Greg Swinson

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I’m not sure I can accurately convey just how unpleasant it is to try to watch low-low-budget horror film Five Across the Eyes. It does start with a nothingburger of a horror-movie premise: as five teenagers drive in a rural area late at night, a psychopath decides to target them for death. That’s already unimpressive, but it only hints at the excruciating visual style of the film or its exasperating plotting. To put it simply, the girls drive around, they are attacked, they escape, and the cycle repeats a few times. Meanwhile, everysinglething in the film is shot in panicked shaky-cam style, with no cinematographic refinements made to the consumer-grade equipment being used. Saying that it looks ugly is underselling it—it’s frequently unwatchable, nausea-inducing and irritating in its refusal to deviate from the worst possible choices it takes at every turn. The antagonist is cartoonishly evil, and her torments (some of them bizarrely sexual) seem picked more for shock value than anything else. Writer-director Greg Swinson (whose IMDB filmography only recently added a second film sixteen years after the first) seems to make his audience go through even more of an ordeal than his characters, adding terrible dialogue to cinematography that makes most found footage films look slick. The only nice thing I have to say about Five Across the Eyes is that… it’s an all-female cast. Bechdel test passed. That’s it. But still not worth a look—seriously.