Five Across the Eyes (2005), by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen

The 21st Century is a weird era for trash. While it does seem like a huge amount of movies that are absolutely crazy and delightful are concentrated in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, entertainingly idiosyncratic films have endured in the smallest of markets. Movies like The Tony Blair Witch Project, Ben & Arthur, and Hip Hop Locos are usually created with the means and tools of supreme poverty, and come in two flavors: If adults make them, they tend to be on the eccentric side, perhaps to the point of egotism, as can be seen in Sam Mraovich, Tommy Wiseau, and James Nguyen. Other times, as with the forces behind Tony Blair Witch, we are subjected to the power called Kids Goofing Off. I don't know if "Kids" is the right term here, but the characters are kids even if the cast and crew probably weren't. What we have here is a story of High School Adventure--for all its thrills and all of its mindless, naive stupidity. While far from perfect, Five Across the Eyes is best described as "unique," which is surprising, given its premise.

A group of high school girls try to dodge traffic coming home from a football game by taking a shortcut. I can't remember their names, but their personalities stick out: the screamy driver whose voice realistically cracks, the polite, lighthearted super-Southern one, the bitchy one, the vague one, and the one who dies (I thought she died, but upon rewatching no one dies). While they apparently already live in a small town, the "shortcut" leads them into an even more rural part of their state (presumably Tennessee, where this was shot). Here, while asking for directions, they decide to make fun of one of the girls by pretending to drive off, and in doing so ram a nearby car. This is their trespass of hubris, because this car is driven by an ever-nameless Crazy Lady. The crazy lady will chase the girls all throughout the rest of the movie, occasionally taking advantage of car stalls, nervous breakdowns, and sweaty hands to pull them out of the car and torture them. There is no small influence from the torture porn genre here, but aside from a possible screwdriver-to-the-vag, "small" is the operative word for scale here--the inspiration is Saw, not Human Centipede. This has to be the first "torture porn on wheels" movie I've seen, and that it manages to build atmosphere without being disgusting, while also being as naive as the characters it depicts, makes it a hard beast to describe.

The movie is best broken down in chunks--there is the first handful of minutes, which is separate from the main chase. It's in this first chunk that we start to see that the characters have individual personality, which they effectively carry through for the rest of the movie. It's hard for us to like these characters at first because they are all incredibly bitchy and incapable of speaking below sane and safe Inside Voice thresholds, which they also carry through the rest of the movie. This first chunk will be a test to see if you can do this movie or not, because it is probably annoying to most persons. Still, there are plenty of blink-and-miss-it scenes in it that foreshadow the coming events, such as when we first see the crazy lady's car. Tellingly, the lady exits the car long before they hit it, and instead of going into the nearby convenience store, she stalks into the shadows some distance away from it. This already sets up the admittedly fascinating characterization of this woman. When we reach the second chunk, it does seem like she's mad at the girls for hitting her car, but changes her reasoning at some point to the girls apparently having "ruined her family"--later on, she screams about them having "killed her baby," and even later on, she says something about "old men" (?). Of course, she keeps her van stocked with corpses, so it's clear she's just a motiveless serial killer, as in too many cheap horror pieces. I'm sold by this, though, because this movie's setting is amazing. There is nothing creepier than driving out in the countryside late at night, especially in the South. I can totally buy that there are people out in the rural area even in the North who will find any weird reason to stalk people and kill them. At least, it can be fun to believe, in its own problematic way. Because the crazy lady has no motive, it only makes the imposing emptiness of the setting even creepier.

I want to zoom in on that first chunk again, and how it will test you, because it exposes one of this movie's stranger angles. A lot of the dialogue here seems scripted, because it's not how people talk outside movies, but it's delivered like it's all improv. I get the impression that if these actresses were as old as their characters when they made this, they were the Theatre Kids. Either this is improv from some really organized heads or scripted lines made to sound like improv in an attempt at realism. It sticks out, with lines like "I feel dead all over the inside." If you're someone who criticizes how people talk (which you really shouldn't), the pre-chase chunk will sort you out. Because every line is awkward, the movie becomes much more entertaining--you'll always be wondering what someone is going to say next.

Then there's the matter of how this was shot. This camera seems to be the same model I had when I was in high school, albeit with better light detection. It's fuzzy, with pixelization seen at points. This is a YouTube movie, and I don't consider that an insult. In the beginning you may be led to believe this is a found-footage film, but there isn't a found-footage frame story, nor is the camera an actual prop in-universe. The camera just bobs and weaves around, and during one of the torture scenes, when we get a close-up of a jangling toolbox, we even see the camera flip upside-down! This, along with a blurry take wherein the crazy lady shoots at the girls with her shotgun off-camera, were both left in. Remarkable is the word, literally. If you've been suckled on good movies, leaving in a gratuitously blurry shot and a random amateurish desire to spin the camera around are both worthy of remark. Whether it's a good or bad remark is up to. What matters is this is a "quasi-found footage" movie, which I've seen before but have never found quite so damn fixating. I wish I knew why it drew me in...

Did I mention that this movie also has the girls throw feces at a car, piss on their clothes, and spill and eat funerary ashes?

This movie even has bookends, which is something this review doesn't. Instead of referencing the beginning of my words, I'll choose instead to say how charmed I am by the title. The in-universe drop is that the part of the country the five girls drive across is called "the Eyes." But it's also a clumsy pun implying that somehow being tortured and killed by a hick with a shotgun is like a slap to the face. And, they make a point of showing us that "Five Across the Eyes" spelled out..."FATE"! Spooky! There's a ring to that. A stupid ring. A ring I like.