Eight Eyes (2024)
The Serbian Candle Wax Massacre
I don’t know that I can fairly review this movie, but here goes. For the last two weeks, I’ve been trapped in “genre film Groundhog Day”. Between the Danish version of Speak No Evil; the American remake of Speak No Evil; the 1992 indie horror-comedy Meet the Parents, and the mainstream blockbuster franchise Universal created from it (strange, but true), I’ve sat through six variations on the same theme: a couple takes a trip to visit another family and are horrified by their socially and culturally awkward ways. Sometimes there are laughs. Sometimes there is bloodshed. Sometimes there is both.
Though Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has a very different tone from any of the movies above, the (ahem) bones are consistent. Over the decades, the 1974 proto-slasher has spawned numerous sequels, a remake, a sequel and a prequel to the remake, another remake, and literally countless imitators—many of which made their own rickety trips on the IP merry-go-round. From Jaume Collet-Serra’s take on House of Wax, to any iteration of The Hills Have Eyes, to Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, there is no shortage of stylized riffs on the same chord. And while the Speak No Evil and Meet the Parents films at least attempted to make their brands of situational horror more relatable (dare I say, more adult*), I’m not convinced there’s anything left to explore in a premise that’s as well-worn as Leatherface’s cheek patch.
But that won’t keep folks from trying. Enter Austin Jennings’ Eight Eyes, an unwitting mash-up of Speak No Evil (strangers-in-a-strange-land setting, bull-headed wife, invertebrate husband) and the TCM franchise (too many commas, so let’s review the partial “TCM Homage Checklist”:
Clueless city kids pick up a sketchy wanderer whom they’re too polite/weak to ditch at the first sign of trouble
The revelation of a freakish family who kill and collect travelers, fetishizing their remains and worldly possessions
One would-be victim telling the other[s] that they should get the hell out of Dodge [no one listens, of course]
A mute brute who does the family’s dirty work while wearing some kind of ghoulish mask).
Eight Eyes begins with real promise. Cass (Emily Sweet) and Gav (Bradford Thomas) crash a wedding in Belgrade, Serbia, in the spirit of their YOLO European adventure. The next day, they encounter a burly local who calls himself “Saint Peter” (Bruno Veljanovski) and offers to take them on a real tour of the region. The guy’s friendly enough, but he’s kind of scary-looking and more than a bit odd. Plus, he keeps showing up places, even after having seemingly parted ways with Cass and Gav. The couple’s agency buckles so completely under the weight of politeness that they soon find themselves listening to a maniac’s unhinged rantings while standing in an abandoned factory several hundred miles from the nearest mile marker.
It was here that I began to get serious Hostel vibes. Where Eli Roth used the allure of sex tourism to put his unwitting protagonists in jeopardy, Jennings and co-writer Matthew Frink use Saint Peter as a gregarious human guilt trip—drawing Cass and Gav further into a country ravaged by the after-effects of war, with the promise of cool shots for Gav’s home movies and stories they can tell their elitist friends back home over Cab and caviar.
Sure enough, Gav eventually disappears and Cass wakes up in a makeshift mortician’s suite. She discovers an eerie video on Gav’s camera, showing him being drugged, filleted, and harassed by comely young women (a direct parallel to House of 1000 Corpses). By the time Cass realizes she’s actually trapped in Saint Peter’s house with his deranged family, we’ve gone full-tilt TCM boogie. Cue the barely alive old uncle. Cue our Leatherface stand-in (here he’s called “Wax Baby”; his gimmick is wearing a hardened candle wax facemask and nothing else). Cue the appearance of—and I’m not kidding—a metal head plate that could have come from Chop Top’s Etsy shop.
Jennings and Frink include one (yes, I counted) surprising moment in Eight Eyes’ last thirty minutes, but unless this is your first horror movie, you’ll have mapped out the rest before Cass opens her eyes on that operating table. I suppose including a left-field psychic witch sub-plot could be considered novel, but by the time we enter the (admittedly impressive) descent-into-madness montage (a cross between Marilyn Burns’ dinner table freakout at the end of TCM and 2001: A Space Odyssey’s “Stargate Sequence”), it’s clear the filmmakers are just throwing more “business” at the screen—possibly to avoid litigation for outright theft.**
Believe it or not, I don’t mean to totally bag on the filmmakers. Eight Eyes is an impressive calling card for anyone looking to hire talented artisans who can put a movie together. The settings, cinematography, practical gore effects, and casting are all on point. Hell, Jennings and Frink even manage to squeeze one last breath from that tired “retro exploitation-movie font” craze without embarrassing themselves. But the script is, after a very early point, unworthy of being filmed.
Set aside the exhaustive filmography from which Eight Eyes swipes liberally. At the center of the movie is a married couple whose on-screen interactions suggest they barely even like each other, let alone possess the kind of love that would inspire lifelong commitment. True, there’s a snippet of Cass and Gav cuddling in video footage, and the beginning of a sex scene later on—but these feel more like inserts than part of an organic story about real people. When a movie turns on its protagonists so early in the game, it’s really difficult to unglaze the eyes—but exceedingly easy for the brain to play “Spot the Reference” as a way of coping for the remaining seventy minutes.
I began this review by admitting I probably wouldn’t be fair to Eight Eyes. For anyone who hasn’t also spent the last couple weeks watching Speak No Evil and Meet the Parents, you may wonder what the hell I’m complaining about. That experience opened up a different kind of Stargate in my brain, a roiling trip of TCM tropes that flooded me with memories of all the bad sequels, remakes, imitators, etc. Watching Eight Eyes is the horror equivalent of an endless loop of 80s standup comics doing Jack Nicholson impressions. Sure, some were less hack-y than others, but they all used someone else’s voice to get cheap, Pavlovian laughs. And that’s not fair to the audience.
*For folks of a certain age, the penultimate line in 2022’s Speak No Evil (“Because you let us”) will hit more viscerally than a thousand college girls on meat hooks ever could.
**Though Jordan Peele’s attorneys might raise an eyebrow at the film’s drinkware-hypnosis motif.
Eight Eyes is now streaming on Shudder.
