Movie Review My Little Eye

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2002 – Spoiler alerts A low key and despite a great premise, an ultimately boring British horror movie inspired by reality TV shows like Big Brother. It is filmed in the Blair Witch Project style as if on found footage from web-cams and CCTV units. Five strangers sign up online for a game show in which they are to live together in an isolated house for a million pound prize. However if any one of them leaves the house before the six months is over they all lose. This reverses the usual reality TV format where contestants are kicked out one by one with the prizes going only to the last player remaining. Until the final week of their stay the contests get on well, and all seems comfortable but then things start getting weird. Food supplies are severely rationed. One contestant gets a letter telling him that a close relative has died though he seems reluctant to leave even then. A parcel arrives with a champagne bottle and a gun loaded with five bullets (one per contestant). A stranger arrives at the house, claiming to be a lost back-packer. He tells them the TV show /podcast does not seem to exist as he is a compulsive net surfer and never heard of it. The visitor vanishes, leaving behind a blood-stained back pack and then contestants start getting killed off. One surmises that their show is a snuff movie paid for by a limited number of clients on a strictly encrypted pay to view system not accessible to the ordinary internet. The killings continue. The biggest problem here is just how dull it is. The film lasts 95 minutes though its original test audience cut went on for a staggering bum-numbing four hours. The drastic cuts to save some of it leave what remains rather ragged and uneven. Snuff movie audiences are hardly going to wait six months before they see their first murder, and even the 80 minute wait for any action at all makes this painful to sit through. The actors do their best with cardboard characters. Jennifer Sky is perhaps the best known of them, having appeared in Xena and in the under-rated SF adventure comedy Cleopatra 2525 but My Little Eye is disastrous, and even at 95 minutes it still feels like sitting and watching an ordinary web-cam for 240. Arthur Chappell