Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Coventry "Eyes of Fire" is a curious oddity in the already curious universe of 80s horror movies. On one hand, it's truly incomprehensible that this film isn't more well-known or doesn't have a much larger cult-following, because it is an atmospheric and genuinely unsettling tale with an original plot, a unique setting and a handful of downright disturbing moments. On the other hand, however, it's rather easy to see why "Eyes of Fire" is obscure and almost forgotten, as it's a slow-brooding and intelligently scripted ghost tale that got released in the middle of an era when horror audiences were mainly just demanding for brainless teen-slashers with lots of gratuitous T&A and extreme violence. Well, the least you can say is that "Eyes of Fire" is overripe for rediscovery and Avery Crounse should be acknowledged as a competent writer/director, even though he only made three films (and this is by far the only one worth seeking out). The story is inventively set in the year 1750 and narrated via a group of children that are found hidden away in a ramshackle cabin near the American/Canadian border (back then still referred to as "French territory"). They start explaining how their parents fled from the peaceful community they lived in because they were close followers of Reverend Will Smyth and he narrowly got executed at the charge of adultery and polygamy. They followed the river on a raft and then ventured into the deep woods where they eventually settled in a couple of abandoned cabins at an open spot. The cowardly and hypocrite reverend keeps proclaiming they are blessed by God and one a mission to revert the Indian tribes in these woods to Christianity, while Marion Dalton (the betrayed husband who went after the group) quickly realizes they entered sacred burial grounds where the restless spirits of slaughtered Native Americans wreak havoc on trespassers. There are numerous of very powerful and petrifying sequences in "Eyes of Fire", notably the grisly images of human faces captured in ancient holy trees or zombie-like creatures emerging from the muddy swamp grounds. The script and dialogues are unnerving as well. I have a personal weakness for good old-fashioned clichés, and "Eyes of Fire" features a delightful monologue around a campfire where Guy Boyd's character explains how the spilled blood of innocent natives eventually clits together in the underground and forms a powerful and vengeful demon. I loved that part! Admittedly the film also contains a few too many dull and overly confusing moments, and the special effects - albeit of respectable quality level - are often used too randomly. The performances are overall very decent, with one actor truly standing out. Dennis Lipscomb is genius as the vile and totally unreliable reverend Smyth. With his almost naturally evil charisma, Lipscomb depicts one of the most loathsome and malignant characters of 80s horror cinema. He's not a perverted murderer, but an arrogant and cowardly hypocrite. Those are generally worse that masked serial killers.

Leofwine_draca An atypical '80s American horror film, insomuch that it is set in "olden times", concerning a bunch of travellers who have to contend with wood-demons, assorted spirits, and possession. The film is different enough to be worth a look, and despite a low, low budget, it achieves some remarkably good special effects which put a lot of higher-budgeted offerings from the same period to shame. Sure, a lot of the effects are achieved with little more than camera tricks or a bit of makeup, but they are abundant, and demons themselves are chillingly realised, reminding me sometimes of the monsters in THE EVIL DEAD.A major flaw is the sub-standard level of the acting. The only memorable player is Dennis Lipscomb (RETRIBUTION), although this is due to his rather hammy turn than any special abilities. The rest of the cast are pretty poor, it has to be said, and constantly shout or whine at each other which quickly becomes grating. The loose plot is, however, action-packed, and filled with weird dreams, nudity, scenes of horror, mutilation, and monsters, so it can't all be bad. The film also evokes a dream-like atmosphere which is pretty compelling in places. It's a shame we don't give a hoot about any of the principal characters, but nonetheless this ambitious, partly-realised hope of a film is worthwhile in places.

Sturgeon54 Frankly, I was expecting a much more engrossing film from the almost unanimously positive word-of-mouth I had read about this on the internet. For a truly original idea - an exploration of dark early American frontier mythology - this movie failed due to one overriding problem: a lack of story focus. It is a shame, because director Avery Crounse, whose work I was unfamiliar with before seeing this, displays a visual talent on par with such macabre masters as Roman Polansky and Alejandro Jodorowsky. This movie contains one striking, horrifying image after another. Unfortunately, these images don't add up to a strong film because most of them make no sense in connection to the storyline. The basic barebones that I picked up on the plot is that a preacher, aided by the mysterious witch-like powers of his teenage daughter, steals from a local town and heads off on the river with his mistress and some others to the "promised land" where he can form a new Christian society. However, once they arrive in an abandoned Indian encampment in the deserted woods, they fall prey to some forest witches or ghosts.It is at this point that the story completely confused me. There never is a good explanation for all of the bizarre supernatural events in the woods, and especially the connection they have with the preacher's daughter, who seems to only speak in some archaic tongue. The supernatural imagery is riveting, but it was not enough to keep me interested. Because I really could not care less about any of these numbskull Puritans, watching the movie became an additional chore. I'll be honest: I hated reading "The Scarlet Letter" in high school, and watching this movie, with its laughable Puritanical superstitions, reminded me of slogging through that book. I would watch this again if I thought I could gain from a repeat viewing, but unfortunately I strongly doubt that I would.

Clint Walker Some movies haunt me for long after I see them. In the case of Eyes of Fire, this isn't because the movie is all that hot, but because I haven't been able to get the darn thing out of my brain since I saw it.Plot: It's been a while, but right off the top of my head, Eyes of Fire is set during days of early American life. A "wicked" polygamist dude is kicked out of his village for his ways, so he packs up his stuff, and leaves town, taking his flock of naive followers with him.He promises to find them a new place to live where they can all start a new society of sorts where they can live their lives the way they want to. But he ignores his Native American tourguide, and chooses to set up shop in a spooky, foreboding area of the woods which is supposedly cursed by evil spirits.After that, I can't really remember too much about the plot, other than that it dissolves into nothingness, and in its place we get quite a bit nightmarish images of ghosts, slime, and spectral zap rays, all backed with a lot of screaming.I tend to remain fascinated with movies that seem to exist in their own world of reality, where our rules of logic don't always apply. If the world of movies were a giant city, these films would be brief snapshots of dangerous streets you don't want to drive down. These don't always have to be horror movies; Over the years I can think of several examples of these kind of films; Gummo, Elephant, The Toolbox Murders (the 70's one), and Impulse (the meg tilly one) all come to mind off hand. These movies all have a worldview that depressed me enough that I just cant shake the characters and their environment afterwards.Eyes of Fire is like that, really. I don't recall one character, actor, or line of dialog. Nor am I really sure I've got the story down right. But the memory of being totally freaked out by it has stuck with me ever since.