Peeping Tom - Movie Review

Mark Lewis is a generally shy individual with a deep dedication to filmmaking. By day he works as a focus puller for a British film studio, and for extra money he supplies playful, erotic photos for a local newspaper shop to sell. Mark, however, has another secret desire – he gets filled with an amorous elation when he sees women in a frightened state. This desirable feeling has spun out of control to the point where Mark has begun murdering women with a weapon of his own design; a handheld video camera supported by a tripod with a spear concealed in the front leg so that Mark can film their deaths and relish in their terror until very last breath, but soon Mark finds himself falling in love with a tenant in his apartment building. He hopes to seek a cure, but to find one he must relive the ordeals of the experiments his father, a famous biologist, subjected him to and recorded when he was a young boy.

Peeping Tom was made in 1960 by director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) and writer Leo Marks and it is a movie that is truly ahead of its time. The story’s use of voyeurism is intriguing and seemed fresh for the suspense genre, especially when watching how someone uses the cameras and recording devices of the 50’s and 60’s to accomplish what a cell phone and a laptop computer can do these days.

Karlheinz Bohm portrays Mark as a neurotic, emotionally frail lost boy when he is around people, but once Mark steps behind the camera a confident, no-nonsense artist emerges, which was a nice touch. You also get a complete story as you see what makes Mark tick, what charges his thrill for a woman’s fear. Bohm shows flashes of legendary character actor Peter Lorre in both expressions and dialogue, and it serves him well for most of the film of which the first three quarters were capable of holding my attention, but somewhere along the line the movie loses steam and instead of an intense, excitable ending things sputter and wear down until you get something passable for the Batman television show starring Adam West and Burt Ward. The murders are gruesome in theory, there is no blood anywhere in the film, which is bright and psychedelic itself, but that’s because it was the style of filming in the oncoming 1960’s as studios were still perfecting the use of color in their films.

I am grateful for what Peeping Tom is, even though at the end I was disappointed for what it wasn’t, but that is just me and cultural difference of my modern age and the modern age of the 60’s. It is still a bizarre film, an experimental one, so if you want to see something unusual it is worth a watch, but if you are looking for any kind of payoff in violence or plot, you’re better off watching something else.