If you're going to try and give audiences a modern giallo then more power to you. There's still plenty of entertainment to be wrung from the subgenre yet, and you can help yourself a bit more by setting everything in the past (Crystal Eyes) is set in the mid-1980s. But if you're going to deliver a movie that riffs on the likes of Blood And Black Lace, as well as the best of Dario Argento, then you'd better be absolutely sure of what you're doing.
Alexis Carpenter (Camila Pizzo) is a beautiful, but toxic, model who dies at the start of this movie. Then we move forward by a year. There will be new models chosen to honour her on some anniversary issues of a fashion magazine, but that might not ever come to fruition if a masked killer gets their way. And that's all you really need to know.
Co-written and co-directed by Ezequiel Endelman and Leandro Montejano, this is a slasher movie that gets some things right, only to upset the balance when the creators seem unable to move out of the shadows cast by the artists who have so obviously influenced them. The kills are very disappointing, the third act isn't ever as mad as it feels like it should be, and the general flow of the whole thing is sadly stuttering and stumbling from start to finish. It does, however, keep the focus on a cast that is almost entirely female, allowing them to portray characters that can be both potential aggressors and victims, and that helps the film to stay a short distance away from so many other giallo flicks.
Pizzo is excellent, but disappointingly underused, as Alexis. The other main leads are played by Anahà Politi, Erika Boveri, and Silvia Montanari, with the latter being the best of the three, playing the editor of the fashion magazine setting up the tribute to Alexis. Nacho Joshas and Diego Benedetto are the two male cast members, both having their memorable moments when they become involved in the killings. Sadly, nobody else really stands out. That's mainly down to Endelman and Montejano, who just want to move from one weak set-piece to the next (although the imagery of this particular killer works well) without fleshing out any more of the supporting players.
Falling somewhere in between being too derivative and dull and being too overly concerned with the artistry of the visuals, Crystal Eyes just doesn't have a feeling of film-makers committed to, or in love with, the type of film that it ultimately wants to be. You can pick many other modern gialli ahead of this one, with my personal recommendation for those wanting something that manages to be both traditional and very modern being the excellent Knife + Heart.
5/10
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