As Gilles in The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, Paul Naschy finds himself in the middle of every hitchhiking ex-con’s dream: being hired as caretaker for three neurotic, not-ugly sisters living together in a huge estate. The one with the bum legs (Maria Perschy) is hot, the one with the gnarled monkey hand (Diana Lorys) is even hotter, and the one with the flaming red hair and big breasts (Eva León) is super-duper hot. You can tell it won’t be long before Gilles starts milking the udders, if you know what I mean.
No, I mean he literally is shown milking a cow’s udders. That’s part of his job duties. Another: listening to the two upright sisters talk smack about the others — says León: “They’re bitches who keep me isolated! And I don’t have defects!” A fringe benefit: bedding them both.
But director Carlos Aured’s Blue Eyes is more about a different kind of poking: that with a knife. As a Spanish take on the giallo, the film plops these characters within an environment where beautiful blondes have a peculiar habit of being slit and having their blue eyes plucked by a black-gloved killer. Being someone who’s spent time in the slammer, Gilles is under suspicion for the murders, and why not? After all, he’s the one who has recurring dreams of choking fine-looking women.
Better known under its unsubtle U.S. title of House of Psychotic Women, this Naschy vehicle spills plenty of the blood for which he is rightfully beloved. That much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the graphic slaying of a pig, steam and all, unfaked. It’s jarring, whereas the murder sequences unspool to some of the happy-go-luckiest music you’ve heard, and the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” becomes a familiar refrain. “Din, dan, don” or “Ding, dang, dong,” it helps make the thriller with the masterfully macabre ending oddly irresistible. —Rod Lott