Description: Stark terror meets art in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Mark Lewis is the son of a famous scientist who devoted his life to studying the psychology of fear--with young Mark serving as guinea pig, and Mark has grown into a psychopathic killer obsessed with capturing his victims' fear on film. Due to its unsettling subject matter, Peeping Tom was initially reviled by British film critics. The film resurfaced in the late 1970s largely through the efforts of Martin Scorsese, and is now considered a classic. A superb cast and taut direction make Peeping Tom a riveting psychological thriller.
Amazon.com: Michael Powell lays bare the cinema's dark voyeuristic underside in this disturbing 1960 psychodrama thriller. Handsome young Carl Boehm is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) who subjected his son to nightmarish experiments in fear and recorded every interaction with a movie camera. Now Mark continues his father's work, sadistically killing young women with a phallic-like blade attached to his movie camera and filming their final, terrified moments for his definitive documentary on fear. Set in contemporary London, which Powell evokes in a lush, colorful seediness, this film presents Mark as much victim as villain and implicates the audience in his scopophilic activities as we become the spectators to his snuff film screenings. Comparisons to Hitchcock's Psycho, released the same year, are inevitable. Powell's film was reviled upon release, and it practically destroyed his career, ironic in light of the acclaim and success that greeted Psycho, but Powell's picture hit a little too close to home with its urban setting, full color photography, documentary techniques, and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence, and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 rerelease, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative American audiences for the first time. This powerfully perverse film was years ahead of its time and remains one of the most disturbing and psychologically complex horror films ever made. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - I don't get it!
I'm watching the end of this movie right now, and I can honestly say it stinks! Not enough to make me stop it mind you. I want to see how it ends, but jeez this thing is boring and way dated, oh he just died. I just don't care.
Rating: - Good at times, yet still a lil camp
I heard about this film from Cynthia Freeland's book "The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror," which is a good book with a unique perspective on horror. Since the last film I had sought out from this book happened to be amazing (Roman Polanski's Repulsion), I tried again.
Peeping Tom must be one of those movies that need time and reconsideration through multiple viewings. The first time I saw it, it bored me and I fell asleep. The second time, I was intrigued by many parts, but as a whole found it disjointed and strange.
Rating: - Frank and Uncomfortable masterpiece in psychological thriller's history.
Voyeurism, violence, perversion, and dark forbidden sexual desire. Michael Powell's most controversial, important and artistic achievement, also destroyed his carrer after the ferocious and merciless critics for this at-the-time outrageous, unbeliavable and shocking classic about the meditation and observation of murder and depraved cruelty.
Mark (Karl heinz) was profoundly affected by his father's creepy experiments, a psychologist who kept a video journal about his son's personal life and raw childhood fears, and that demential intrusion turned him not only in an apparently shy ... Read More
Rating: - It's more of a good laugh then suspenseful!
I saw some parts of this film. The suicide ending made me laugh really hard. It was just bad acting at the end. It was not scary, and I think it was trying to make a statement about our media culture going to the extremes. Mark seemed like the perfect sterotype of a mean German. I felt with the charachter when he wanted to kill the dancer and he kept rolling his eyes I wanted him to kill her too. It's good for laughs. If you want a good suspense film then watch Wait Until Dark.
Rating: - It put me to sleep
This movie is about a guy who carries a camera with him everywhere he goes. He starts to kill people with the end of his camera, the camera has a little knife attached to it. He also has some unresolved childhood issues.
I tried watching this 3 times and everytime I tried I fell asleep within the first 25 min. Finally forced myself to watch the whole thing and it was hard to make it through.
The characters are like walking zombies. The classical music playing during the 'murder' scenes is annoying and not scary. In fact theres almost continuous classical/piano music ... Read More
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