue Eyes (1976) - Reviewed

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.

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. 

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