Product Description

A frank exploration of voyeurism and violence, Michael Powell's extraordinary film is the story of a psychopathic cameraman-his childhood traumas, sexual crises, and murderous revenge as an adult. Reviled by critics upon its initial release for its deeply unsettling subject matter, the film has since been hailed as a masterpiece.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15614 in DVD
• Released on: 1999-11-16
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Special Edition, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

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

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.

I understand how it could be a "masterpiece," but also think that since he was so reviled at the time he is given landmark status now to make up for the fact that his career was ruined.

The movie is about a man with sexual and psychological perversions who acts out on the torments he endured from his father--only his victims are women (mostly of ill repute: actresses, hookers and porn models). He is demented in his isolated world with his camera until he meets Helen and her blind mother. Through Helen, we learn all about Mark and his fractured self.

The concept of the movie is the real winner. Reading about it, you would think it the most brilliant script ever written. But the actual film is disappointing with this mindset. Some acting is overdone. Some scenes drag on, while others are cut short. You never see enough to understand (but this is where the terror lies, in the unknown!), yet in the end you see too much and it seems like Mark is now hamming it up. I also think that this film would have been better in black and white (like its companion Psycho, to which this movie will be eternally paired with, although I cannot figure out why, nor do I endorse such sentiments).

Check it out to see if it was worth a ruined career. Keep an open mind and remember--it is a movie for entertainment!

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 photographer himself, but in a violent, sexual-deviate, and menacing stone cold killer. Over the very afflictions that marked his life and as an traumatic extension of his father's visual research, he found over his work the way to satisfy his murderous and gruesome sexual appetites, in the most terrible but passionate way: To torture and murder women with the sharpened leg of a camera's tripod, while capturing the whole sequence on film. After the killing in front of the camera, he runs the films for his private pleasure, to explore and study the victim's agonizing expresions and reactions towards fear and death.

This macabre and unseen concept broke the stereotypes about permited reality on cinema, by creating a disturbing and horrific portrayal of a derranged film fan, on film. Without delivering excessive gore or even fear, the explicit and graphic aproach to murder and the dark atmosphere about madness and psychological mental trauma, were more than enough to raise hell back at the year 1960, while Alfred Hitchcock actually shocked the world of cinema with his mind-bending and creepy classic "Psycho". After destroying Powell's reputation, "Peeping Tom" eventually became a cult classic of the thriller genre, overthrowing standard after standard about any possible concept in post-noir cult-disturbing films.

As we witness the sickening and torturous obsession throught the viewfinder of Mark's camera, as we are forced to watch the pain and despair of the women throught Michael Powell's eyes, we slowly realize that it is we who feel uncumbfortable: When mark projects on screen the silent and savage murders, we find an unpleasant projection of ourselves, the appeal of the voyeurist pleasure to other people's pain, regardless of the degree of fantasy implied in cinema itself. We become silent accomplices as we observe Mark's erotic pleasures becoming the ugly side of the filmgoing experience and on-screen display of everyday's suffering. Powell drives us in depth, into the very essence of the darkest side of human behaviour, by indicating the complicity of the audiences over mark's atrocities.

Recomended, ultimate dark masterpiece in psychological thriller, the mind-bending but non-judgemental style of Powell's work is devastating. The haunted-by-the-past character of Mark, must be one of the most disturbing and psychotic portrayals of a lonely and traumatized sad killer. The audacious fetishistic voyeurism implied of the story, will reveal the very dark side of your soul, something that not even the less-daring milestone "Psycho" was capable of achieve. The documented emotional conditions of the twisted psyche or Mark are waiting for your presence: Come, the show's about to start....

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.