Eyes Of Fire

IN a frontier forest, human souls are drawn into trees and bark-covered faces emerge like bas-reliefs from the tree trunks; the sky sends down charred bones along with rainwater; a red-haired witch swallows a luminous yellow toad. ''Eyes of Fire,'' which opens today at the RKO Warner Twin and other theaters, is an imagistic morality tale written, produced and directed by Avery Crounse, a still photographer. Set in 1750, it follows a small group of settlers who wander into a haunted valley ''where the devil-witch lives.''


The bizarrely fascinating story, told in flashback, begins as a foppish minister is about to be hanged for his affair with a married woman. A young woman named Leah telekinetically burns through the rope to save him, and with a handful of townspeople they flee. The woman's husband finds them, and the group escapes attacking Indians by heading into the ominous valley. Its entry is covered from ground to treetops with white feathers; a devilish face is carved on a tree.

Adultery, survival in the wilderness, religious hypocrisy, the supernatural - Mr. Crounse clearly means his tiny band and mythic image to carry heavy weight. But his valley, it turns out, is haunted by special effects, not human drama or even symbols. Leah sees visions - eight people, now clothed, now naked and covered with mud. An abandoned Indian girl appears to have a blackened face and Satanic yellow eyes. Soon everyone is seeing specters, a body pops put of the ground as in grade-B thrillers, and by the time the good witch Leah confronts the devil-witch the film is toppled by the onslaught of images.


However uneven his taste - ranging from the stunning feathered forest to some laughable tree-people spouting green bile - Mr. Crounse's visual imagination is extraordinary. We move from the washed-out gray of the town to the bright green valley, which imperceptibly grows darker, muddier, more closed in. But he has given his art director and cinematographer material enormously superior to what he offers his cast. Guy Boyd makes the husband's reverse pantheism almost believable, but that's a slim thread on which to hang so much atmosphere. As Leah, Karlene Crockett looks fierce at the right times. The only jarring actor is Dennis Lipscomb, a posturing minister.


If Mr. Crounse had stayed poised on the line between human reality and horrific visions of evil, he might have turned out a small masterpiece, or at least a cult film. As it is, ''Eyes of Fire'' is an ambitious idea gone haywire, as if ''The Scarlet Letter'' had zoomed into the future and collided with the movie version of ''The Exorcist.' (Caryn James, NY Times 1986)