I rented a PAL import of WHITE OF THE EYE after some of you guys were talking about it in the comments back around Halloween. I really didn’t know anything about it, so I was off balance from the beginning. The opening credits said in huge letters DONALD CAMMELL’S WHITE OF THE EYE so at first I assumed that was some writer like Dean R. Koontz or John Grisham. Turns out it’s the director, he co-directed PERFORMANCE, did a couple weird ones like this, then killed himself.
Also it was co-written by “China.” Who the fuck is that? It’s not the bodybuilder lady from WWF, that was Chyna. Could it be the entire country of China wrote it communistically? Turns out it’s Cammell’s wife. As the movie began I didn’t even know what time period it was made in. I honestly thought it was a ’90s movie with some retro ’80s touches, turns out it’s 1987 and just happens to be very stylized.
The opening murder is a tour-de-force, it actually kind of creeped me out how fetishistically it captured every detail of the murder scene. It starts by showing this woman in her fancy home, extreme closeups of the objects surrounding her – flower vase, goldfish bowl, kitchen utensils – then every one of them is knocked over in the struggle when an unseen man attacks her. We only see him by the extreme closeup of the eye, which is disconcerting. And it seems to treat the wreckage as a carefully planned art installation. Or some kind of druid ritual. (read the rest of this shit…)
