Peeping Tom - Lisa's Review

*** SPOILERS ***

We remain in the world of early movies this week for 1960 offering 'Peeping Tom'.  A story about a rather, awkward, shy but disturbing young man called Mark who loves nothing more than to film beautiful women.

He works on a movie set by day and takes soft porn photographs at night in a room above the local corner shop, which sells the images under the counter on the hush hush (and even packages them in a brown bag labelled 'Educational Books').  We become aware very quickly though, that Mark isn't just your normal pervert as the title would suggest, but someone with a penchant for something a little more.... painful.

Although Mark photographs beautiful women in skimpy lingerie and even topless, the first sign of any real interest in any of these girls comes from the discovery of a young potential model with a deformity of her upper lip.

The main premise of the movie however lies in Marks obsession with fear.  His dad was a pyschologist and as Mark grew, he experimented on him, by doing his best to cause fear reactions in his son.  One such experiment involved throwing a lizard on his bed, another had him shining bright lights into the eyes of his sleeping son.  His entire childhood seemed to have been filmed by his father, which obviously led to one fucked up young individual.

Mark satisfies his curiosity by placing a mirror and long knife onto the end of a camera and murdering beautiful women, just to catch their 'fear' as the knife enters them and the realisation they are about to die.

All of a sudden Marks life is somewhat infiltrated by a young women called Helen whose family rent a room in his building.  As they pass each other on the stairs every day and as it's her 21st birthday, she speaks to Mark. When he refuses an invitation to her party downstairs, she brings a slice of cake to his room and so she enters his life.  Upon meeting Helens mother, who is blind, he feels an infinity  which later leads to him telling everything to her.   He promises however that he will never film Helen again.

Helen even convinces Mark to leave his camera at home when he goes on a date with her, but he soon realises how weak and useless he feels without it.   So we're left with pretty much only 2 questions as the movie progresses.   How will he manage to maintain an adult relationship with Helen, while abiding with the agreement to never film her when that's the only excitement he knows?

So my impression?  I thought it was incredibly dull and terribly dated.  I did enjoy seeing some aspects from the 60's, like items for sale in the corner shop, clothes and transport, but I just didn't enjoy the movie.  One thing I will say though is I am not at all surprised it caused a furore when it was released.  It was most likely innovative in its day and was a very brave move, but it's old hat these days.   I found pretty much every actor in the movie terrible with the exception of Carl Boehm as Mark.  He had 'creepy guy' down pretty well.

All in all, this was most definately not poor enough to mark as an 'Avoid', but I most definately would not recommend it.