As a muddied, impenetrable tale about an intelligence officer ( Ewan McGregor) who spies on and falls in love with a serial killer, Eye of the Beholder is a scattershot of bad ideas that run the gamut from ludicrous to misogynistic.īeauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but this movie will close the lids over your pupils inside of 30 minutes. But any credit it deserves for deviation-including making Ashley Judd’s central femme fatale the killer-it loses in execution. Eye of the Beholder (1999)Įye of the Beholder is a tonal oddity that only passingly flirts with the conventions of ‘90s serial killer thrillers, all while it tries to pay homage to (read: rip-off) Alfred Hitchcock. (Also this list is strictly for the decade when the genre was at its height and it excludes slasher movies like Scream, which may feature serial killers but were not exactly adult-oriented thrillers.) 12. So grab your magnifying glass and fortify your stomach, because we’re about to revisit some of the best (and worst) of ‘90s serial killer thrillers. From our modern gaze, where the dominant studio conventions prefer reassuring morality tales and sunny lighting, these movies’ preference for shadows and discomfort in the mainstream is kind of startling. Yet they can also be bleak, hard-edged, and ambiguous. Granted that means there can be something formulaic about many of these movies. For a macabre minute or two, every Hollywood name appeared eager to play either the detective or the killer-the hunter or the obsessed, which often proved interchangeable for both characters. All the evidence points to only one conclusion: the serial killer thrillers of the ‘90s are back! You can see it this weekend with the release of John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things, a throwback to the days when movie stars hung out at crime scenes instead of in spandex, and it’ll be more apparent next month with the launch of Clarice, a television spinoff of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Someone must have left the freezer door in the morgue open, because grisly reminders of the past are thawing before our eyes.
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