This film has always been a bit of an anomaly.
When I first saw it as a kid I thought it was awful and wonderful. And today, it hits me exactly the same way.
Yes, it's got a crass, urban-sleaze vibe a la the late-'70s, which is both its weakness and its strength.
Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING and DRESSED TO KILL and CALIGULA and LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR all seem prime examples which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.
And the period plays a key role in why they don't entirely work -- and yet why they DO work.
The '70s had a melancholy, breezy, sexy thing going on which defined the decade, yet the last half of that decade also had an odd gutter-smarm undercurrent which is hard to describe but at the time was hard to miss... It wasn't the only era to give us real life serial sex murderers, but -- gee! -- no other era seemed to fit it so well.
Movies tapped into this vibe as well. And if it was going to do so effectively, you had to wind up getting a bit queasy during or after watching it. And that was these films' strengths as well as their vulnerability to partly-valid criticism.
Curiously, motion pictures can get much more explicit today, but few of them feel so utterly fetishistic as those from the late-'70s. These pictures were repellent in many ways, largely on purpose. But their sordid-beyond-belief flavor was absolutely part of the zeitgeist of the time. And I retained an interest in them without fully condoning them.
They're period pieces, essentially. And valuable for that reason.
And they sort of define that old, over-used idea that "it's so bad it's good." Ultimately, despite the elements that don't entirely work, the overall film just does.
Film critic Janet Maslin said about it at the time, "...It's the cleverness of EYES that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, dryly controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip..." And George Lucas hired Irvin Kershner to direct THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on the strength of EYES OF LAURA MARS.
When I first saw it as a kid I thought it was awful and wonderful. And today, it hits me exactly the same way.
Yes, it's got a crass, urban-sleaze vibe a la the late-'70s, which is both its weakness and its strength.
Even though I'm very fond of the 1970s (and it got a bad rap during the endless revisionism of the '80s) there was a definitively sleazy, gutter undertone to the latter half of the decade which worked its way into even mainstream movies. (CRUISING and DRESSED TO KILL and CALIGULA and LOOKING FOR MR GOODBAR all seem prime examples which, while not graphic by today's standards maybe, nonetheless tapped into the sordid, carnally apocalyptic tone of the day). Likewise, the period seemed the apex of real life serial killer zeitgeist somehow.
And the period plays a key role in why they don't entirely work -- and yet why they DO work.
The '70s had a melancholy, breezy, sexy thing going on which defined the decade, yet the last half of that decade also had an odd gutter-smarm undercurrent which is hard to describe but at the time was hard to miss... It wasn't the only era to give us real life serial sex murderers, but -- gee! -- no other era seemed to fit it so well.
Movies tapped into this vibe as well. And if it was going to do so effectively, you had to wind up getting a bit queasy during or after watching it. And that was these films' strengths as well as their vulnerability to partly-valid criticism.
Curiously, motion pictures can get much more explicit today, but few of them feel so utterly fetishistic as those from the late-'70s. These pictures were repellent in many ways, largely on purpose. But their sordid-beyond-belief flavor was absolutely part of the zeitgeist of the time. And I retained an interest in them without fully condoning them.
They're period pieces, essentially. And valuable for that reason.
And they sort of define that old, over-used idea that "it's so bad it's good." Ultimately, despite the elements that don't entirely work, the overall film just does.
Film critic Janet Maslin said about it at the time, "...It's the cleverness of EYES that counts, cleverness that manifests itself in superlative casting, dryly controlled direction from Irvin Kershner, and spectacular settings that turn New York into the kind of eerie, lavish dreamland that could exist only in the idle noodlings of the very, very hip..." And George Lucas hired Irvin Kershner to direct THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK on the strength of EYES OF LAURA MARS.