Giallogy: Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

A rare Spanish entry in the giallo genre, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1973) begins with a drifter ex-con finding work at the remote mountain estate of three very different, yet equally eccentric sisters. Then the dead bodies start piling up around town. Beautiful, blue-eyed village women are being murdered, their eyeballs carved out by the killer’s blade. Meanwhile, beefy, monosyllabic drifter Gilles (Paul Naschy) quickly beds two of the sisters. He’s also plagued by disturbing visions of strangling his old girlfriend to death. Or are they his memories? Who is killing the women, and are the sisters going to be the next victims of this mad slasher? Most gialli traffic heavily in red herrings, but Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll tosses them around like nobody’s business.

Initially, Spanish horror legend Naschy is our POV character—he also wrote the screenplay—but Gilles is pretty flat, as a character. The film comes alive thanks to the entertainingly neurotic sisters, played by Diana Lorys, Eva León, and Maria Perschy. Claude (Lorys) is the dour matriarch of the group, Nicole (León) the eternally thirsty slut, and Ivette (Perschy) the wheelchair-bound recluse. Together, they live miserably in their sprawling gothic mansion, shooting daggers at each other with their eyes. Director Carlos Aured especially utilizes zooming closeups of Lorys’ intense eyes to great effect.

Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll was released in the United States as House of Psychotic Women, a name I find far more evocative, partly because Kier-La Janisse named her extraordinary “Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films” after the US title. Janisse’s part-memoir, part-film criticism approach is perfect for discussing a film like Blue Eyes, which offers a peak example of female neurosis in horror or exploitation cinema.

Lorys is fantastic as the most sympathetic of the sisters, the reserved and emotionally wounded Claude. Sex bomb León, as nymphomaniac Nicole, deserves special commendation, and automatic entry into the Giallo Hall of Fame, for her enthusiastic commitment to never buttoning her shirts above the navel. When she’s seductively sauntering around, the film might as well be called House of Psychotic Cleavage.

See what I mean?