Charles Band's perfectly grim and upsetting first-ever low-budget indie fright feature is a real creepy, unpleasant and most unnerving shocker starring Richard Basehart as a well-respected, but obsessed surgeon determined to restore his blind daughter's sight by stealing unwitting donors' eyes for extremely graphic and gruesome transplants! Pretty soon Basehart has a basement full of miserable, hideously moaning and hollow-socketed victims who include the always welcome Lance Henrikson (who's fine as usual in his initial foray into the horror genre) and blaxploitation actress Marilyn Joi.
Capably directed with admirable conviction and seriousness by longtime favorite sleaze movie thesp Michael Pataki (who also helmed the outrageously bawdy soft-core musical version of "Cinderella" for Band), with excellent icky make-up f/x by Stan Winston, a splendidly spare'n'spooky Robert O. Ragland score, an appropriately eerie and unsparingly bleak tone (the sequences with Basehart's victims groaning in abject pain and suffering are quite potent and upsetting), solid cinematography by future big deal mainstream Hollywood director Andrew Davis (who went on to direct such big budget action blockbusters as "Under Siege" and "The Fugitive"), sturdy supporting performances by Gloria Grahame as Basehart's loyal, but worried assistant and Vic Tayback as a homicide detective, and a truly startling nice'n'nasty ending, this overall rates as a highly unsettling and effectively rough-edged little B-horror item.
Capably directed with admirable conviction and seriousness by longtime favorite sleaze movie thesp Michael Pataki (who also helmed the outrageously bawdy soft-core musical version of "Cinderella" for Band), with excellent icky make-up f/x by Stan Winston, a splendidly spare'n'spooky Robert O. Ragland score, an appropriately eerie and unsparingly bleak tone (the sequences with Basehart's victims groaning in abject pain and suffering are quite potent and upsetting), solid cinematography by future big deal mainstream Hollywood director Andrew Davis (who went on to direct such big budget action blockbusters as "Under Siege" and "The Fugitive"), sturdy supporting performances by Gloria Grahame as Basehart's loyal, but worried assistant and Vic Tayback as a homicide detective, and a truly startling nice'n'nasty ending, this overall rates as a highly unsettling and effectively rough-edged little B-horror item.