Five Across the Eyes is an American horror film, directed by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen and released in 2006.
Five girls on their way home from a football game get lost when they attempt to take a shortcut. Terrifying things happen to them as they try to find their way back.
Tropes:
- Aborted Arc: A few random things that are brought up, like the urn in the back of the van and the dead bodies in the woman's SUV, are never explained, nor do they have any plot relevance.
- Ashes to Crashes: The girls find an urn containing the driver girl's ashes in the van's backseat. It later ends up breaking.
- Book Ends: The film starts and ends on the same line: "Hey, don't mess up my mom's van".
- Department of Redundancy Department: "Don't go out there, she'll get you, if she gets you she'll kill you and if she kill's you you're dead!".
- Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female: Averted. The insane woman's rape of the girls is done with complete seriousness, and is treated as horrible.
- Dung Fu: At one point, one of the girls throws her own feces at the insane woman's SUV.
- Jitter Cam: The film abuses this trope. Along with the grainy, low-quality footage, it's hard to tell what's going on much of the time.
- No Ending: The film ends with the girls returning to the store that they passed at the beginning of the film, only to find that the woman killed everyone inside. The film ends there, with no indication of if the murders happened before she met the girls, or if she's Not Quite Dead.
- Punk in the Trunk: The girls find several dead bodies in the back of the insane woman's SUV.
- Random Events Plot: To put it simply, the film has no coherent narrative. The girls get lost on a shortcut, stop at a store, and then end up having to flee from a crazy woman. None of these events have anything to do with each other, and nothing is ever really explained.
- Rape and Revenge: A female on female example of this, where a psychotic woman tortures five teenage girls through means that include sexually humiliating them, and violating them with objects like a screwdriver and a shotgun. They avenge themselves by stabbing her to death with a screwdriver and then setting her on fire.
- Real Time: Everything on camera takes place in real time over the course of the 90-minute runtime.
- Sensory Abuse: Between the overused Jitter Cam, horrible video resolution, and loud screaming and whining from everyone, the film can be painful to watch for some.
- Short Cuts Make Long Delays: Five girls on their way home from a football game get lost when they attempt to take a shortcut. Terrifying things happen to them as they try to find their way back.
- Show, Don't Tell: As the girls find out at the end, the insane woman killed everyone inside the store. The audience never sees any of it, though; the girls just say it after coming back out, so we have to take their word for it.
