White of the Eye (1987) (2025)

Popular reviews

• Review by nathaxnne [hiatus <3] ★★★★★ 34

  How the Hippie Dream evaporated, concentrated, retreated and ensconced itself into fortressed bastions of high-end electronics, boutique kitchen goods, an endless series of perms whilst leaving Freedom and Psychedelic Knowing Unleashed In The Highest Deserts As Driftless Murder Zones Reconstituted Inside Of And Outside Of Family Values And Utility Vans. What is left in a pool at the bottom of a Copper Mine, why it is That Green? What Can Or Cannot Live There In That Pool. Psychoacoustics/A Resonating Chamber/The Spahn Ranch Sharper Image. (((Careful With That [ ], David Keith!!!)))))

• Review by pd187 ★★★★ 26

  real cybill fans love seeing cybill's ex ira as an 8-track loving american-indian mechanic in this surrealistic southwest giallo from cannon films, one of the strangest things ive seen in a while. tbh if it was just playing on tv in the background of a saturday id assume it was a normal movie but it felt like we were paying too much attention & the movie got scared of being pinned down; david keith rocks a UT vols hat like michael gross' atlanta hawks cap in tremors and offers his wife a freezer pizza saying "i KNOW you want the gooey one with the sausage!" & his weird little girl has an incredible, sparse list of credits including GORNO: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY…

• Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½

  83

  Diseased Americana. Such a wild ride - flows from characteristics of giallo and neo-noir all while building a fractured portrait of a family in consumerist turmoil. The Tucson, Arizona setting is unlike anything I've seen, so engulfed in scuzz and synth-waves of cultivated modernist architecture that the only outlet for the killer is to create an art-piece out of local housewives. David Keith and Cathy Moriarty provide fearless performances, and it gives White of the Eye a tortured power that mirrors the agitation and ennui of Donald Cammell's filmmaking. The ending is a real letdown, but even then, its weirdness remains uncompromised and tragic.

  TIL Marlon Brando, Donald Cammell's friend at the time, even pushed for the MPAA rating to be lowered from an X to an R, and he succeeded. What a king.

• Review by Kevflix And Chill ★★★½ 8

  #SlasherSaturday
  This was very different from what I was expecting. Much less of a slasher and more of a giallo thriller vibe. That usually works against my rating on these because I’m usually hoping for plenty of bloodshed. After the opening kill, we go a full hour before the next casualty….but I was actually completely engrossed. Most of that is because of David Keith’s performance. Thought he was a magnetic lead (and seems like he’s got an excellent singing voice too). He seemed super familiar but I couldn’t place anything that I might have seen him in before. Reminded me a Wyatt Russell though.
  This had a super artsy vibe with some very creative (and extensive) establishing shots at times…

• Review by Yves Bouwen ★★★★★ 3

  The dvd box tells me that this is the only movie director Donald Cammell had full control over. I was embracing myself for something weird and experimental. It is, but the dream like weird does not get in the way of the narrative.

  It is also a bit of a mind fuck. I have the feeling that there is a deeper theme here, I just can't seem to grasp. I have the same thing with David Fincher movies.

• Review by Mike Thorn 8

  Truly unusual... there's far too much to process in one viewing. First thing, I'm struck by Cammell's incorporation of such disparate thematic poles; not only does he make them work in concert with one another, but he actually merges them. This is where the horror, so unexpected and particular, comes from. Specifically, I'm thinking of the ways in which Cammell so persistently tangles this film's banality (labor, domestic routine, marital dispute) with the high energy of giallo as avant-flavored fever dream. I'm struck, too, by the way he complicates the film's center of horror: it's a place of interiority, literally psychosis, but he also moves it into the realm of the sociopolitical (the hellish aftermath of the Hippie movement, like…

• Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 2

  Part giallo, part Rambo (?) - David Keith is the prime suspect of a series of gruesome murders of housewives whose mutilated body parts are found around the state of Arizona and slowly but surely this will lead to his marriage and family life to crumble down.

  While the elements of giallo like the very experimental images like with an eye and the score that calls back to bands like Goblin makes for a nice American take on the genre, there's simply something about the acting that always kept pushing me back. Especially with Monarty who mostly come as wooden and feels like she's reading her lines rather than performing.

  All in all, while its not a movie I will…

• Review by Patrick Pryor ★★★★½ 1

  White of the Eye feels like a desert bleach sun rot death spiral into a nightmare in a damaged brain. Sure, the investigatory exposition dumps drag and the acting comes across frightened and amateurish and jittery in spots. But those slow swooping camera movements and out-of-place closeups on eyeballs and dripping meat and broken bloodstained glass looked like an abstract expressionist painting spawned from the brush of John Wayne Gacy, Jr. though! This feel bad, art damaged movie got on my weird wavelength and held tight once the final act coagulated into a putrid too real heap of screaming and giant blades and family trauma.

  Poor li'l Danielle cut me deep. And I loved the use of blown out hair…

• Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 1

  An utterly deranged work, approaching the same ideas as The Shining in its view of America's rotting soul but from the angle of giallo and acid westerns in lieu of Lynch and the masters of '60s Euromodernism. A city slicker woman is wooed out west, but even the wide rural expanse is complicated somewhat by the fact that her husband and the film's serial killer daylights by installing wildly elaborate, bespoke hi-fi systems into homes as sleek and modern as anything in prime Antonioni or Argento. But when the blood-letting starts, it unfurls in lysergic splashes of psychosexual release, punctuated by flashbacks that brim with primal, prehistoric savagery and a transition blend of dissolves, irises and frequent "pillow shots" of…

• Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★½ 2

  "We got us a nonconformist here"
  
  Spoilers ahead.

  When a string of suburban housewives turn up brutally murdered, Paul (David Keith), a sound specialist home equipment installer, finds himself a suspect. His wife Joan (Cathy Moriarty) finds her world turned upside down by the accusations, and disturbed by what she finds during her attempt to defend him.

  White of the Eye is a solid horror/thriller about the fear and danger that comes with misplacing your trust and love. For the majority of the first half we follow Paul, and the film does a good job of making us wonder if he's the culprit or not. Once things take a turn and we find out, it's all about Joan's horror and…

• Review by WraithApe ★★★ 2

  She's dead, wrapped in plastic...

  At first, I thought this was gonna be Donald Cammell's giallo, as an early scene depicts an artfully composed murder, complete with Pollock-esque exploding fluids, gloved hands, close-up eyeballs and broken glass - but it doesn't really pan out that way.

  The opening credit sequence is very arresting, with its eagle-eye view of the Arizona cityscape below; gleaming glass skyscrapers soaring out of the parched earth into the deep blue yonder on arcs of electric guitar. It whets your appetite for a kind of twisted Dallas, and that's probably closer to what you get. After the first murder, crime and investigation takes a back seat as the ménage à trois of Joan and Paul White…

• Review by 🍂🎃🏈 NotAnnaFaris 🏈🎃🍂 ★★★½ 14

  "Dad's wearin a bunch of hotdogs."

  It's called 'dressing the part', you antisocial lil sh*t. & Dad was chosen by mighty powers for his role in this weird-a$$ Southwestern giallo, so quit your yappin & make me a bologna sandwich already. On the white bread.

  #SlasherSaturday

  Nah, but srsly White of the Eye was not the slasher promised in the poster, but it's an interesting watch, anchored by solid performances that goes from slow & slightly strange to pure porangi quicker than you can say 'pass the peyote'.

  It's also a solid gap movie to explain David Keith's descent from peculiar protagonist to abusive antagonist between Firestarter & Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain.

  
  🛞🛞🛞1/2
  3.5 outta 4 tires, which is just half a tire short of how many I would've knifed in that sitch.