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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES
Rating: 
USA. 1993.
Director/Screenplay – Jon Jacobs, Based on the Short Story by Fritz Leiber, Producers – Michael & Seth Kestenbaum, Photography – Gary Tieche, Music – Paul Inder & Oscar O’Lochlaunn, Underscore – Rich Giovinazzo, Special Effects Supervisor – Barry Anderson, Production Design – Clare Brown. Production Company – Kastenbaum Films/Smoking Gun.
Cast:
Christina Fulton (Louise Balfour), Isaac Turner (Carlos), Bret Carr (Bud), Leon Herbert (Johnny), Susan Rhodes (Mandy), Jon Jacobs (Henry)
Plot: Louise Balfour, a woman who hung herself at Miami’s The Tides hotel in 1937, is resurrected as a vampire in the ruins of the hotel in the present-day. The voice of the hotel inside her head drives her to go out and devour human blood. She goes to the studio of the photographer Carlos who is under pressure from hoods to pay up owed money and models for him. But then when people are startled by her camera presence and demand that she be made a feature model, Carlos becomes obsessed with finding her again.
Behind the quite captivating title The Girl with the Hungry Eyes turns out to in fact be a vampire film. And sadly it is no more than a glorified student film that is self-consciously trying to be arty and one that soon collapses into pretentiousness of the highest order. Christina Fulton gives a really terrible over-the-top performance, staggering around like a cross between a strung-out junkie and a silent movie version of a waif. She is given these interior monologues which try to be hip but are really quite terrible. Director Jon Jacobs throws in pretentious lighting schemes, odd camera effects and distorted cut-up editing – there’s a completely laughable theatricality to it all. (Jacobs also makes a rather awful appearance as a white trash local who tries to pick Fulton up).
Some of this might have been tolerable if The Girl with the Hungry Eyes was a film with some original ideas and something to say, but sadly this is not the case. Indeed strip away all the artifice and it is an extremely trivial vampire film that really transpires as holding nothing more than a banally ordinary vampire-finds-true-love plot. The film is based on a short story by famed fantasy/horror author Fritz Leiber. (The same short story was also adapted earlier as an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971). It’s not very clear – for instance we are never certain if the hotel itself resurrected Fulton from the dead. There’s the rather confused notion of the hotel which appears to be rebuilding itself, a la the house in Burnt Offerings (1976), as Fulton claims each victim. The one positive aspect is the Miami locations whose colour and sunniness make a quite sharp contrast for a vampire film.
Jacobs and Fulton later teamed up again for the equally bizarre and pretentious Lucinda’s Spell (1998), an erotic film about modern witchcraft.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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