Set in Miami, Florida, the film follows Jane (Lauren Tewes) a TV news reporter who covers the murders of a serial murderer/rapist. Jane lives with her sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh in her first film role), who after an encounter with an abductor as a child renders her blind, deaf and mute leaving Jane with survivor's guilt. Jane sees suspicious behavior from a neighbor in the adjacent apartment block, Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti), and suspects he may be the killer. Jane's suspicions are confirmed and Jane uses her skills and resources to turn the tables on the killer.
Released in 1981, Eyes of a Stranger marked director Ken Wiederhorn's third feature film following the cult zombie film Shock Waves and forgotten Animal House rip-off King Frat. The film was unique among most slasher films having come from a major studio, Warner Brothers, and forgoing the isolated country sides or suburban settings that defined the ambiance of Friday the 13th, Halloween, and the subsequent films they inspired and went for a more urban environment. Eyes of a Stranger doesn't follow the typical slasher formula wherein we focus on a group as slowly one by one the characters are killed in various fashions, but instead the movie is told from the point of view of Jane as she investigates her suspicions in an almost Noir-ish approach to the material there's a decent story idea at the core of Eyes of a Stranger, but it feels like it's rather unsure of itself as it wavers between traditional thriller tropes and slasher tropes with both ends feeling rather underdeveloped.
I think the biggest mistake the movie makes is in letting us the audience know that Stanley Herbert is a killer from the get go. While initially Stanley's face is obscured in shadow or off camera during the initial kills, the movie eventually drops this and it's made clear he is the killer. The fact we already know who the killer is robs much of Jane's investigative story of its tension as conversations with her lawyer boyfriend where they debate whether he is the killer feel pointless since we already know Jane is right and it's just the movie spinning its wheels until the inevitable climax. The kills are very much inspired by slasher trends and the gore work (in the uncut version I saw) by Tom Savini is par for the course well done and carries weight and impact, but we know so little about the people being killed because they're not main characters and you feel nothing when they die because there's no investment. It's not to say that this kind of framework can't work as there's been a number of Giallo films from the likes of Mario Bava or Dario Argento that cover material in this fashion, but those films usually try to have a sense of moral ambiguity to them with time taken to establish intrigue or character. We do get an idea of the impetus as to what motivates Jane's plan against Stanley, but it isn't all that fleshed out and feels like a footnote. Stanley himself isn't all that interesting and basically plays a standard quiet loner but even with that we don't get much of an idea as to who Stanley is outside his kills. His apartment is spotless and bland with only a Cuckoo clock that serves as a plot point standing out and we have no idea what he's like outside of the killings so he's basically just a murder machine for Jane to fight against.
Eyes of a Stranger is technically superior and has a more interesting story core than most of its contemporaries of the 1980s Slasher Glut, but it doesn't fully commit to being a thriller or a slasher and wobbles un easily between the two not really satisfying the standards for one or the other. The movie does have an intriguing noir-ish style that made the film more visually interesting in comparison to other films of similar ilk and the effects work by Savini is good as usual, but at the end it feels a hodgepodge of ideas from Rear Window, Wait Until Dark, and Peeping Tom with some contemporary gore work added that doesn't give the film much of its own identity. It's serviceable, but I can't give it much more than that.
