MOVIE REVIEW : A Road Movie That Goes Somewhere

The four principal actors in “Alligator Eyes” (AMC Century 14)--an ultra-low budget road movie about blindness, control and burying your past--have never appeared in a movie before. Its 36-year-old writer/director, John Feldman, is making his feature debut as well. But you’d never know it.

Each of the quartet--Annabelle Larsen as a sexy, incongruously omnipotent wanderer, Roger Kabler as a drunken clown, Mary McLain as a tense divorcee and Allen McCullough as a would-be mensch with a few sex problems--show surprising assurance, subtlety and control. Courtesy of Feldman, they have better, sharper lines than many actors in higher-budgeted movies and they all dig into their parts, bring out grace notes, shadings, flourishes. The performances aren’t completely successful--McLain and McCullough’s are the most thoroughly realized--but each has moments.

That puts “Alligator Eyes” somewhere above the ordinary--though not too far. The actors play a foursome thrown together on a car journey through North Carolina. The latter three try to spark up old friendships; Larsen is the enigmatic, sexy hitchhiker they meet along the way.

Basically, Feldman has invented three semi-plausible post-’80s post-collegians, all going through a serious life-change--Kabler’s Robbie coping with the alcoholic mess of his life, McLain’s Marjorie and McCullough’s Lance trying to rekindle an old romance after successive smashed relationships--and then thrown in a figure of pure fantasy, the kind of character who actually might fit more easily into a trashy revenge fantasy.

Larsen’s enigmatic Pauline is a mix of sexy tigress and wounded little girl, a blind woman with a gun, a super-woman with a traumatic past, a blend of Zatoichi and Sissy Spacek. Blinded at 2 by the jealous lover who killed her mother, Pauline is an inverted archetype: the victim turned seducer-controller, manipulating the trio with cool, offhand ease.

The material, ultimately, doesn’t amount to much. The movie begins with a sloppy slasher movie blast and later sabotages itself with a melodramatic misfire of a climax, solving a mystery better left unsolved and ending on a callous, far-too-pat note. The visual style is brightly over-emphatic, in the glassy, unevocative manner of many “serious” TV dramas. Made for less than $1 million, “Alligator Eyes” doesn’t look bad, but it’s less cinematographically interesting than any average road movie of the ‘70s, much less such recent examples as “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Drugstore Cowboy.”

But Feldman’s writing, and his quartet’s performances, give “Eyes” substance and interest. In one long two-shot, Larsen’s Pauline describes her imaginary refuge, Atlantis, where the blind are guarded by alligators. McLain’s Marjorie quietly listens and responds, and both actresses sustain the depth, simpatico and slowly ripening tension that many studio movies, with their glib, vacant scripts and punch-’em-home performances, lack.

“Alligator Eyes” (rated R for sex, language and brief violence) is no real gem, but it does what a low-budget, independent movie should do. It explores what’s usually left unexplored, takes chances, tries to make us both mind and eyes.