The Hypnotic Eye (1960)

(On Cable TV, September 2021) This won’t be a newsflash to anyone, but exploitation cinema is older than nearly all of us, and as you get away from major studio movies (and even then), it’s easy to find films based on nothing more than dubious premises and cheap thrills. So it is that The Hypnotic Eye doesn’t make any attempt at hiding how shameless it is, as it begins by describing a curious epidemic of attractive young women disfiguring themselves. One breathless demonstration of hypnotism later, there isn’t much more to piece together: it’s all about the hidden dangers of hypnotism and how this evil mastermind is driving young women to cut and mutilate themselves. Hypnotism is always a bad plot device (there’s one exception: The Manchurian Candidate) and The Hypnotic Eye doesn’t break the rule. The plot is paper-thin and napkin-big, with much of the film dedicated to outlandish demonstrations of the quasi-magical powers of hypnosis as filtered through the movie thrill machine. It’s all bunk, but the audiences at the time probably lapped it up in disregard of the reality of the practice. Reading about the film’s marketing is a wild ride, and helps explain the film’s, um, fascination even when it’s such transparent claptrap: exploitation is always close to the raw fears of the paying audience, and it’s amusing to see how far director George Blair is willing to go (for instance, in showing a young woman setting her face on fire) in order to get a rise out of its audience. It’s almost a good way to better appreciate what modern movies are doing to rile us up with topics we (now) barely understand and will eventually find quite silly.