Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

dougdoepke Short Eyes is to prison pictures what the atom bomb is to weaponry— powerful and frightening from one end to the other. In fact, I'm surprised the movie got made at all since it's got all the commercial appeal of live surgery. But once you start watching, you can't stop. The characters are real and riveting, the setting an actual prison (The Tombs), and the violence sudden and brutal. It's almost like being in prison, except thankfully you're not.The story is about one floor of the lockup where the packed-in racial groups appear poised for combat like Europe in 1914. There's a tense truce as long as Whites, Blacks, and Browns observe the unwritten rules and don't invade the wrong space. Too bad they're not making music all the time because that's the only time they seem in harmony. Then into this tense mix comes a guy everyone can despise, a child-molester (Davison). Worse, he's a white guy who even looks like "the man". So he's got as much chance of surviving as a minnow has among sharks-- that is, if the authorities don't pull him out first. And, kind of surprisingly, we wish they would since after listening to his "story", he seems more pathetic than wicked.Two things to note. Catch how difficult it is for any kind of humanity to survive amid racially charged, oppressive conditions that the authorities (guards, supervisors) only make worse. Juan (Perez) wants to cling to some vestige, but he's got to do it within the unwritten rules. And, in this testosterone-soaked atmosphere, the problem isn't just ethnic, it's other guys in general. However, the most nightmarish part is the threat of emasculation, men being denied their identity and turned into substitute women. That scene in the shower between Cupcakes and Paco may be more unsettling than even the knifing in Psycho (1960). I expect this loss of sexual identity may be the most unnerving part of a genuinely frightening movie, by which Hollywood's prison films pale in comparison.

spanishfli The performances in film version of Short Eyes are perhaps some of the best I've seen. Short Eyes, in prison slang, means child molester. The whole play revolves on a white pedophile Clark Davis interacting in a prison whose majority are Puerto Ricans and Blacks, and Davis' interaction with Juan who attempts to come to terms with Davis' need for sex with children.There are several memorable characters such as the very young and tender Julio, known as Cupcakes by the prisoners, who is the target of unwanted homosexual attention by several, if not all, prisoners. El Raheem is a strong black man, perhaps a Black Panther, who studies the Koran all day long and acts on his feelings of anger towards white people. Longshoe Murphy is a tough young Irish. And of course Clark Davis and Juan, who are the main characters of the play.Pinero, who plays GoGo in his the film version of his play, wrote this play while in Sing Sing prison at around 1974 for armed robbery, and first was performed by a cast of prisoners. Short Eyes had a very short success on Broadway.The only problem of the movie is the cinematography-it is rather boring, especially in this time where special FX of Lord of the Rings is rather common. But there are two or three rather beautiful scenes, one with a prisoner posing in front of a poster. Despite the very dated lackluster cinematography, I wouldn't hesitate to buy this film.

preppy-3 A movie about prison life. It deals with the inmates--their lives, hates, sexual feelings and the rituals that happen in prison. Clark Davis (Bruce Davison) is thrown in with them--he's suspected of being a child molester ("short eyes" in prison slang). The other prisoners want to kill him...but Davis has talked to one prisoner Juan (Jose Perez) who has serious doubts about his guilt. But can he convince the others?This was a pretty big art house hit (here in Boston at least) back in 1977. It dealt with (for the time) a taboo subject matter. Then it completely disappeared. That's too bad--it deserves a wider audience. It was shot in an actual closed-down prison (the Tombs) in NYC. That really helps the mood and feeling of the film. The acting is very good by all--especially Davison, Perez and Joseph Carberry (as Longshoe). But this is a very hard movie to sit through. Davison's confession to Juan is VERY explicit, a sequence where a prisoner is beaten up and tortured by the others is unpleasant and the ending is very disturbing. It's not a perfect film. It was a stage play first--and it shows. The action never moves away from two areas and occasionally the inmates speak WAY too intelligentally for the characters they're playing. (I seriously doubt that the character Longshoe would ever know the word "quadroon"--or what it meant). Still a very powerful, disturbing drama. Well worth seeking out. Accomplished character actor Luis Guzman plays one of the inmates (good luck finding him).

zetes Maybe the best prison film ever made because its origin is people who were actually in prison, most notably its main author, Miguel Piñero. The film deals with the interrelationship between the prisoners of a cell block. That's what most of the film is, the observation of these men and their culture. The plot of the film is about a new arrival (Bruce Davison) who has been arrested as a suspect on a child molestation charge. He's never been in prison, and he's very afraid, which, of course, he should be. Short Eyes doesn't make any easy choices at all, which makes for a particularly uncomfortable movie to watch. But it also makes it one of the gutsiest and most important films ever made, and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's one of only two movies that I've ever watched twice right in a row. Well, the second time was with commentary by the director (and another man, whose participation in the film I don't exactly know), because I wanted to know exactly how this film came about, and to confirm my guess that there was some kind of inside track to prison life behind the scenes. There was far more than I could have guessed; the commentary also ranks as one of the best I've ever listened to. A masterpiece.