I wanted to write a small piece (for my blog) on eye patches in cult and exploitation movies. I was hoping you kind folks could help me out with some titles that feature them. So far I've thought of these five:

THE HEADLESS EYES
THRILLER
The Flesh Trilogy
KILL BILL
REVENGE IS MY DESTINY

I thank you very much in advance.

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

Well, there are also eyepatch classics in the Snake Plissken duo of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ESCAPE FROM LA. And didn't MAY feature a bit where she wore an eyepatch? Oh, and SWITCHBLADE SISTERS.

Cameron Mitchell wears one in NIGHTMARE IN WAX.

Jack Hill gave a small supporting character an eyepatch in COFFY, because he disappears for a long stretch in the middle of the movie, and the patch would allow the audience to recognize him when he shows up later (or was it FOXY BROWN?).

THUNDERBALL
The AUSTIN POWERS movies
NICK FURY: AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D.
STAR WARS
GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS!

Too bad there never was a Bazooka Joe movie!

It was Coffy, and there's a great shot of the character revealing his dead eye. A slight nitpick, though, he didn't actually wear an eyepatch. Instead, he wore a pair of glasses with one of the lenses blacked out.

STORY OF A JUNKIE aka GRINGO

This is one of my favorite exploitation movies. It’s a documentary, interspersed with vignettes, about real-life, one-eyed heroin addict John Spaceley and the heroin trade that surrounds him on the lower east side of Manhattan in the early 1980s. In one of the few scenes where Spaceley isn’t shooting up, he tells how he lost his eye a few years earlier when a group of drag queens beat him with bicycle chains.

Spaceley, and his eyepatch, later showed up in a bit part in SID AND NANCY. He died of AIDS in 1992.


I also seem to remember bad-guy extras running around with eyepatches on in innumerable Cannon movies from the ‘80s, although I can’t place any specifically at the moment.

Well, now that you mention it, Sonny Landham wears an eyepatch in the Cannon action/comedy FIREWALKER and, thanks to the movie's shabby continuity, it bounces from one eye to the other.

Just remembered one more:
Vittorio Gassman wears one in THE NUDE BOMB.

Lee Marvin wore one in half of his Oscar-winning dual role in CAT BALLOU.

As an interesting aside, at least two directors who wore eye patches directed pirate movies: Andre de Toth and Raoul Walsh.

Bette Davis in the Hammer film THE ANNIVERSARY
John Heard in CUTTER'S WAY

It's neither cult nor exploitation but I mention the mini-series RICH MAN, POOR MAN (mainly BOOK II) because it was the one & only William Smith sporting the eye-patch as the nefarious Falconetti.

. . . according to the poster (and I think you can make it out in a still) for Hammer's THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER (1962) that appears in HAMMER FILMS, AN EXHAUSTIVE FILMOGRAPHY (it seems anything Hammer produced falls under the "Cult" heading), Christopher Lee sported one in that film . . .

As he also did in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS!

Actually, what Lee Marvin wore in CAT BALLOU was a nosepatch!



Got bit off in a fight!

Okay, new list - movies featuring nose patches!

j/k

Would THE VIKINGS qualify?

What about eye-sashes, which Alain Delon sported in THE LEOPARD.

Both Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and Truck Turner feature coordinated eyepatches and outfits, on a paramilitary leader and a pimp respectively. Huge fan of the look, should I ever lose an eye that's the direction I'm going.

Sheila Keith wore one in I think Pete Walker's The Confessional Murders (or it might have been House of Whipcord or both).

Does TV count - the alter ego of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart wore one in the Jon Pertwee Inferno Dr Who adventure.

I we're including tv, Nadine on "Twin Peaks" wore a patch. The revelation of how she lost the eye was one of the more mean spirited jokes (though still funny thanks to Miguel Ferrer's reaction).

Going even further astray from film, John Cale's song "The Jeweller" is a memorable spoken word tale about a man who finds something...other than an eye under his eyepatch.

John Wayne in TRUE GRIT

Alberto Sordi is forced to sell his right eye to a fat cat industrialist's wife in order to cancel his upwardly mobile credit card debt in De Sica's IL BOOM. I think he goes the glass eye rather than patch route, however. Italian films of the same vintage and political leanings more often favored the capitalist machine mangling working guys' fingers rather than plucking out their eyes. Thus both Mastroianni and Volonte in various films sport the 'finger patch': looks very like Lee Marvin's Nose Patch.

One of the kids in THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP loses an eye (and wears an eyepatch afterwards) and talks about getting a souvenir snowball to replace it.

And let's not forget Christopher Lee in THE THREE and FOUR MUSKETEERS.

Waaah...thought someone would mention this already but...the insane AMAZON COMMANDOS (AKA JACKIE CHAN'S CRIME FORCE) with an eye-patch sporting Brigitte Lin... :wacko:

For pictures and a review, go to:
http://www.brns.com/pages2/femftl59.html

Should have aimed higher.

Anita Pallenberg in BARBARELLA
Christopher Plummer in STAR TREK: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
One-Eyed Willie (do corpses count?) in THE GOONIES

You know, when I first saw this thread, I thought it had been started in honor of today being International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Dave "Arrr!"

Unfortunately, I'm not that clever

As long as the list is getting more mainstreamy, in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY Bill Carson wears an eyepatch, which Tuco later steals off his corpse and uses himself.

IIRC, the lead pirate in PROJECT A who is dubbed by Danny Trejo wears an eyepatch too... but I'm too lazy to get out my VHS tape and fastforward to find out for sure.

And let's not forget Barry Lyndon and Atlantis, the Lost Continent!

And how about The Black Shield Of Falworth, didn't the training Master have a patch?

You're right. The actor's name is Dick Wei.

Maybe I missed it, but how about George C. Scott in FIRESTARTER?


I still marvel at the Oscar-heavy top-drawer acting talent all across the board in this picture, and yet...not one of them is cast properly in their role. The most successful performance is probably Scott's due to his inherent screen presence and the unsettling nature of the Rainbird character.

Also considering the solid directorial saavy of Mark L. Lester's other 1980s efforts (COMMANDO and CLASS OF 1984 in particular) and a Stanley Mann screenplay that is actually fairly faithful to the King book, it still kills me that FIRESTARTER is such a stillborn, inert mess.

What the hell happened on that picture?

Not sure if these have been mentioned or qualify but...

Didn't Hicks (Michael Biehn) sport a patch/sash/bandage over one eye briefly at the end of ALIENS?

And, iirc, didn't the cyborg villain in METALSTORM have a patch?

Lastly, would the flesh patch/flap over the eyes of the cyclop fellas in KRULL count?

BeAst WisheS -- L

Nothing sets off a crisp Gestapo uniform better than a black eyepatch, as we see in movies such as THE DESERT FOX (with one-eyed/one-armed conspirator Eduard Franz lurking outside Hitler's bunker, not looking too suspicious hiding behind a tree and checking his watch while he waits for the bomb to go off) and Robert Duvall in THE EAGLE HAS LANDED as a Nazi with an eye out for Winston Churchill.

Laurence Olivier played the famously eye-patched Admiral Nelson in THAT HAMILTON WOMAN. Presumably, Peter Finch, Richard Johnson, Lester Matthews and Ivan Solovyov all donned the black eye-sash in their respective turns as this celebrated historical figure.

In retrospect I think I was wrong about the cyborg in METALSTORM.

However, I'm pretty sure Dennis Hopper wore one in WATERWORLD.

And there was/is a fun eyepatch/bandage/sash in FEAST as well.

BeAst WisheS -- L

Nigel Davenport wears one in NO BLADE OF GRASS, hanging it on his bedpost for when he sleeps.

Charlton Heston in TRUE LIES and Michael Wincott in the Disney THREE MUSKETEERS are both patched.

Am I suffering from false eye-patch recall syndrome, or does Clooney don a patch for one (all?) of his SPY KIDS cameos?

And talking of eyepatches, here are some mementos from the Christina Lindberg special at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles this May!

Christina posing with the Italian 2-sheet



My signed Italian photobusta



And, last but not least, from a collection deep in the Swedish woods, the ORIGINAL EYE-PATCH FROM THRILLER!

Wow, an authenticated pink eyepatch and its owner even!!!

Great photos!

While not a movie character per se, this advertising creation of David Ogilvy is a hardcore eye-con of patches:



I'm fascinated how Ogilvy created bonafide movie type characters complete with 'actors' but without actual movie portfolio. I can easily imagine a cool early Bond era film with the Hathaway Shirt Man sharing the screen with Schweppes'es Commander Whitehead (though whether 'found character' Whitehead, the actual owner of the Company, could act beyond the printed page is another question):

Another one to add. Broken Oath with Angela Mao. One of the villains wears an eyepatch fashioned out of one of those old Chinese coins with the hole in the center.