That was an excellent one.

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Blistering performances.

"The Hypnotic Eye" is a fairly effective B movie about a spate of self-mutilations by beautiful women who appear to be in a trance when they do the deed. A detective tries to unravel the link between the victims and a stage show that features a hypnotist that they have all attended.A lot of what appears in the movie is fun, although "The Hypnotic Eye" is barely 70 minutes long, and a lot of this is padding, featuring several needlessly long looks at the "hypnosis" act, as well as a very tiresome sequence set in a beatnik bar where we have to watch the whole show of beatnik music and poetry. It's a shame, because these really slow down the action. Surely it would not have been to difficult to make the actual storyline events take up some more time.The acting is ok, although a little hammy. The story actually has a really brutal side to it, as the methods the ladies use to self-harm are all pretty twisted. We don't witness many of them happening, but seeing somebody screaming with their hair fully ablaze is quite something for 1960 (even if it's not very realistic). Some of the "after" make up of the others victims is also pretty good.If all the padding was stripped out, this would rattle along and be a lot more fun, but it would be over in less than an hour! The plot really is tiny and there is barely any quality time given to the climax, in fact events dash to the closing credits with far too much haste...a little time spent on a proper ending and explanation would have been nice. Still, it's pretty entertaining while it lasts.

And this is high camp. The 40's and 50's were the decades of great B movies and this one's right up there. Each scene is a little gem. From the various disfigurements to the coffee house poetry reading to the obvious strings holding up the woman "defying gravity" to the doctor in his highly stylized (right down to the choice of dog) apartment playing his piano in a short silk robe open to the waist to the climax when all is revealed. And as others have mentioned, the cops are dumb as rocks. All in all, it's just a hoot!This movie requires just a small investment of time and it's worth every minute of it.

When a series of strange self-mutilations against women occurs throughout the city, the police investigator assigned to the case worries a big-shot hypnotist is responsible and tries to keep his girlfriend from falling under his spell and becoming another victim.This here was a fairly entertaining if somewhat slightly flawed effort. The main crux of this one is the fact that there's just as much of a mystery angle as there is a horror angle, almost to the point of that being the film's interest rather than the horror since the mutilations take place before the film starts with us getting involved at the most recent attack while the majority of the film takes focus on the police trying to find the cause of the attacks with little effort before stumbling onto the whole affair at the end. This isn't bad at all despite the change in tactics because the mystery is handled nicely with a rather shocking reveal late in the film that makes it a lot more shocking than expected. The few attacks shown are quite gruesome and graphic for the time-period, with one being quite shocking overall. Coupled with a bevy of attractive women and a rather healthy viewpoint of hypnosis and it's effects, this one isn't all that bad.Today's Rating-PG: Violence.

I just heard Michael J Weldon of Psychotronic Video talk about this on a podcast interview. It reminded me of the first time I saw this on television ( sometime in the 1960's I guess) on the late night Friday Chiller show. The woman burning herself, her hair catching fire, etc. was really terrifying. The film is kind of a B-Movie horror-noir with the oily continental Jacques Begerac performing that Hypnotic Eye thing and causing all manner of mayhem and mutilation. Then there was the wonderful Allison Hayes just 2 years past The Attack of the 5o Foot Woman giving another great performance and of course, my favorite, Merry Andrews from TV's How to Marry a Millionaire. They just don't make them like this anymore. A campy horror classic!