Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1976)

the audience applauded

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

As the enigmatic title suggests, Blue Eyes Of The Broken Doll sees Spanish horror star Paul Naschy putting away his fangs and fur for a stab at the giallo genre. Directed by Carlos Aured (who had previously worked with Naschy on Return of the Werewolf and Horror Rises From The Tomb), the film has its stout star playing drifter Gilles, who finds work as a caretaker for three sisters, wheelchair bound Ivette (Maria Perschy), nympho Nicole (Eva León) and Claude (Diana Lorys), who has a disfigured arm; when women start to turn up dead, their eyes gouged out, suspicion falls on Gilles.For almost everything that Blue Eyes gets right, it also gets something wrong, making it a frustratingly mediocre murder mystery overall. The killer wears regulation black gloves and mask (tick), but their identity isn't too hard to guess (being the seemingly most unlikely suspect, as is often the case in these kind of films). The murders are accompanied by a creepy rendition of nursery rhyme Frère Jacques (tick), but the rest of the score is unsuitably jaunty. There are several nasty murders (tick), but the gore is cheap and unconvincing. And of the numerous sexy ladies (tick), only one of them gets her clothes off (sexy redhead León).Aured conducts matters with little sense of style (Argento, he is not!), and even throws in some unnecessary animal cruelty with the slaughter of a pig (a knife inserted into its jugular so that it can be bled to death). A silly ending sees the previously inept police chief (who happily gunned down Gilles despite no concrete evidence against him) suddenly acquiring Miss Marple levels of deduction and revealing the secret behind the murderer's psychosis.5/10.

Mysterious hitchhiker Gilles (Naschy) thumbs rides until he reaches a desolate village in the South of France. At the local cafe he is made to feel unwelcome and told there are no jobs around. But the next ride he thumbs turns out to be Claude (Lorys) a woman in charge of a sizable estate and she is hiring. He signs on as the new caretaker immediately though her horribly disfigured arm gives him pause.Arriving at the estate he is introduced to her two pretty sisters one of whom - Yvette is paralyzed. Michelle - an attractive nurse moves in to take care of her. Meanwhile he and Nicole the youngest sister begin an affair. The only guy around, he probably starts thinking he lucked out after he beds Claude - withered arm and all it is still a big event for a homely schlub like him.The odds may be in his favor at the beginning but he slowly comes to regret his decision to work there. Young women (Locals and tourists) meet grisly ends at the hands of a serial killer. He is a prime suspect though seemingly the entire village is filled with creeps anyone of whom could be the killer.Considerable pains were taken to sell the audience upon the setting being a French location when it was in fact shot in Spain with an almost exclusively Spanish cast. The reasons for that remain unclear.The poor way movies like this were translated and dubbed into English was distinctive - use of words and phrases that sound odd due to out of date colloquialisms or misuse of turns of phrase, high-pitched or low-pitched voices that sound like they belong to cartoon characters rather than the people on the screen, over enunciation of the dialogue which sounds completely unnatural.Then there are the actors that films like this featured. Paul Naschy - a homely, chunky dwarf with a bad comb over and Hugo Stiglitz - a chinless wonder with a huge pointy nose and a receding hairline with a scruffy beard and frizzy hair were both what passed for leading men in a shocking number of these movies. Attractive actresses in films with them of course couldn't keep their hands off these guys - at least while the cameras were running inviting speculation that the characters they were playing were legally blind, legally drunk or simply sex addicts with limited available options.The hairdos characters in this film have are those kind you see in 1970s movies and TV that are so wild and absurd they look like they have to be wigs when they are in fact real hair. If you go by the movies made back then half the people in the world had hairdos that looked they were made from the contents of a vacuum cleaner filter.

Gilles (Paul Naschy) is a convict on the run, he has bad dreams that he at one point strangled women to death, he is unsure as to whether or not they did or did not happen. Travelling through France he is hired as a handyman at a country house where three beautiful but very different sisters live. One is wheelchair bound, due to psychological issues and is constantly attended by the family doctor, another has a false arm and is afraid men will not like her, the third is a nymphomaniac who immediately sets her sights on Gilles. When women begin to get brutally murdered in the area, the local Gendarme naturally believe the suspicious new guy in town, Gilles, is a suspect.Decent Giallo, where the killer preys on women with blue eyes, gouging them out after killing them (Hence the title) In classic Giallo style, Aured succeeds in keeping the identity of the killer secret while throwing suspicion on everyone, while also keeping up a fair tempo of sexual goings on at the house. There's the usual misogynistic stuff you might expect, along with some daft plot set up's, like the blonde girl who decides to take a short cut through the cemetery while there's a killer on the loose, but if you can ignore these points, its not a bad film. There is a moment just before the final reveal of the killer, where we are left briefly with no legitimate suspects, to me this was the place to end the film, but that's just my personal taste for vague endings.

Starring Spanish horror icon Paul Naschy "Blue Eyes of a Broken Doll" tells the story of three sisters,a sexy brunette with horribly mutilated hand,a wheel-chair bound blonde and a nymphomaniacal redhead who hire a handsome handyman to fix up their decaying old house.Naschy soon finds himself embroiled into a series of brutal killings which leave some beautiful local girls dead and eyeless(the eyes were torn out by the killer).Our hero with criminal past attempts to solve the mystery before it's too late. "Blue Eyes of a Broken Doll" is obviously influenced by Italian gialli.The killings are more sleazy than stylish,but there is enough suspense and nudity to keep fans of Eurohorror entertained.It's a crying shame that Carlos Aured died in February 2008.