Come On, Description Writers!

I first tried to watch The Hypnotic Eye (1960) on Friday, the day I wasn’t feeling well. I blamed my inability to watch it on my lightheadedness. When I managed to sit through the whole thing on Saturday, I realized it wasn’t me. It’s a dull, stupid movie.

As far as a Spoiler Alert is concerned, I feel I don’t need to give one to anybody who read the little description of the movie in the Guide on Digital Cable. It gives away everything, including the big reveal at the end! For all others, Alert: I’m going to spoil everything.

One doesn’t realize what a spoiler it is when one reads the description: a hypnotist causes beautiful women to deform themselves at the behest of his ugly assistant. As a starting point, that sounds promising. One could get some suspense out of a plot like that.

But, no, the movie is a mystery. We’re not supposed to know why these women are deforming themselves. Of course the hypnotist is under suspicion right away — why wouldn’t he be with the title being The HYPNOTIC Eye? But the assistant part is a little less obvious. And she’s not even very ugly till the very end.

Come on, description writers! We could have spent the whole movie wondering WHY he’s doing this. We would have felt clever for noticing the subtle signals the assistant sends him as he selects his next victim. Instead we sit there thinking, “She’s not that ugly.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie starts out cheesy enough for most palates. A beautiful young lady in a slip glides into a kitchen, pausing silhouetted in the doorway so we can admire her shape (if we like). She rubs some stuff from a bottle in her hair, then bends over the gas stove, burner on. And catches her head on fire! There’s wonderful shot where they show the fire superimposed over her hair. These days they would have used CGI to show her blistering skin, which some people would have liked better (um, I’m not one of them).

I thought it was a beauty treatment gone horribly wrong; the heat from the stove was supposed to activate something. But, no, the woman mistook the stove for the sink. That’s some good hypnosis!

Of course the cop on the case doesn’t know it’s hypnosis. There’s a whole bit with him and his colleague (not sure if that guy is another cop or a doctor or what) (you know how I never pay attention to these details) about how hypnosis is a valuable tool in medicine and psychology, but these entertainment hypnotists are nothing but charlatans.

And from there it moves slowly.

There is some suspense along the way. The cop’s girlfriend, in true movie female fashion, puts herself in harm’s way to try to catch the criminal. The big reveal — The assistant is really ugly! That’s why she hates beautiful women! — comes as no surprise, probably not even to people who didn’t read the little description. Why the hypnotist feels compelled to do the assistant’s bidding is never revealed.

In summary, this is a movie that could definitely have used robot heads, especially if you are unfortunate enough to watch it on a day when you feel too lightheaded to make up your own jokes.