An Eye For Murder

It is a story about a clinical trial gone deadly, and of MILBERT GREENE, a 4th year medical student at the University of Louisville, a nerd that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Milbert works at the research lab of LUCY EFRON, an egocentric genius professor who has been trying for years to cure cataracts. One night Efron strikes gold. In her 12th attempt she succeeds in synthesizing the miracle drug. Although aggressively courted by PETER LISTER, the president of Medionetyx, a pharmaceutical giant, she signs a multimillion-dollar contract with BERNIE COOPERSTEIN, his rival and easygoing CEO of Oculoris. The rivalry between Peter and Bernie goes way beyond business. The two were childhood friends and as close as brothers, but intrigues, forfeiting experimental results and failure to report fatal side-effects caused a bitter rift.
Cooperstein sends his aide, JOHANNA BERGER, a blond Austrian physician with a shady past, to observe Efron’s experiments. Lister feels betrayed. He orders JEFFREY GIBBONS, his confidante and cold-blooded psychopath to get the 12th test tube for “whatever it takes”. When the paranoid Efron feels stalked, she asks Milbert to hide the tube for the weekend. Milbert is suspicious, but never knows to say no. He stashes it in his home refrigerator. From that moment his life is in peril.
While visiting his demented grandmother, BERTA ZUCKER at her Blue Meadows plush nursing home, Milbert notices that a stretcher is stealthily rolled into an ambulance. But when Berta claims that the nightshift doctor kills her roommates as part of a test with new eye drops, nobody believes her. MRS. HERTZ, the dominant manager dismisses the accusations as “nonsense”.
On the coldest night of the year, Milbert’s car won’t start at the University parking and Johanna offers him a ride. It continues way beyond. When Milbert wakes up in his bathtub in stupor, he finds out that Johanna disappeared with the tube. Before being able to recover, he receives a phone call from Efron, begging him to bring the tube to her apartment at Andromeda, a new development, still under construction.
Milbert decides to go without the tube since Efron sounded desperate. When he arrives there, he is greeted by Gibbons who converted Efron’s living room into mini-golf course and settles for nothing less than the tube. He breaks Efron’s leg with his golf club and strips Milbert off his clothes. Gibbons toys with a trophy, an eyeball he enucleated from a scientist that left Lister for Bernie. Milbert and limping Efron manage to escape into the storm and muddy grounds of the unfinished complex. When Milbert looks for help and returns to their hiding place, Efron is gone. A neighbor reports a naked young man running around, pressing intercom buttons.
Milbert passes out and wakes up in the ER, doped and confused. Police Sergeant CYD RAMZI informs him with a no-nonsense attitude that the upper half of a body of a blond woman was found floating in a lime pit at Andromeda. As Milbert mourns the death of Johanna, his new love, he is surprised to discover that the body in the morgue is actually that of Efron’s. The lime bleached her hair. Before long he becomes the prime suspect in his professor’s murder – his underwear found on her bed and an eyewitness places him by the pit. Nobody believes him, including HARRISON ZUCKER, his cousin and lawyer. When released on bail, Milbert decides to find the tube by himself. He is chased by both the police and Gibbons who follows him around his neighborhood. Meanwhile, at Blue Meadows another tenant is about to die. Berta escapes to the park, later found by police and restrained with a tranquillizer. The gentleman from room 17 is dead now. Bertha is next.
Milbert continues investigating. When he finds the eyes of “donors” in Efron’s Cold Room, the door is blocked by Gibbons. Both are now alone on the 7th floor of the medical school building. Milbert hits Gibbons with a heavy acid container, rolls out through the window and walks on his tiptoes on the external wall’s protrusions till he arrives at the neurology lab. He spends the rest of the night among animal cages and excrements.
When Gibbons switches to Johanna and almost gets to her in her hotel suite, Dr. Berger decides that the best way to survive is by staging her own death. She chooses a corpse with similar physique to hers, an illegal Moldovan hooker that died of overdose. She drives with the body to a dilapidated warehouse in southern Louisville and lures both Gibbons and Milbert to follow. At a precise timing they witness the fall of ‘her corpse’ from the top floor. In the dark, they both fall for it. Minutes before the funeral of the gentleman from Room 17, Milbert discovers that his eyes were enucleated.
Johanna drives quickly to Blue Meadows and sneaks into Berta’s room, her last living patient participating in the experiment. Berta is already delirious. Alone in the room Johanna takes out the tube from her white coat pocket and buries it inside the philodendron plant by the window. Now she is free to finish the last experiment without interruptions.
The showdown takes place inside Blue Meadows. As Milbert sneaks in via the window of the room facing Berta’s, he sees that she is already connected to an IV line. Milbert leaps across the corridor but never makes it to her room. Gibbons grabs him from behind and drags him to the rear treatment room where he ties him and drops him into soiled laundry cart. When Gibbons returns and pushes Milbert towards the steaming autoclave, Milbert manages to grab a scalpel and drive it into Gibbons’ orbit.
Milbert hurries to Berta’s room and finds Johanna holding a syringe. At first he refuses to accept that his love is a cold blooded murderess. While Milbert feels a delicate itch in his calf Johanna confesses to the killings, claiming she is “doing them a favor”. She already euthanized patients in Tyrol, including her terminally ill father.
Before losing consciousness, Milbert sees Hertz, holding the defibrillator plates, electrocuting Johanna, who falls on the floor with final convulsions.
Milbert recovers in Hertz’s office. He is bruised and sutured with few teeth missing, but happy to be alive! A photo hanging on her wall – a group picture of a summer camp – catches his eyes. He recognizes Hertz as the counselor and the young girl at the second row as Efron.
A week later Milbert arranges a meeting with Mrs. Hertz. Gradually the friendly encounter deteriorates into horrible revelations: Hertz was Johanna’s aunt. When the death rate increased in her niece’s shifts at the Tyrolean hospital, Johanna sought and got refuge in Hertz’s nursing home. When Efron’s clinical trial was about to fail the deadline, Hertz came up with the bright idea for a source of human eyes. She was sick and tired of dedicating her life to the demented bastards. “I was around death for too long!”
Two weeks later, as Milbert is about to board a plane to Kenya he receives an urgent call from the nursing home. Berta mumbles about “the doctor doing something to the philodendron plant”. That morning the male nurse threw it to the garbage.
Milbert’s cab makes a U-turn. He digs in the garbage. The Geiger counter traces the tube. From the top of the stairs Berta watches him with crystal clear eyes: “Is it true that plants have eyes? It was constantly looking for light.”