Blind Date (1984)
Another of Greek director Nico Mastorakis's films for Omega Pictures. Joseph Bottoms (The Black Hole) stars as a man who goes blind following an accident. Doctors find nothing wrong with his eyes and so offer him an experimental method of sight using brain electrodes and a computer like walkman device which enables him to see electronic outlines of objects in his brain. Meanwhile a taxi driver is abducting and murdering young women by performing amateur surgery on them. Naturally the two strands of the story converge into one come the last third of the film.
Mastorakis was on a fine streak of film making in his days with Omega Pictures. Blind Date is a stylish horror thriller with added sci-fi elements. Quite disturbing in places, the kills, although blood is never seen, are protracted scenes and quite methodical and sleazy in their approach.
However for all the Giallo-esq murders the experimental sight device Bottoms uses is quite primitive in it's use and dodgy to say the least as he can only make out lines and going off the dialogue the lines don't appear immediately should he turn his head quickly. All well and good but none of this seems to matter during a car chase along the busy Athens streets.
Mastorakis in only his second film after Island of Death brings together a good cast in the aforementioned Bottoms, Keir Dullea, Kirstie Alley and Marina Sirtis of soon to be Star Trek fame. As a nice exploitation trick he also manages to get each of his many actresses, including Alley, to go topless at some stage or another, mainly in their death scenes.
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