Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes, best known as Julie, Your Cruise Director on TV’s The Love Boat) is your stereotypical big-haired anchor for the local news in Miami, except for her bad habit of cutting off her male counterpart and going off-script to editorialize about the serial rapist/killer terrorizing the city. As she tells her boyfriend, “This rapist thing is really getting to me!”
And how. Spotting a suspicious fat guy (John DiSanti, The Presidio) changing clothes in their twin-tower apartment building’s parking garage, Jane assumes he’s the hosiery-headed culprit, starts sniffing around his business and eventually gives him the Rear Window treatment.
Eyes of a Stranger, as if you needed telling, is no Rear Window. Nor is it supposed to be. Ken Wiederhorn, director of the Nazi-zombie chiller Shock Waves (clips of which can be seen on the tubes of a couple of characters), knows he’s making a B-level psycho-thriller — no more, no less — and thus makes Eyes watchable. For all its genericness, it’s almost comfort food in how utterly every-step-predictable it plays, right down to each victim’s teasing display of nudity and other elements watered-down from the era’s slashers.
That he gets a good performance from Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Machinist), however, as Jane’s blind and deaf sister, seems accidental. That’s all her. —Rod Lott