The Eyes of My Mother

05/23/17 • 71 min

2 Guys And A Chainsaw - A Horror Movie Review Podcast

Simone joins us yet again for a tribute to Mother’s Day, only a week late. This slow burn creep-fest really got under our skin and we enjoyed discussing its many nuances.

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The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

Episode 81, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: I’m Craig.

Todd: And today with us, one of our favorite special guests. Say hi to the people, Simone.

Simone: Hey, guys. Good to be back.

Todd: We’re really happy to have Symone back with us today. Actually, she suggested this week’s film in honor of mother’s day, which by the time you hear this will have already happened. But, Simone, what movie did you choose?

Simone: I chose the 2016 film, The Eyes Of My Mother. And this was a movie that I had, heard had come out in the states, but of course, living abroad, I wasn’t able to see it in the theater. And I picked it up in one of our favorite little knockoff DVD stores over here, and gave it a shot. And man, oh, man, was this this is a very drastic change from the last time I was on this show talking about the fly.

Todd: That’s right. No Jeff Goldblum in this one for 1. Unfortunately, no. Not really many men in this one not not many characters really, actually.

Simone: Yeah. A small cast.

Todd: Yeah. Craig, I knew nothing about this movie. Did had you heard of this film before?

Craig: I don’t think so. I don’t think I had heard anything about it, and I just watched it. I didn’t look anything up. I didn’t know anything about it. So I didn’t know if this was a new movie, an old movie. I had no idea. And so when it started and I could tell that based on the cinematography and whatnot that it was a Todd, film, I was a little bit surprised. And I would say that that’s a good way of of describing my feelings about the movie overall. A little bit surprised. It’s an interesting film.

Todd: It really is. Interesting is a good way of putting it. Yeah. I’m glad you picked it, Simone, because we try to do all kinds of different, you know, types of movies. Mhmm. And I was surprised because, it was all in black and white, first of all. I I thought when it started out in black and white, for sure, we were seeing a flash back, and then pretty soon it would change. You know? But this is a pretty interesting choice nowadays for a 2016 horror film to go black and white. It it kinda shows the director is going for, like, art house. Mhmm. You know?

Simone: A film noir kind of thing, if you will.

Todd: Yeah. It’s not, you know, a lot of the horror movies now that are coming out, it seems to be, you know, we’ve talked about this before, like a genre that’s kind of revived in popularity again. Mhmm. But there’s so many of them getting churned out that they’re just all so commercial. You imagine that a person really wouldn’t be putting out a black and white horror film unless they really interested in more than just, like, making money. You know what I

Simone: mean? And this is unconventional in the way that other horror movies of this day and age are going and that it’s not a remake, I believe.

Todd: Oh, yeah. It’s kind

Simone: of an original idea. And the black and white really works because, Craig, you had mentioned it’s modern, but when we were watching it, like, I couldn’t decide what modern era. Like, people didn’t have cell phones. The the trucks and the cars looked maybe a little old. So we were guessing maybe, like, eighties, early nineties.

Todd: Yeah.

Simone: But then because of the, like, remote location of where the set takes place in this kind of small town, that also could help with, you know, a town that’s maybe a little, bit behind in the times. Yeah. But I think black and white really works with this film because in in a lot of the scary movies, especially the remakes that we see, it relies so much on, like, blood and gore and everything’s, like, doused in the color red. But this movie was very effective and very creepy, and we know that there’s blood. We we see it happening, but I guess encased in black and white, it’s just something old timey and off. It’s very haunting.

Todd: It mutes the the gore and the blood quite a bit, doesn’t it? Yeah. I mean, there’s a point in this movie where there’s a big puddle of blood on the floor, and you’re not even sure...

Simone joins us yet again for a tribute to Mother’s Day, only a week late. This slow burn creep-fest really got under our skin and we enjoyed discussing its many nuances.

Expand to read episode transcript Automatic Transcript

The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

Episode 81, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: I’m Craig.

Todd: And today with us, one of our favorite special guests. Say hi to the people, Simone.

Simone: Hey, guys. Good to be back.

Todd: That’s right. No Jeff Goldblum in this one for 1. Unfortunately, no. Not really many men in this one not not many characters really, actually.

Simone: Yeah. A small cast.

Todd: Yeah. Craig, I knew nothing about this movie. Did had you heard of this film before?

Simone: A film noir kind of thing, if you will.

Simone: mean? And this is unconventional in the way that other horror movies of this day and age are going and that it’s not a remake, I believe.

Todd: Oh, yeah. It’s kind

Todd: Yeah.

Previous Episode

Puppet Master

You’ve no doubt heard of Puppet Master. But have you seen it? The original, and not one of the hundreds of sequels? We did. And we talked about it. And it was interesting. Take a listen.

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Puppet Master (1989)

Episode 80, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys in a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, we’ve been doing a slew of requests lately. Haven’t we, Craig? Yep. And today’s request comes to us from loyal listener, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew, for suggesting 1989’s Puppet Master. Puppet Master, this one was a popular one. I mean, you saw it on the shelf. I think it was in the consciousness of about every horror fan around the late eighties, early nineties. And, I swear that I had seen it before, but after watching it today, I think what I had seen was one of the 1,000,000,000 sequels to it instead. And I think what I had seen was, Puppet Master 3, Toulon’s Revenge because this one didn’t ring any bells. Craig, had you seen this one before?

Craig: I had, but I’m kind of in the same boat as you. I know that I’ve seen this one. There are a lot of memorable scenes that I remembered, but I do think that I saw the sequels more often. And I think that that may be because while I do really appreciate this movie for what it is, I think that with the sequels, they went a lot more madcap. And I think that that suited the material well, and and maybe that’s why we remember those a little bit more. But like you said, there I don’t know how many sequels there have been. I think at least 6, and they’re still making them. So, yeah. It it’s been on the radar for a long time. The funny thing is, when I looked this up and saw that it was 1989, I was really surprised. I had thought that it had come out much earlier than that. To to find tapes on the shelf, and that just seemed like such a part of my video store experience was, you know, the puppet master and and all of its sequels. I I really had thought that it was, an older film than that.

Todd: Well, I guess they started cranking them out pretty quickly. When we’re doing this podcast, they’re you know, I are pretty die hard horror fans, but there’s still a lot of things that we don’t know and we learn as we go along. I was really interested to find out that the man who produced this and really takes a lot of credit for the series, whether it’s deserved or not, is a man named Charles Band. He started a low budget film studio back in the mid eighties called Empire Pictures and was responsible for a lot of putting out a lot of the movies that some of them many of them we’ve reviewed. One of them, sorority babes and the slimeball bowl a rama, and, Ghoulies, and a lot of these pictures that we know and love that are pretty notorious even though Empire Pictures folded because he sounds like a pretty interesting guy and maybe a little nuts. He he got flushed with cash with Ghoulies in one other film, and so, he went and he bought a 12th century castle, like, over in Romania or something, and decided that that was going to be the studio, kind of their base of operations. I think it was in Spain, actually. And, then started, you know, filming a lot of low budget horror movies. And the guy’s heart was in the right place. He really saw a need, especially in the direct to video market he was to later find Mhmm. For these low budget horror films. And then we talked about that when we talked about David deCoteau and how they couldn’t really fill the demand fast enough. Well, this guy was the one doing it. And when Empire Pictures folded because he owed a bunch of people money, he started a new one called Full Moon Pictures and really picked up where he left off. And this film, I think, was the one that put Full Moon on the map and is the reason why we have so many sequels to it is because he was able to fund a lot of his other movies just from the sequels to Puppet Master. You know, which is really interesting. You mentioned that the later ones are really madcap. And they they almost have to be, you know. I wasn’t really thrilled with this movie and part of that, I think, comes from the fact that you’re dealing with some pretty silly subject matter at least Oh, sure. Especially in the the hands of low budget film. You really run the risk of pure awfulness, really, when you’ve got little puppets, and you’re trying to make it convincing that little puppets are running around killing people. And in this movie, when they try to get really serious, and hardcore about it, it doesn’t really come off, I think, as well as the later films do when it seemed like they were maybe having a ...

Next Episode

It's Alive

It’s only the second PG-rated film we have reviewed (the first being Gremlins), but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pack a punch. By the end, we were unexpectedly touched by this dated but unique “killer baby” movie.

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It’s Alive (1974)

Episode 82, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podacst

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: So, Craig, we have a little bit of an announcement to make. It’s exciting. In my life, things have been changing quite a bit. You know, first, we moved to China, and then not long after we moved to China, we found out that my wife, my wife and I, by the way, have been married for about 15 years. We found out she was pregnant, and we have given birth to a nice baby boy.

Craig: Yay. Yay. If I had a cigar, I’d be smoking it.

Todd: Thank you, my friend. Thank you. So it’s been a really nice exciting addition to our life, and we thought what better way to announce that to our listeners than to, watch a movie about a demon child.

Craig: This was my idea, folks, so, don’t don’t blame Todd. And and even when I told him, I’m like, I don’t know if it’s distasteful or not. Let’s do it anyway.

Todd: Oh, heck no. It seems only fitting. It at least, we we it’s kind of like, you know, you go grocery shopping after you’ve had a really big meal. This is kind of the kind of the same deal. I think we we maybe we purposely waited, to watch these films, until after the baby was born, just to make sure everything was gonna be okay. So, you know, we could have chosen a number of things. You’d rattled off The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious choice. But we kinda tend to be into a little more schlock on this, on this show. We, at least those are the ones we have a little bit more fun with from time to time. And there’s one movie that has been on my list forever, and I don’t think Craig you had ever seen before either. But I think we both had wanted to see it and that is the 1974’s, It’s Alive. Mhmm. So, yeah. This one’s been on my radar for quite some time and I think it’s because I always grew up sort of knowing about this movie. I mean, I was born in 1978. And so as we were kinda crushing the threshold from the seventies and the eighties, my parents had a lot of stuff around the house like, I don’t know, like from movies from the seventies. And it’s alive. I think my parents maybe had the soundtrack to it. And so, you know, look looking through our record collection and things like that, I think I had been I had seen the cover for it at times. So just this this crib with a claw reaching over the side of it. And it always been intriguing to me. I knew I knew the movie that existed probably even saw it on the shelves of the video store, but never actually got a chance to sit down and watch it. So, this was the time. How about you, Craig? Had you seen this before or

Craig: Nope. And I’m I’m really surprised that neither of us had seen it because this is one of those ones that, you know, we say it all all the time, but you and I grew up in a, video store culture, and this is one of the ones that, you know, I saw on the shelves and, you know, that box art like you said with the crib with the claw kinda coming out, or excuse me, stroller, whatever it is. It was always intriguing and not just not just this one, but then there were a couple of sequels too that used the similar imagery. And, it Todd did always intrigued me, and and yet somehow I had never seen it until yesterday. So, no. It was new to me too.

Todd: And I guess this film eventually did pretty well. Obviously, well enough to warrant a couple of sequels. But initially, the, you know, after it was made, there were some the studios changed hands a little bit. There was some shake up in the executive branch or whatever. And, people the studio itself kind of lost interest in the movie, which surprises me a little bit. But in any case, it eventually got released almost 3 years, I think, after its initial release in like one theater in Chicago. They came out with a pretty impressive little marketing campaign with a little slogan, that drew people in. And end up making a little over 7,000,000, which I think is pretty good for the time. And again, enough Todd to warrant some sequels. And the writer director is Larry Cohen. And Larry Cohen himself has done a ton of things. I mean, if you go to IMDB, you’ll see that he has got over 80 writing credits. A lot of it, in TV, number of films. He tends to be in the more horror ...