The Bottom Line
Pros
- Good concept
- Unique real-time format
Cons
- Poor sound and video quality
- Poor direction
- Annoying characters
- Incoherent dialogue
Description
- Starring Sandra Paduch, Jennifer Barnett, Angela Brunda, Danielle Lilley, Mia Yi, Veronica Garcia
- Directed by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen
- Not Rated
- DVD Release Date: September 23, 2008
Guide Review - 'Five Across the Eyes' DVD Review
If you've ever driven alone down a rural road at night, you know how creepy it can be. This is the draw of Five Across the Eyes, a shot-on-video tale of five high school girls who get lost one night driving through a wooded area known locally as "The Eyes."
While fooling around, they accidentally hit an unoccupied SUV, and being the thoughtless teens they are, they flee. Soon, though, the SUV is tailing them, and the driver, a seemingly average-looking business woman, is actually a deranged killer who thinks the teens noticed that she's got several dead bodies in the back of her truck. Thus begins a game of cat and mouse in which the cat captures, pummels and inexplicably lets the mice go over and over again.
Five Across the Eyes has the makings of an intriguing film. It aims for heightened realism, told in real time with a near-POV filming style, featuring shaky camerawork and odd angles that sometimes obscure the action. However, the jittery, constantly moving camera ends up feeling more like bad direction, and the real time storytelling results in stretches of inane chatter punctuated by incessant screaming and incoherent blubbering. The actresses were obviously hired on their ability to cry and yell, and they do a fine job in those instances. Otherwise, their acting ability reflects the dirt-cheap budget.
If the material were better, the violence might be disturbing, but a movie with lines like "Is one of us dead?" is never engrossing enough to disturb. Not helping matters are the grainy video quality, the poor audio (as if the marble-mouthed dialogue weren't hard enough to understand; luckily, there are subtitles.) and the irritating characters who act like helpless victims for 90 minutes.
The DVD
No special features.
Movie: D+
DVD: F
