Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Izzy Adkins The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

bababear EVIL EYES takes a couple of good actors and a decent idea for a plot, then sinks it under an avalanche of bad writing and directing.Adam Baldwin (not related to Alec and company) plays Jeff, happily married to Tree (I didn't make that up, it's the character's name) and trying to succeed in L. A. as a screenwriter. He gets an offer from George, a producer looking for someone to develop a script about a multiple murder 35 years ago.It seems that a filmmaker named Gramm went quite mad and slaughtered his family. Jeff visits the house where the murders took place, and soon sets to work. As time passes he realizes that what he writes in the script also happens in real life, and to people he knows.This is perilously close to Stephen King's short story "Word Processor of the Gods" but this film is obscure enough that King didn't sue.The film is character driven in that our involvement in the story is proportionate to our involvement in the characters. And that's the sticking point.The characters are not involving. Jeff and George are played by two competent actors who bring presence to their roles. The other actors range from competent to awful. A "tense" scene in which Tree's parents try to persuade her that Jeff must abandon the screen writing project goes nowhere because all three performers are terrible. It's hard to get the old adrenaline pumping when people are reading crucial dialog as if they were reciting the alphabet.The direction is unimpressive, and the staging of the climax is done so ineptly that any impact is lost. The "surprises" revealed in the narrative just lie there.I don't think these are bad actors: they're actors delivering bad performances. The director's mind may have been on delivering shocks and gore and he just didn't worry about the actors.I've done a little directing and quite a bit of acting (all on stage) and watching this I wish I could have had time to work with the actors to help them find the humanity in their characters and connect with them; can you tell I'm a product of the 1960's and a believer in Stanislavski's theory of Method Acting, the search for "theatrical truth" in which actors look for the motivation and feelings of the characters and try to connect this with experiences from their own lives to help them relate to the characters they are playing?Visually, it's a mixed bag. Some scenes are atmospheric, using light and shadow effectively. Others aren't.Still, kudos to The Asylum to making a film that's not a direct rip-off a bigger piece of work.

Nelson Shreve I want to keep my movie collection down to a manageable & rational number for reasons I won't go into here. Evil Eyes became a keeper because of its treatment of females. The movie was way too violent first time through, so I wrote it off & forgot about it, or so I thought at the time. But the images of the girls kept coming back on me. They were all attractive in various ways and whoever shot the scenes including them adores the opposite sex as much as I do. And the actresses treatments of their own respective characters bridged the gap between drama and reality. In other words, they were at the same time, themselves and the roles they were playing. You see this kind of melding in live comedy skits, as on Saturday Night Live, but I can't think of another movie with actresses so ready to break out.

meehawl This plot has been done many times in the past, and will undoubtedly be redone many times in the future - can we expect ominously precognitive MySpace pages or blogs in the future? Anyway, Kristin Lorenz is exciting and brings a sense of fun to her character but is removed from the main action a little too early. Jennifer Gates as "The Wife" is a bit too Anne Archer... while Adam Baldwin is no Harrison Ford, alas. The cutting is a little disjointed and the narrative feels a little over-forced in places. There are a bunch of minor continuity snafus with lighting and time of day. Nevetherless, this is a well-done little movie considering its obvious limitations in budget and shooting schedule.

Joseph P. Ulibas Evil Eyes (2004) was another production that was distributed by those lovable morons from Asylum. Unlike most of their productions, this one actually look like a movie. Too bad it wasn't a good one. This film was a step above the usual shot-on-video fare.The movie is about a washed up writer (Adam Baldwin) who has another chance to make a splash with a big production company. His job is to write a script about a film maker who went insane and chopped up his family with a dull ax that had a wobbly head. When he take the assignment from a Teutonic producer (Udo Kier) strange things began to happen to him whenever he writes. For some strange reason everything that happens comes to happen. Meanwhile for inspiration he decides to live in the same house that the murders occurred. Soon his life and sanity begins to crumble. With pressure from his new client to write something horrific and his impending madness it all becomes too much for the writer and also for the film makers because they obviously have ran out of ideas and created a lame and nonsensical ending that was neither effective nor cool.The movie was very short and heavily padded out. It seems like most of Asylum's films have that very same problem. Maybe the movie would have worked as a short and if they found a lead actor with an ounce of charisma. Udo Kier was barely in the film and he had more charisma and was more effective in his role than Adam Baldwin. This movie is terrible but not as bad as most of Asylum's back catalog. More Udo Kier and less bad actors and film makers.Not recommended.