The People Next Door - 1996 ***

I think this film must be every parent's nightmare. You trust your children to someone and they betray you.
Nicollette Sheridan plays struggling single mother Anna, who leaves her abusive husband and moves into a rented property with her three young children. Soon after arriving she befriends the next door neighbours Donna and Garrett to the extent that they sometimes babysit her children when she is doing late shifts at the bars she works in.
After a while however, the couple start to become rather personal, and rather pushy, demanding to look after the children even when Anna wants to have them at home with her. On an outing to the park one day Anna turns her back to purchase tickets to one of the rides for the six of them, and when she looks back finds that Garrett, Donna and two of her children have disappeared.

Eyes of Laura Mars - 1978 ***

I was drawn to the bizarre idea of this movie, and decided I had to see it. Laura Mars is a famous photographer who unwittingly begins to take pictures of her models in poses of murders that are about to happen. She also has visions where she sees the murders take places through the eyes of the killer. This is naturally terrifying to her, but she begins to feel she is making more sense of it when she meets a very young Tommy Lee Jones who is a detective specialising in the cases. Very soon they make a romantic connection, and she feels that she can trust him, or can she?

I liked the idea, and found the film a sort of foreign version of an American horror movie, a bit like the giallo genre. It's tense and unnerving, but that's what makes it so good, and you get to see the fantastically wacky clothes that people wore in the 1970s!