Deadly Eyes

Pretty early into Deadly Eyes, director Robert Clouse (yeah, the director of Enter the Dragon) establishes that the rats of his film are a danger to everyone. A baby in a high-chair, his toys and baby food in a bowl, just happy-go-lucky, is pulled down. The rats drag this child off while his sister is bidding adieu to her high school friends who are off to get burgers. The sister re-enters her house, sees a blood smear trail leading into the basement, a massive, fugly rodent flashing towards her as the scene ends.
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Thankfully we don’t get explicit details (unless you are a sick fuck who wants to see a baby eaten by a giant rat), but we are left to fill them in. Not something I particularly want to dwell on myself, but the film does from that point cause us to keep in our minds that a breeding of these bad boys would not be good to the city population. A menace to society is putting it mildly.

A grainery, about to send a ton of corn to Africa, with a lot of money tied into it, is condemned by the Health Dept as unsanitary and forced governmentally to burn the product due to a major rodent problem. Those said rodents head into the big city and all will not be well with the world.

The film primarily follows a clan of high schoolers, like a head cheerleader in lust with a teacher/basketball coach while dating the lead star of the basketball team. One of the gang was bit on the hand by a member of the dog-sized vermin. Trudy, cheerleader, Matt, basketball star; their relationship crumbles because she’s bored with him and wants to experience what it would be like to have an older man, Mr. Harris. Look, you can’t blame Harris for being a little out of sorts and responding with a bit of shock when Trudy comes on to him. She enters the men’s locker room after he showers, approaches him about her falling in love with him, and makes a move by kissing his lips. He momentarily kisses back but maturely back pedals, telling her to call him in ten years. Will this infatuation lead to an obsession? Yeah, I realize this sounds so soap opera, and this finding its way into a killer rats movie is rather all the more odd, but for some reason I didn’t mind it because as a 35 year old man, the idea that a younger beauty would have a sexual interest in you is, if anything, flattering.

I tell you, these rats don’t discriminate…they’ll eat any human that walks. I’ll be damned if even the old folks are made tofu for these bastards. A nice old geezer with a cane is just walking home after a date with an elderly lady, and low and behold if a gaggle of those rodent monsters don’t send him over a guard rail, down steps, and into a prone, vulnerable position to be covered and eaten. Again, the film shows little and uses the premise itself of a steadily growing horde of giant rodents on the hunt for human meat to instill a sense of “if this happened it would really suck” in your mind, the whole “fill in the details if you are so inclined” script/direction may leave much to be desired to the crowd who gravitate towards a plot concerning man-eating rats actually wanting to see human consumption.

How did the rats grow into such larger rodents the size of dogs? Steroid corn grain! Yes, corn. The city is celebrating a new subway extension, and even though the health dept fumigate the sewer system underneath the city the rats take to the subway tunnels. Dachshunds dressed as rats had me harkening back to The Killer Shrews, and this film’s monsters are just as corny if not worse. Just lousy. Some might get some laughs out of it. The film is presented in performance and story in primarily a serious tone/manner. The Grand Opening of State Street Station is about to be visited upon by some hungry rats. A subway train carrying Mr. Harris’ son and his new romantic love interest in Health Inspector, along with the Mayor and members of the media, will also be stopped by a giant rat gnawing into brake lines, and therefore vulnerable for attack.

I think the rats, because they look so silly and unconvincing, are a detriment to what could have been ideal scenes of horror. The all-out assault on a theater full of patrons watching Game of Death (yeah, nice plug Clouse), singular attacks on lone victims who try to flee from the vermin as they run into dead ends (Scatman Crothers’ field inspector who searches for rats plaguing the city in the sewer system; Cec Linders’ professor/rat expert running down an alley outside his museum; the aforementioned old man caught by them while walking on a street), and even when they scurry about; each scene featuring them fails because the rats are so laughable. Unconvincing creatures can either make or break a movie depending on what the audience desires. I know some horror fans purposely will go out of their way to see this just because of the rats are fake-looking while others, like me, will often groan inside. Oversized rats, or “super rats” as they are often referred to, just the idea, lends itself to mockery. There are moments where the poor actors have to make obvious dolls into convincing ferocious monsters pouncing on them. It invites ridicule. Some puppetry when there’s gnawing also leaves much to be desired. It is just hard to get worked up with these creatures when they look so unimpressive, even with the blood and screams. When it comes to those pesky, ugly, unpleasant rodents, I think instead of wasting time on this hokum, Of Unknown Origin (1983), with a solid Peter Weller, is the film that's worth going out of the way to see. Deadly Eyes, on the other hand, offers a bar of Velveeta so think that you'd break your teeth trying to saw through (yeah, cheap cheese joke, but I thought it was appropriate considering the subject...).

Thinking about large rats on the attack in cities can produce the stuff of nightmares, and if this film accomplishes anything it is that there’s no easy solution to curing a sporadic, spread rat population with one explosion. There’s no happy ending with all the rats dead and society continuing on without a hitch. It’s not enough to supersede the surplus of cheese in abundance. Shabbily closed subplots such as Trudy (Lisa Langois, many will know from 80s cult like Happy Birthday to Me) abandoning her pursuit of Mr. Harris (Sam Groom), eventually returning to her previous beau, Matt, with Sara Botsford’s Kelly Leonard (Harris’ love interest) a little upset finding Trudy in Harris’ apartment, but not enough to put up too much of a fit (Botsford finds it hard to summon up much life or personality at all, but her part is so dull I kind of understand why). Trudy retreating to Matt before both enter the movie, facing unforeseen horrors, would have come off a bit stronger had the rats been scary. Still there's room for dramatic power had a better film pulled it off. Fans of the Scat will probably get a kick out of seeing Crothers swearing and threatening the rats before becoming lunch to them.