6 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Corn grain contaminated with steroids produces large rats the size of small dogs who begin feeding on the residents of Toronto. Paul, a college basketball coach, teams up with Kelly, a local health inspector, to uncover the source of the mysterious rat attacks and they eventually try to prevent the opening of a new subway line as well as find the mutant rats nest quickly, or there will be a huge massacre of the entire city!
Starring: Scatman Crothers, Lisa Langlois, Sara Botsford, Lesleh Donaldson, Sam GroomHorror | 100% |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
DVD copy
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Steroid use has become a major scandal in American (and global) sports activities, but you hardly ever hear of superpowered vermin who have ingested the body (and mind) altering drugs. That is, unless you watch Deadly Eyes, a patently goofy 1982 film that plays on one of the vagaries of modern day urban living—namely, rat infestations. Deadly Eyes (which is known under a variety of titles, and which is actually labeled Night Eyes on the source elements utilized for this release) has a certain reputation in horror circles for its frankly hilarious use of Daschunds in not all that convincing rat costumes as the virulent beasties of the film. That gambit gives Deadly Eyes a comedic bite (so to speak) that was no doubt unintended. In other ways, Deadly Eyes falls squarely into tropes already explored in previous “killer rat” entries like Willard and its sequel Ben. The scurrying little critters swarm various unsuspecting folks (and even some suspecting folks) and chew them up into rat snack sized chunks. A stalwart hero and several acolytes attempt to alert the public while also dealing with the obvious health menace, but of course as in all good horror films, it takes a certain amount of carnage before at least a modicum of order is restored—and even then, the (subway) door is left open to the possibility of a sequel (which thankfully never materialized).
Deadly Eyes is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While this was a low budget feature and bears a certain lack of glossy production values, the film pops surprisingly well in high definition, with good, accurate color and some extremely vivid saturation of reds, something that helps the gore scenes achieve a notable gross out factor. Fine detail is quite good in close-ups, but tends to retreat in midrange shots. Outdoor locations (the film was shot in Toronto) provide good to very good depth of field. Contrast is also strong here, helping to elucidate some of the shadowy confines of underground locations where the rats like to dwell until their next attack.
Deadly Eyes features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that gets the job done without much fuss or bother, but which has an unusually noisy high end at times and also signs in an early scene of some kind of midrange disturbance (not quite what I'd term typical "distortion", but something close) a couple of times. Otherwise, though, everything is perfectly listenable, with dialogue and the loopy (literally—it sounds like a tape loop) rat sounds coming through loud and clear.
Scream Factory continues to mine the seemingly inexhaustible supply of little remembered horror films of yore, and this release of Deadly Eyes provides generally excellent video and very good audio, along with a nice supply of bonus features. Somewhere out there is some horror fan sighing rapturously, "At last! Deadly Eyes on Blu-ray! Now I can die peacefully!" (That last comment is more than can be said for most of the victims in the film). While this is the very definition of a cult item, curious onlookers may want to check this out simply for the laughs the dog-rats provide. Be afraid— be very afraid.
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