This film was written by John Carpenter while looking for his big break into Hollywood, Dark Star having failed to give him that platform. Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, a huge success as a fashion photographer. Her latest work is based on scenes of death and mutilation. She starts having strange dreams in which she is seeing killings from the point of view of the killer. These dreams start to intrude on her waking reality. When one of her friends is killed and she witnesses it in this voyueristic way she decides to contact the police.

It is a big budget, big cast (Faye Dunaway and an incredibly youthful Tommy Lee Jones, Brad Dourif) and big 70's production values film. Which meant garish sets and awful, wukka-chukka guitar music with big disco beats. The film really suffers from its 70's setting, it has aged badly. Beyond that it is quite an effective shocker, especially the opening sequences. The director (irvin kershener) seems to have really concentrated on making the 'voyueristic' scenes as they are the best in the film. They are accompanied with grand 'Omen' style classical music that even made them quite scary.

The film seems stilted, lurching along (quite boring in some sections) from one murder to the next. The cast members seem unhappy with some of the trite dialogue coming from their mouths, which is quite sad considering JC wrote most of it, or at least it is his name on the script credit. In reality the film is hugely different to JCs original script, this is all too apparent in the cluttered nature of the script. JC prefers relatively simple scripts, the story is told with the camera and the action. Mars... gets too bogged down in side details.. It is an interesting film, not an original premise, but the story has some killer twists to keep people interested. An ok film, just about.

Here is some information from David Schmidt - "Of course, as a JC fan, I've seen this one. I agree it's watchable and a lot of talented people put some good things in it, but it's definitely flawed. From what I've read Carpenter was _very_ unhappy with the number of un-credited re-writes of his script (remember, another writer has to change over 50% of the material to get a listed credit - of course four different writers can re-write 49% of the script and it will still say "Screenplay by John Carpenter", no matter how little of his dialogue is left! :). Kershner (a severly underated director, in my book) was brought onto the project fairly late, and though it helped his name in Hollywood, wasn't very happy with the project either. Lots of studio interference. (The same thing happened later when he was working on _Robocop II_ with a script by comic writer Frank Miller. Unfortunate, they both had high hopes for it.) ."

JC's original premise does sound more interesting. The finished film does suffer in that it is a 'which one of her friends did it?' type who-dunnit, with all the usual red herrings and cliches.

Some more information from David - A paragraph from "Horror Film Directors, 1931-1990" by Dennis Fischer which is as follows: "Finding that _Dark Star_ was not the success that he hoped it would be, Carpenter went back to square one and started trying to peddle scripts to the various studios. His script _Eyes_ was about a woman who as a psychic experieince - she sees whatever a skid row slasher sees when he is killing. At one point she even envisions a nightmare the killer has. The script was sold to Columbia and John Peters as a possible vehicle for Barbara Streisand, who backed out because of the amount of violence in it. Then someone came up with the "bright" idea of making the killer someone the heroine is close to, possibly her lover, and Carpenter left in disgust. (The picture was finally made as _The Eyes of Laura Mars_ starring Faye Dunaway and directed by Irvin Kershner. It failed to deliver on it's promising premise.)"

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