"Eyeball" is one of the more tedious giallo flicks I have seen. It's funny: you'd think the film's unique setting in Barcelona, and its premise of a group of American tourists dealing with murder in Spain, would be enough to set it apart somehow. It's even got an interracial lesbian couple. Yet, none of this works. I think the problem is the director is just not comfortable making gialli. Umberto Lenzi is a name infamous among all fans of cult, exploitation and shock cinema. Yet he was never really renowned in giallo circles. He is famous, or infamous, for films like "Cannibal Ferox", a movie some consider to be even more appalling than its obvious inspiration, "Cannibal Holocaust". Aside from that, he seems to have been most prolific in the Eurocrime genre, with classics like "Almost Human" - arguably the best poliziotteschi of them all, and a bunch of others like "Syndicate Sadists" and "The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist".I feel the urge to describe the plot, but I've pretty much done so already. The movie has a set-up but no execution - no pun intended. American tourists are on a sight-seeing trip in Barcelona. Among them is a rich man with his mistress whom he intends to leave his wife for, and a lesbian couple featuring a sexy woman-of-colour. Someone dies. Actually, make that a bunch of people. They all turn up dead with one eyeball plucked out. The killer is gradually revealed to be a masked figure with a red raincoat.There is a completely ineffectual police investigation, some random bare breasts and some more murders or attacks which, considering the violence against eyeballs, are surprisingly non-violent.None of the characters really make any impression whatsoever. The guy playing the cheating hubby is like every other such character in every other giallo ever made. There's always a rich guy screwing around. Giallo exists to show rich people behaving badly.The only person onscreen who brings out any sympathy in the viewer is the black lesbian. She is sexy and easy to root for. She should have been the main character! Forget the others. I wonder if people of colour just weren't generally protagonists in European films in the '70s - which is a shame, considering blaxploitation was kicking ass across the Atlantic at this time, so obviously there was a market for it among exploitation fans.The killer was, I guess, a surprise. I didn't guess it, but then I didn't care enough to. The direction is just so pedestrian; it's one of those movies where it feels like a tour of the city in which it's filmed. The locations overwhelm and dwarf the actors. The direction is so dull it can't focus your attention on them for long.

***SPOILERS*** Italian slasher film that takes place in Barcelona Spain involving this hooded, with a red plastic raincoat, psycho killer who after murdering his victims pokes their baby blue left eyes out in some kind of bazaar blood ritual. A number of foreign tourists are targeted by this maniac that has the local police headed by the soon to be retired, in just three days, Inspector Tudela, Andres Mejuto, desperate to catch him. That before the story hits the front pages and decimated the city's tourist business that's it major source of income.Were given a number of clues to who the killer is but they seem so confusing that they in fact give him cover from to police instead of having him tracked down and arrested by them. One of the clues that's revealed with such shock and fan-fear is in him being seen a photo with the mulatto fashion model Naiba Campball, Ines Pellegrini. The confusing photo doesn't really show anything except to Neiba, who has brown eyes instead of blue ones the ones the killer is really after,that doesn't make any rhyme or reason at all to his identity! And leaves you, or those of us watching the movie,totally confused to who he is! ***SPOILERS*** It in fact was the plucky Neiba who's lesbian lover Lisa Sanders, Mirta Miller,was one of the killers victims who figured out who the killer was by seeing the photo that was kept from the audience. And after her tracking him down almost lost her life as well as left eye in doing it. This murder and eye popping spree was finally put to and end by the frustrated, in trying to solve the case, and soon to retire Inspector Tudela who finally got a chance to draw and fire his revolver, that he never did in his entire 30 year career in the Barcelona Police Depertment, and mercifully put an end to the killer as well as the movie.

The eighth and final Giallo in director Lenzi's prolific and versatile filmography is generally considered to be his least effort in this vein but, while I may not entirely agree with that assessment – the Spanish setting does give it an atypical look (especially as many of the murders occur out in the open and during daylight hours!) – but, unfortunately, the proceedings are very much run-of-the-mill. Incidentally, I was glad with the identity of the killer since I could not believe the hero, John Richardson (balding but saddled in the Italian print I watched – which actually reverts to English for a couple of brief instances – with a youthful voice!) preferred her character over his gorgeous wife (who, for the longest time, is thought to be the actual culprit due to a past crime she may or may not have been involved in)! The cast of characters, though most come from the same American town and are holidaying in Spain, is a mélange of different attitudes and ideals – a cigar-smoking bigwig with a precocious teen niece in tow (repeatedly ogled by the tour guide{!} and later attacked beside a pool at night: another girl is unsubtly killed inside the "House Of Horrors" of a Luna Park…though, why a bunch of mostly middle-aged tourists should choose it as an excursion in the first place is anybody's guess!), a Spaniard who has come with his less-than-enthused wife to the places he knew in his youth, a priest(!), a couple of lesbians (one a photographer and the other her black model), Richardson's secretary (with whom he not only carries on an affair but, bafflingly enough, tags along once the murders start).Interestingly, the killer (who mutilates each body by removing the female victim's left eye, hence the English title!) is seen sporting a red raincoat and gloves (as opposed to the characteristic black – perhaps a nod to the Venice-shot British chiller DON'T LOOK NOW {1973}? – and sort of explains the original title – RED CATS IN A GLASS LABYRINTH – since the fleeing killer is idiotically described as a red cat, even if the print I watched sported the banal alternate moniker of THE SECRET KILLER!!) but, since the tourists were all given one on account of the rain, it could be any one among them. However, the victims are seemingly haphazardly chosen (not merely the tourists but locals as well), so that the Police (an Inspector on his last assignment before retiring and his replacement, whom he patronizes somewhat) are at a loss as to what the motive can be. Soon Richardson's involvement in a similar crime in his hometown the previous year puts the finger of suspicion on him, especially as he always seems to be the first to reach the victim after each murder. When the lady photographer conveniently quarrels with her lover and goes back to the hotel alone to develop the latest roll of film, only to be murdered just as the black girl is entering to make her peace; in hospital due to the shock, the latter once again escapes with her life but, being now the proprietor of her deceased lover's stuff, she discovers the identity of the killer in one of the photos (hilariously revealed only towards the very end)! Richardson (by the way, he had starred in one of the best Gialli i.e. Sergio Martino's TORSO [1973}, which I had actually watched while in Hollywood!), who had been running around in circles trying to locate his wife, is eventually released from custody; the whole, then, climaxes in a monastery where the priest and a local girl are killed but the black girl cries out before the murderess can replace her own glass eye with the dead girl's! About to be attacked yet again, the black girl is saved first by the intervention of Richardson who tries to reason with his now completely deranged secretary and, eventually, the Police (who obviously prefer to shoot first and ask questions later). Mind you, even lesser vintage efforts of this type are bound to give a modicum of pleasure to genre buffs (which, I guess explains my average rating), but it does seem like the Giallo was definitely running out of steam by this time. Indeed, the lack of a R1 DVD for this one – or, for that matter, the recently-viewed THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE (1971) – could well be a tell-tale sign of the film's relative underperformance even within the established confines of its subgenre! For the record, Bruno Nicolai's jaunty musical accompaniment is a pleasant but unexceptional one.

"Eyeball" is better than Umberto Lenzi's later cannibal and zombie epics, but it still gets bogged down in banality and a LOT of excess talk (though I did get a kick out of trying to decipher the German subtitles on my bootleg copy). He whips up a few suspenseful scenes (don't expect anything on the Argento level, though) as a killer in a red poncho stalks a tour group in Barcelona, removing the victims' left eyes. The violence itself is rather poorly rendered (love that instantly-dried blood!), but the story keeps the viewer guessing (even if it's largely due to sloppy writing) up until the silly conclusion. As far as Italian time wasters are concerned, "Eyeball" isn't bad, but there are much better giallos out there.5/10