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The Headless Eyes (1971)

Dir: Kent Bateman

Malcolm (Bo Brundin) is a struggling artist who has taken to crime to pay his bills and so breaks into a woman's apartment, "I just want $65 for my lousy rent"!
But the woman fights back (with some nicely exploitative between the legs coverage of her lace panties) and gouges out Malcolm's left eye with a spoon!
"My eye! My eye! My eye" screams Malcolm, via a bizarre audio loop (here we are given a great image of his blood streaked face for the movie's title to appear over), and then flees into the street.

Time passes and, haunted by gory visions of bloody eyeballs, our now totally deranged, eye-patch wearing artist, prowls New York's streets spooning out the eyeballs of his chosen victims and using them in his macabre sculptures….

Produced by prolific porn Director/Producer Henri Pachard ("The Devil in Miss Jones part 2") and directed by the man who spawned Justin "Teen Wolf Too" Bateman on an unsuspecting World, "The Headless Eyes" is Grindhouse/Trash at it's most ragged.

A huge asset to the movie is the wonderfully rough and dirty Cinematography that truly captures that dark and sordid concrete jungle where predators and their victims share the same dank shadows.
An early stalking scene has the camera, placed at a lopsided angle at pavement level, gazing up into the night sky, with the city's dour buildings framing the image, show the unsuspecting prey pass by with our psycho skulking after them. It's weird, ugly and just perfect.

Offbeat scenes are essential in this kind of cinema and a fine example involves a 'tart with a heart' who takes pity on the dishevelled Malcolm and takes him up to her room, but when he clicks in that she is a hooker he is not amused;
Malcolm:: "You a prostitute"?
Girl: "'A prostitute'. Come on, only brought you up here because I thought you needed some help, you know prostitutes are Human too"!

Due to Brundin's strong Swedish accent it means that some of his dialogue hard to hear when he rants, but overall he does an interesting job at delivering a Schizophrenic psycho with more emotional depth than in most Grindhouse psycho killer flicks.
The scene where Malcolm's ex-wife (?) Anna comes to see him, to beg him to let her help his physical handicap, is a particularly well done sequence where he announces, to himself as much as her, that it's not just physical damage he has.
Gripping an eye in a Lucite/Perspex cube tightly he announces;
"Do you see him now? Is he showing himself? He's always been there I think, the other one. We just never noticed him. You shared him with me, we just never saw him. All those years. You helped him grow".
He's also given many chances to go way over the top, as only good Exploitation nutters do, while threatening his victims ("I am twisted! I am twisted"!).
A stunning example of this is the sequence where he kills a woman in an office;
"You know what this is? You know what this is woman? You know what this is? This is the murdering spoon…spoon! Now I'm going to take your eye out!…Your eyes are old a weak, but I shall make them extraordinary"!
Then, bringing the two freshly scooped eyeballs, held in his blood dripping hands, up to his face he shakes uncontrollably and screams at them "These eyes they shall live on forever! I promise you that! I promise you that! I promise you that"!
A striking sequence, the kind of which you wish there were more of.
But at least from this point on the film does start to wallow a bit more in the macabre gory possibilities that the plot and the title promised us, especially during the finale.

The gore is in fact mostly confined to blood with the odd (sadly late in arriving) cheesy eyeball extraction.
But the ragged and shaky staging of these scenes adds to the overall feel of nastiness because it makes them look almost documentary like, as the camera seems to have jostle for position so it can cover the grizzly act.

A rare diversion from the (generally) serious attitude the film takes is a pseudo 'on the scene' News broadcast, at the apartment of victim #14, with a reporter asking people on the street about what it's like to live in an area where such a dreadful murder took place.
The street shooting and the obviously real bystanders roped in to answer the questions, is a plus but it comes across as unintentionally comic more than anything else, especially when it's revealed the body is being brought out from the crime scene…in a coffin!
Though the sequence does end on a superbly effective and macabre touch as a one-eyed old woman, sitting on the sidewalk in a rocking chair, madly chants to an unnerved Malcolm "I know who did it…I know who did it", as the camera scrutinises her grinning face with it's black orbital cavity.

The chaotic yet minimalist score is a strong part of the film's atmosphere and feeling of psychotic dementia as Arthur goes about his dastardly deeds. In fact it gets truly chaotic at times when the score is added to the shaky images and rapid fire editing in certain scenes.

But even at a scant 78 minutes or so the film does tend to drag it's heels, using up too much precious running time on either shot's of sidewalks, feet, characters generally walking/driving around or doing mundane tasks and far out hallucination/hearing voices in the head sequences.
Though you can see with these head trip set-pieces that Bateman was at least trying to show a more personal side the killer's psychosis away from the more normal madness on show while he is killing.
Abel Ferrara would do the same kind of thing (only to a more serious and successful degree) when covering the madness that was eating up Reno in "The Driller Killer".

The screenplay (also by Bateman) is a mess though and does tend to suddenly throw in new characters and then either forgets them completely or has them pop up once more from nowhere without any logic to their re-appearance (like a strange scene involving a Cop on the case).
One new female character who seems to strike up a relationship with Malcolm is especially wasted as this potentially important development only appears with 15 minutes or so of the film left, and half of that is spent on the final stalking sequence!
Generally the whole of the film's design follows this jolting attitude the screenplay has to characters as it too tends to shoot off in all directions, lurching from one location/set-up to the next with dizzying rapidity.

It all ends in a rather low key fashion (after a final bout of gruesomeness), that would be a real letdown where it not for Bundin's freaking out performance and a final crazed blow out of disjointed edits and sounds.

So what is "The Headless Eyes" in the end? Well, it's a mixed bag of great moments and wasted potential.
When it's good…mad, bad, crazed and blood soaked…it's very good.
But when it's bad it's basically frustrating, as too many chances (and characters) are either scooted over in a chaotic heap of jumbled images or poorly crafted via a muddled, slapped together script.
But overall, it's still worth every Grindhouse/Trash aficionado seeking "The Headless Eyes" out for the unusual way many of the scenes are edited and scored, Brundin's whacked out performance (that truly has to carry the film), the atmospheric New York locations and grimy Cinematography, the few scenes of scooped eye ghoulishness and the thankfully (for the most part) serious take on the gruesome subject matter.