Mark Jackson’s script for Eyes of a Stranger started life in 1980 as a more-or-less straight thriller about a man stalking women in Miami, Florida. But by the time director Ken Wiederhorn took the film out on location on the film, Friday the 13th (1980) (also made by Georgetown Productions Inc., the producers of Eyes of a Stranger) had given the fledgling slasher film a huge box office boost and suddenly mere stalking just wasn’t going to be good enough. Tom Savini, also from Friday the 13th, was called in to add gory slasher effects – most of which the producers promptly removed when the MPAA threatened to slap an ‘X’ rating the film.

Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes) is a local news anchor in Miami reporting on a series of brutal rape/murders. She lives with her teenage sister, Tracy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is deaf, dumb and blind (her pinball-playing prowess remains unexplored…) after being kidnapped and raped as a young girl. Jane becomes obsessed with the murders and stumbles on a big clue when she spots Stanley Herbert (John DiSanti), a resident of the apartment block opposite hers, disposing of a blood-stained shirt and belt in the shared garage beneath the residential complex. She suspects that Herbert is the killer but can’t get the police interested. So as Herbert continues to kill, she starts her own investigation, breaking into her apartment in search of clues and harassing him by phone in the way that he harasses his victims. But her obsession puts the vulnerable Tracy in the firing line…

How many changes were made to the script during its “slasherfication” is impossible to know at this stage but as it stands, it’s notable for not having a single original bone in its body. Like the killers in Black Christmas (1974) and When a Stranger Calls (1979), Herbert likes to taunt his victims by phone before attacking them; the climax recalls Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967), though not nearly enough is made here of Tracy’s almost total sensory deprivation, a major misstep; and the plot is suspiciously similar to John Carpenter’s television film Someone’s Watching Me! (1978). Like the heroine of that film, Jane is an imperilled news anchor, a fitfully popular theme around the late 70s/early 80s (see also The Unseen (1980) and The Howling (1980) or variations on the theme).

So, there’s nothing new here but even by 1981, horror fans tracking the seemingly unstoppable flow of slasher films were becoming used to that – no matter what else you might say in their defence, originality was never the slashers’ strongest suit – and, initially at least, many of the gory highlights had hit the cutting room floor. So, what does it have going for it? Not a great deal to be honest. It’s slickly made but easily forgotten, with a schizophrenic feel as it struggles to make up its mind what it wants to be. At times it’s sleazy, brutal and impossible to defend against charges of misogyny. Yet at others, it has the feel of a run-of-the-mill made-for-television film.

Jennifer Jason Leigh makes an impression in an early role, the best of a largely undistinguished cast. She occasionally struggles to sell the idea that she’s blind and a closing moments scene that has Tracy, senses newly restored, inexplicably examining her breast in the bathroom mirror is almost a textbook example of gratuitous nudity. At the time, there was a certain fascination to seeing Tewes – then a familiar face on television’s terribly bland and wholesome The Love Boat (1977-1986) – appearing in something as occasionally nasty and distasteful as this, but it’s not enough to get past how wooden her performance is. DiSanti meanwhile, makes for an unassuming killer but little is made of the fact that he’s just an ordinary, every-day nobody rather than the supernaturally omnipotent monster that many slasher killers were morphing into.

The decision was taken to tip us off to the identity of the killer very early, leaving Wiederhorn with very little to work with. He manages a suspenseful scene where Jane hangs from a balcony when Herbert unexpectedly returns while she’s exploring his apartment, and the film finally kicks up a gear in the last ten minutes or so, but it’s largely a plodding affair that seemed like a bloodless letdown in its uncut version in 1982. Subsequent home video releases have restored the gore, but the film is none the better for it.

Wiederhorn had started out well enough with underwater zombie chiller Shock Waves (1977) (showing ion television here during the prolonged first murder), but the rest of his career was a letdown – prior to Eyes of a Stranger, he made the witless comedy King Frat (1979) and went on to make only a handful of feature films, none of them much good – Meatballs Part II (1984), Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988), Dark Tower (1989) and A House in the Hills (1993). It was a disappointing career arc to say the least.