Logline: A semi-bubbleheaded Miami TV news anchor begins to suspect that she knows the identity of the serial killer whose exploits she breathlessly reports on each night. Does she have the investigative chops to catch him? And is it worth putting her blind/deaf sister at risk?
The premise above could be fodder for a good or bad movie in almost any era; what arguably dooms Eyes of a Stranger apart from its gauzy, shot-through-a-wine-glass production values and affectless acting is that it's a serial killer movie made at the apex of the slasher era, instead of, say, in the 90s at which point the serial killer genre would have been well-trodden enough to accommodate its story naturally.
The film's opening passages are straight out of Eli Roth's Thanksgiving trailer, with airless scenes following the POV of soon-to-be-dispatched victims as they go about the monotony of typing up letters, watching TV and even making toast, unaware of the increasing danger (apart from a few heavy-breathing phone calls) until the killer falls upon them. Take the opener, for example, in which a busty bimbo excuses herself to her bedroom only to return and find that the killer has quietly entered her apartment and removed her alive-moments-ago boyfriend's head and placed it in the living room aquarium: what a kidder!
It soon becomes clear, however, that director Ken Wiederhorn (Shock Waves, Return of the Living Dead 2) is following this Steve Miner-esque playbook under protest. The film begins to veer away from overt slasher set pieces and (tonal consistency be damned) becomes a cat and mouse thriller with the blonde reporter (70s TV mainstay Lauren Tewes) turning sleuth and the Vincent Gardenia lookalike (John DiSanti) killer being revealed as a pseudo-Zodiac, even mimicking one of the famous Zodiac kills directly.
Wiederhorn adequately stages scenes of mild suspense, such as when the reporter breaks into the killer's apartment and is forced to hang over the balcony by her fingers when he comes home early. He also gives us long, quiet sequences of the killer sitting and doing next to nothing in his featureless apartment, and in doing so seems to be a bit ahead of his time in his desire to immerse the audience in the banality of a 90s-style schlub-psycho. Ultimately, however, the movie Wiederhorn wants to make is not on the page and what ends up on the screen is a tonal trainwreck.
The tug of war between the taut thriller the director clearly imagined and the sleazy slasher film he was contracted to deliver reaches its apex in one peculiar moment during the finale, an apartment-bound chase scene between the killer and (in her feature debut) Jennifer Jason Leigh as the blind-deaf teen sister: Having escaped the pursuing killer for the moment, Jason Leigh inexplicably walks to the bathroom mirror and opens her shirt, giving the audience a prolonged look at her bare chest. Once her shirt is back in place, the chase continues. You can practically hear Wiederhorn shouting at you: "Happy now?"
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