1. The Simpsons: Lard of the Dance
In this episode’s B-story, Homer and Bart embark on a get-rich-quick scheme involving the theft and sale of Groundskeeper Willie’s “retirement grease”. One suction-pump-related mishap later, Homer’s eyeball has been sucked halfway out of its socket, but, inured as he is to physical injury, he fails to notice. Bart, however, is visibly disconcerted at the grisly sight. Asked what the matter is, he compassionately replies: “Er – nothing.” Eye injuries are something of a staple in America’s finest cartoon series – see also Lenny and Moe’s eyes contused by razor-sharp springs in The Old Man and the C Student, Homer’s corneas crusting over in Last Tap Dance in Springfield, and the claw hammer calamity in the movie. The Simpsons now feature on health and safety posters about eye injuries.
2. Casino
Even Joe Pesci’s sociopathic mobster balks when, stonewalled by his errant detainee Tony Dogs, he is compelled to employ a last-ditch method of interrogation: putting Dogs’ head in a vice and squashing it until an eye pops out, splattering those present in sticky bits of face. “Don’t make me hafta do this, please, c’mon!” begs Pesci. The unwise reply: “Fuck you!” Cue a stomach-churning sequence which Scorsese reportedly inserted principally in order to distract the MPAA from the rest of the movie’s violence. Distressingly, this one is a true story, based on the fate of one Billy McCarthy, whose corpse is one eye down thanks to his commission of a crime in a protected Chicago suburb and subsequent “friendly chat” with vice/switchblade/testicle-icepick-wielding enforcer Tony Spilotro.
3. Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment
Satoru Ogura’s charming faux-snuff movie is fondly remembered among fans of video grossness principally for its climax, in which a sharp piece of metal is slowly inserted through the side of a barely-conscious girl’s face and out of her retina, while flashbacks of her earlier ordeal at the hands of anonymous sadists are intercut rapidly in disorientating fashion. It’s all very convincingly done, so much so that the Guinea Pig series was investigated by the FBI, who suspected that depictions of actual torture and murder were being distributed. Cool! A must-see for those keen to be sicked out and depressed by context-free ultra-violence.
4. Hostel
Our hero Paxton can’t bear to leave Cute Asian Girl trapped inside the torture/murder pleasure complex from which he has managed to escape, so he returns and guns down her tormentor. Sadly, it’s too late to rescue her right eyeball, which dangles forlornly out of its scorched and mangled socket. For some reason he decides to cut the eye clean off with a nearby pair of medical scissors, possibly so that it doesn’t snag on a door handle on their way out. This has the gruesome consequence that a great deal of viscous goo not dissimilar to Hellmann’s Dijonnaise oozes down her face. Ironically, the special effects masters at KNB have revealed that they improvised the dangling eye using a condom which was “lubed for easy insertion,” so Paxton really shouldn’t have had any trouble cramming it back in. Live and learn.
5. Un Chien Andalou
Surrealist pioneer Luis Buñuel stands on his balcony and gazes up at a full moon bisected by cloud, “like a razor blade slicing through an eye,” as he put it when recounting a dream to collaborator and outlandishly-moustachioed visionary Salvador Dali. We cut to the face of Simone Mareuil, and then to a close-up of her eye, which is swiftly and gooily sliced open with a razor. This is the only instance here of real-life ocular disfigurement, although the eye in question is that of a skilfully disguised donkey, not the lovely Mareuil. Those involved went on to great things: Luis Buñuel succeeded in becoming one of the most revered directors of all time, while Mareuil succeeded in going mental and burning herself to death in a public square.
6. Saw II
The moviegoing public’s favourite serial murderer, moral philosopher and creator of excessively clever devices for squashing people, John ‘Jigsaw’ Kramer gets his first sequel off to a fine and bloody start by abducting and drugging a police informant, surgically implanting a key behind his eye, attaching an automated cranial iron maiden to his neck, locking him in a cell, showing him a video of a scary puppet that mumbles some exposition, and finally activating a timer that will set off the trap and kill him unless he extracts the key by cutting through his eyeball with a scalpel. Simple! The informant in question is understandably horrified by the dizzying implausibility of his situation, but nevertheless makes a good go of his assignment. In the end, though, Jigsaw’s stingy time constraint brings things to a hasty and predictable conclusion.
7. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Having dispatched her semi-naked boyfriend to investigate a mysterious noise in a dark forest, arming him with a small plastic party noisemaker (“I’ll be right back!” he declares optimistically), hapless Kate nevertheless finds that she just can’t relax – was that the sound of a squirrel outside, or was it a human head being squashed? There’s only one way to find out! Heroically tiptoeing out into the darkness, she manages to cover a good few inches of ground before encountering Jason Voorhees, who promptly stabs her through the eye with said noisemaker, eliciting a completely hilarious honking noise.
8. The Terminator
The defining scene of James Cameron’s epochal tech noir is perfectly calibrated to showcase Arnie’s thespian abilities, as he succeeds in expressing no emotion whatsoever while inserting a rusty scalpel into his gore-filled eye socket. Things become even more shuddersome as he nonchalantly pulls the severed eyeball out of his head and plops it into the sink, happily necessitating those super-cool sunglasses. Evidently an enthusiast for eye-related fucked-upness, Cameron revisited the subject matter in the sequel, in which Lewis the blameless fatso security guard is stabbed through the eye by his doppelganger. All together now: “Fuck you, asshole!”
9. Evil Dead 2
Showcasing what is possibly the finest comedy-eye-popping visual gag ever committed to celluloid, Sam Raimi’s barmy splatterfest follow-up to The Evil Dead has frantically executed dismemberment aplenty. God among horror movie nerds Bruce Campbell reprises his role as chainsaw-armed, super-chinned action hero Ash, and his finest moment comes when stamping a trapdoor onto the head of a demon from the fruit cellar, sending its eye flying across the room. Raimi ingeniously gives us a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the eyeball as it careers through the air and deep into the shrieking mouth of one of the bit players. Eww.
10. The Beyond
If you’re going to build a hotel, it’s probably best not to pick one of the seven gates of Hell as your site. And if you absolutely insist on doing so, try not to let the guardian of said gate end up tortured to death by a gang of nutso religious types. And if for some reason you really feel inclined to throw caution to the wind with regard to these matters, make sure that the back of your head is well away from that large rusty nail jutting hazardously out of the wall (and serving no apparent function) when confronted with the inevitable zombie attack. Doomed servant Martha learns these lessons the hard way when an animated corpse rises out of the bath and runs such a nail through the back of her skull, pushing her eyeball cleanly and nauseatingly out of its socket, along with a few pints of rather unconvincing blood.
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