Eight Eyes (2023) User Reviews

Eight Eyes: Exploring 70s Techniques

[babyjaguar · 6/10 · 22 October 2023]

Austin Jennings creates a darkly romantic portrait of Serbian family dysfunction. It explores a couple's (Cass and Gav) travels while filming footage with vintage equipment.

The story follows them until meeting a stranger, Saint Peter. Then like with many cinematic tropes of the American tourists in a foreign country, things go array.

It's slow moving but if you are a film technie, this film is for you. The director explores Italian filmmaking, 70s Giallo and horror genres by using practical effects with a selection of cameras. Although Jennings really tried to produce something new, rather than mimicking.

The acting by Emily Sweet as Cass, the woman in peril, holds the storytelling with the performance of Bruno Veljanovski as Saint Peter. Location shots are well photographed and as well as interior shots of trains, apartments, etc.

Stay home (and watch this movie, you know?)

[BandSAboutMovies · 7/10 · 24 October 2023]

Cass (Emily Sweet) begins to hear voices while backpacking through Yugoslavia with her husband Gav (Bradford Thomas). She thinks it's just stress or maybe her marriage not working out. But then a local named Saint Peter (Bruno Veljanovski) offers to show them the real parts of his country and Gav goes missing.

Eight Eyes was shot using a variety of 16mm and Super8 cameras, such as the Aaton XTR Prod Super 16mm, Bolex H16 Super 16, Krasnogorsk 3 Super 16, Leica Leicina Special and Classic Pro Max 8 16x9. 16mm and 8mm film was used to get a vintage look, including animated shots and sequences that were all captured in-camera using a reflected-glass process.

This is also the first production by Vinegar Syndrome, who worked with Not the Funeral Home and Night Loops, the crew that creates Joe Bob's The Last Drive-In. Director Austin Jennings also directs that show.

Ever since Cass meant Saint Peter, she's been having hallucinations and hearing voices. And then this gets weird, as we see Gav's 8mm footage and meet Saint Peter's strange family and then we descend into folk horror and that kind of 70s occult weirdness that I love filtered through the torture-filled slashers of the mid 2000s.

This is yet another movie that tells me that I should never go to Serbia, the same as how I will never go to so many places that have terrified me so much through cinema.

Masterful Tension Building and Strong Characters

[putterkev · 9/10 · 5 November 2023]

Eight Eyes takes you on a wonderful trip of tension building and release cycles. 16mm film, in camera effects, and the eastern European setting mesh well to create a cohesive art direction for this memorable film.

I was pleasantly surprised by the restrained use of gore. What was there was effective, but never so much or so often as to become desensitizing or tiresome.

The acting was fantastic (especially female lead and the main antagonist) with a solid script. It also includes an interesting story/thematic twist on the genre. So, while the film nailed the genre(s) it was going for, it was also unique and memorable. Definitely worth a watch for anyone into indie or throwback/analog horror.