Audience Member
<strong>The Girl with the Hungry Eyes</strong> (Jon Jacobs, 1995)
At the very end of <em>The Girl with the Hungry Eyes</em>, there's a title card that says the film is dedicated to Fritz Leiber, on whose short story it is based. It gave me pause, mostly because I'm shocked Fritz Leiber's moldering corpse didn't heave itself out of the grave, track down everyone who worked on this piece of shit, and murder them all in the most grisly manner possible. I've seen some godawful adaptations of Leiber over the years (and no matter how many times I am told this, I refuse to believe Romero didn't have <em>Conjure Wife</em> right at the front of his brain when writing the execrable <em>Jack's Wife</em>), but this one truly takes the cake.
Plot: Louise (<em>Snake Eyes</em>' Christina Fulton, better known for being Nic Cage's ex and Stian Thoreson's current than anything in her film career) is a vampire with a long-standing connection to the Tides Hotel, a South Beach fixture slated for demolition. The spirit of the hotel-or maybe it's a demon, I have no idea-sends Louise out on a quest to find the safety deposit box that holds the title deed to the hotel in order to stop it from being demolished. I think. (It's very hard to understand the spirit/demon/whatever's voice; watch the movie with subtitles if you get a chance.) This leads her to Carlos (Isaac Turner in his only big-screen appearance to date), a down-on-his-luck artist who's squatting in an abandoned building, in debt up to his neck, and doesn't seem to realize he's the owner of a prime piece of South Beach real estate. (Or maybe he's not and just happens to have the key, I don't know.) In any case, he mistakes her for a new model, and during the photo shoot, the key gets itself lost, leading the two of them to look for it.
Oh, and of course Louise is a vampire, which means she has to kill people now and again to keep that healthy glow. The murder scenes are the unintentionally funniest in the movie. You know how in crappy low-budget movies, you see the knife head towards the victim, and then the camera cuts to a white wall, which then gets a spray of red Karo syrup? (And the worse the movie is, the bigger the splash?) It's like that, but all kinds of funnier. When Louise kills someone, there's a power surge in the Tides Hotel, and the lights in the top floor flicker, with the straight-from-stock electrical buzzing noise. It's a kind of demented genius, really, in that it makes everything else in the movie seem marginally less stupid. And this is a movie that needs it. The acting is terrible across the board. The effects are worthless, what few of them there are. The plot is close to incoherent, and the demon/spirit/whatever whose commands to Louise are (I assume) supposed to pull it all together is unintelligible, shooting any possibility of this movie being in any way watchable in the foot. Repeatedly. With a musket that has to be reloaded between shots. By halfway through the film, I was rooting for the development company (whom we never actually see, so I was free to imagine David Caruso cackling and rubbing his hands together as the bad guy here). *
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
<strong>The Girl with the Hungry Eyes</strong> (Jon Jacobs, 1995)
At the very end of <em>The Girl with the Hungry Eyes</em>, there's a title card that says the film is dedicated to Fritz Leiber, on whose short story it is based. It gave me pause, mostly because I'm shocked Fritz Leiber's moldering corpse didn't heave itself out of the grave, track down everyone who worked on this piece of shit, and murder them all in the most grisly manner possible. I've seen some godawful adaptations of Leiber over the years (and no matter how many times I am told this, I refuse to believe Romero didn't have <em>Conjure Wife</em> right at the front of his brain when writing the execrable <em>Jack's Wife</em>), but this one truly takes the cake.
Plot: Louise (<em>Snake Eyes</em>' Christina Fulton, better known for being Nic Cage's ex and Stian Thoreson's current than anything in her film career) is a vampire with a long-standing connection to the Tides Hotel, a South Beach fixture slated for demolition. The spirit of the hotel-or maybe it's a demon, I have no idea-sends Louise out on a quest to find the safety deposit box that holds the title deed to the hotel in order to stop it from being demolished. I think. (It's very hard to understand the spirit/demon/whatever's voice; watch the movie with subtitles if you get a chance.) This leads her to Carlos (Isaac Turner in his only big-screen appearance to date), a down-on-his-luck artist who's squatting in an abandoned building, in debt up to his neck, and doesn't seem to realize he's the owner of a prime piece of South Beach real estate. (Or maybe he's not and just happens to have the key, I don't know.) In any case, he mistakes her for a new model, and during the photo shoot, the key gets itself lost, leading the two of them to look for it.
Oh, and of course Louise is a vampire, which means she has to kill people now and again to keep that healthy glow. The murder scenes are the unintentionally funniest in the movie. You know how in crappy low-budget movies, you see the knife head towards the victim, and then the camera cuts to a white wall, which then gets a spray of red Karo syrup? (And the worse the movie is, the bigger the splash?) It's like that, but all kinds of funnier. When Louise kills someone, there's a power surge in the Tides Hotel, and the lights in the top floor flicker, with the straight-from-stock electrical buzzing noise. It's a kind of demented genius, really, in that it makes everything else in the movie seem marginally less stupid. And this is a movie that needs it. The acting is terrible across the board. The effects are worthless, what few of them there are. The plot is close to incoherent, and the demon/spirit/whatever whose commands to Louise are (I assume) supposed to pull it all together is unintelligible, shooting any possibility of this movie being in any way watchable in the foot. Repeatedly. With a musket that has to be reloaded between shots. By halfway through the film, I was rooting for the development company (whom we never actually see, so I was free to imagine David Caruso cackling and rubbing his hands together as the bad guy here). *
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
01/26/23
Full Review
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