Malibu Eyes (2004 Video) User Reviews

Hannah goes to the beach

[Dr. Gore · 24 July 2005]

*SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT*

I rented "Malibu Eyes" because I thought it was going to be another sex flick. The description sure sounded like it was going to be: Young girl in a beach house spies on her neighbors etc. But I'm afraid "Malibu Eyes" has pretensions to be something far more than that. It is trying, and I emphasize trying, to be some sort of thriller in which Hannah watches people and in turn is watched by a mysterious stranger. Were the filmmakers trying to tip us off with the palindrome name HANNAH? Hannah gets it both ways. She watches them, they watch her. I watch all of them and cry all night long. It's a vicious cycle.

"Malibu Eyes" is a stinker. It's shot on cheap video and looks tacky. What the heck am I watching? More importantly, where's the sex? If Hannah loves watching people, why can't she watch something interesting? Who knew spying in neighbor's windows could be so dull? Hannah even has a secret camera in her sunglasses. So she wanders around the beach looking like one of the ladies from "Invasion of the Bee Girls". It's preposterous and pathetic. The real kick in the groin with this one is that any remote semblance of a payoff scene is shot so ineptly that you can't make out what's going on. Any nudity or sex scene is handled badly. The only reason for watching Hannah the voyeur is to see what she sees and she better see something worthwhile. You see? Better yet, don't see this one. It's a waste.

What's going on with the sex in this film?

[MBunge · 2/10 · 18 February 2011]

Well, this film is so slow that if it were a 100 yard dash, you'd have to time it with a sundial. Its camera work is so bad at times that trying to shoot it while bouncing on a pogo stick would have looked better. The cast either look and act like they should be manning a register at Burger King or like the moms of various crew members that got their roles because they brought sandwiches to the set one day. All the dialog would have sounded better if it had been spoken by Belgians with speech impediments. What's offered up as a plot simply shuffles along like it has senile dementia and many of the scenes look like they were staged by someone who's lived their entire life inside a sensory deprivation chamber.

For all that though, I'll give writer/director Norman Ollestad credit for coming up with a couple of awkwardly raw sex scenes that manage to be so bad they're good. That's more than balanced out by some other sex scenes that are so bad they're just bad, like one that starts out with what looks like a date rape drug and ends with a foot orgasm.

Hanna (Courtney Cole) is a college freshman who's spending some time at the bargain beach house of a family friend. She was supposed to spend the time with her boyfriend and her parents, but they both bailed on her. Considering that Hanna is pretty but has all the personality of a bar of Ivory soap, who can blame them? Hanna finds a video camera in the beach house, which she marvels at like she was raised Amish, and proceeds to wander around and film her neighbors having mostly fully clothed and poorly executed sex. As that goes on, Hanna falls in lust with the underage interracial chick next door and a handsome beach bum who's barely monosyllabic, yet reads Nietzsche. The beach bum is also banging the underage interracial chick and at least two other broads, which never quite seems to register with Hanna. There's also a subplot involving the local mayor and a campaign against pornography that's not even coherent enough to qualify as a non sequitur.

Now, I don't have the foggiest notion of what writer/director Ollestad thought he was doing with this movie. Why he made it, what he's trying to say, how he thought it would connect with an audience…you almost certainly haven't seen this film and your guess would still be as good as mine. The painfully cheap production values and the camera work that's bewilderingly bad mark this as one of those amateur productions that have escaped onto DVD, but even by those standards Malibu Eyes is both terrible and inexplicable.

What really encapsulates the oddity of this production are its handful of sex scenes. Most of them are so tame they could be shown on the ABC Family Channel, one dances along the edge of being stupidly erotic and then there's one where a poor body double's vagina practically gets shoved into the camera like this film was in 3D. Why are some of the sex scenes virtually Disneyfied while another is but a step or two away from Hustler magazine? It defies explanation.

Don't let this talk of smut fool you. Malibu Eyes is wearisome. It's not funny or dramatic or ironic or sardonic or puerile or romantic. I hope writer/director Ollestad satisfied whatever urge drove him to make this thing, because that's the only satisfaction it will ever bring anyone in this world.

Don't waste your time

[groggo · 1/10 · 17 October 2007]

The illustrious Dr. Gore, who loves B-movies, has already done the descriptive honours for this flick, and thanks to him for his honest appraisal.

'Malibu Eyes' is not really a 'B' movie, but more a curious piece of C-plus silliness that toys with the potentially interesting premise of voyeurism being a two-way street.

Hannah, a lovely 18-year-old, is alone in a Malibu beach house, and finds cameras of various kinds lying about. She then starts videotaping practically everything she sees on and off the beach until she realizes that someone else is videotaping her. Oooohhhhh, scary.

As Dr. Gore has pointed out, this is pretty boring voyeurism. The producers must have been looking for a PG rating while pretending, on the DVD cover, that it's NC-17 stuff. There is one flickering scene -- about a second -- of a wayward female nipple in profile, and that just about does it for the nudity.

This is a clunker because it doesn't really go anywhere with its Rear Windowesque premise. The reciprocal spying-on-Hannah turns out to be a non-threatening non-event. So you have to ask: what was this flick all about? From what I can gather it's this: when you spy on someone else, be careful that someone else is not spying on you. Or, how about this: an observation on the unending voyeurism that is rampant in our society. If you spy on peoples' private lives, they have the right to spy on you. This has been done before in movies, but it's still a terrific premise. Unfortunately, it wasn't developed in this movie.

And, oh yes, 'Malibu Eyes' is also a half-hearted examination of Hannah's sexual awakening to the sins of the flesh, both male and female. This has only been done roughly eight million times since movies were invented.

I really liked Courtney Cole, who plays Hannah with a lovely sweetness. But one glaring goof by the director (or whomever): she awakes after a night's sleep with full makeup, including perfectly intact eyeliner and glossed lipstick. Nice trick if you can do it. The credibility factor went out the window with that one, and made you wonder about the filmmakers: don't they know that people NOTICE these kinds of things?.

Here's a good rule of thumb with a DVD cover: if it LOOKS like it's loaded with steamy sex, it probably isn't. This cover has a secondary female character (a sexy black woman in a bikini no less) embracing a studly guy on the beach. This strongly suggests you're going to see people doing the nasty all over the beach. Shame on the producers and director for what amounts to false pretenses. And avoid this flick with extreme prejudice.