The Worst Film Ever

Thanks for the memories!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

And that's the essence of cinema...Basically, Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" is about a voyeur, but it doesn't just portray voyeurism as the mental illness of the main protagonist Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, it also provides disturbing glimpses of his childhood where he was the object before becoming the subject. The film ventures in the realms of Freudian psychology and ends up being an extraordinary character study where the understanding of his Peeping Tom habits converge with the understanding of the essence of cinema. Film-making is all about the size of the scope, and whether you take the big or the small one, "Peeping Tom" never ceases to amaze.Now, a camera is a window to a person, it provides us an access we all long for in reality whether from the keyhole or behind sunglasses. Once there 's something that is hidden from our eyes, the challenge is to catch it, and when hidden rhymes with forbidden, there's twice more excitement. To give you an example, I'm a foot fetishist, and when a beautiful woman is sitting in front of me, she takes my eyes down as a form of discretion, while I'm just adjusting my sight to the right spot. I don't feel guilty inasmuch as I believe that everyone's got a fetish or a reason to be peeping.And cinema is simply about providing the perfect medium for a voyeurism that goes to the common denominator. Watching people in their intimate interactions puts us on a form of pedestal where for once, we forget about our reality, the one that enslaves us, to become the master eye, the Big Brother who watches. We can't change the story, that's the limit of our power, but we're powerful in the sense that we know nothing will ever happen to us, that's the edge we have, and that's the edge Mark Lewis has. That he's an aspiring filmmaker is no surprise, the filmmaker is also named the director, he's a God-like figure who catches his victim at the very instant of their death. But there's more.Mark, named after the screenwriter Leo Marks, never gets rid of his camera, which not only reinforces its status as a weapon but as something of a phallic value, like the source of a predator's power, aroused by his prey's powerlessness. The film opens with a murder seen in POV but in the next scene, we understand the roots of Mark's fantasies. There's no exhibition because the exhibitor is flattered over being a fantasy, but the excitement of Mark is to do what he does against his subject's will. This is why, of all the crimes, the most disturbing is the one that starts with a shooting and gradually turns into murder.This moment, starring an unforgettable Moira Shearer, is not only shocking but pivotal because it asserts the other form of perversity induced by the camera, it might show things we'd love to see, but it can also show the total opposite, murder, crime, violence. In reality we can close our eyes, turn our head, but that's the catch with cinema, it catches your eyes, but sometimes it makes your eye catch disturbing realities. "Peeping Tom" is a film of great artistic excellence but then it reaches heights of intelligence by submitting to our eyes the little voyeuristic games we love to play with ourselves and the trashy, sordid part of us. Never had another film toyed so masterfully with my emotions since "Man Bites Dog".And "Peeping Tom" has often been compared with its counterpart of the same year "Psycho", and "Psycho" made me think of what Hitchcock said to Truffaut about his preference for blonde uptight Nordic girls; they were volcanoes inside, Hitch loved to play with paradoxes, with people being well-spoken and educated only to hide mountains of sexual contradictions. "Peeping Tom" does highlight this tendency of British society and this might be the reason the film was trashed by the critics, and trashed is an understatement... maybe it confronted uptight pompousness to its trashy subconscious. Hitch wouldn't screen "Psycho" to the press to avoid similar backlash and the rest is history.And not the happiest one, Powell could never make movies again and if it wasn't for the film's revival driven by the New Hollywood generation, Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier, "Peeping Tom" wouldn't have lived a renaissance, and we might have missed its subversive intelligence and the pinnacle of Michael Powell's artistry. Artistry isn't just a word, you couldn't direct a more difficult film, one that shows crimes from the killer's perspective, then from the way they're shot by the camera and finally, from our perspective. It's a three-dimensionality of perceptions, one layer more disturbing than another.Mark was named after the screenwriter, and Powell played Mark's father in the footage, responsible for some of the most shocking conduct against a kid to be ever shown on a movie, that Powell's son played the son eliminates any doubt about the film's being a symbolization of the most pervert yet subversively brilliant aspect of film-making.And with the help of two great performances from Carl Boehm, soft-spoken, shy, handsome and crazy, the delightful Anna Massey who embodies our curiosity and her mother, Maxine Audley our suspicion, the film swings back and forth between the delights of watching and the horrors, the joy and the shock, the fascinating character study and introspection into the roots of voyeurism and the heart-pounding pioneer of slasher films, driven by an unforgettable jazzy tempo.Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" accomplishes something that has probably no equivalent in the history of cinema: it captures all in one film the two diametrically opposed applications of cinema or to be more technical, the eye of a camera. Indeed, it captures the soul of voyeurism by showing us that a camera can work as a double-edged sword... almost literally.

Some films are so innovative, so ahead of their time, so wholly engaging, that they leave the audience in a perpetual state of "wow" as they watch; Peeping Tom is one such film. Directed by Michael Powell in 1960 explores voyeurism and hypocrisy in a similar fashion to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho released the same year. Starring Karlheinz Böhm and Anna Massey, Peeping Tom delves into the emotional psyche of a man who uses his camera to kill people while simultaneously using it to film their dying reactions. Powell manages to tap into the sexual interest of voyeurism of his principle characters as well as the hypocrisy of what constitutes art in amazing ways. Showing such stark juxtapositions to illustrate hypocrisy was stunning. To watch this film in 2017, it's possible to miss just how revolutionary this film was for 1960, but nonetheless, Powell deserves to be recognized and praised for his innovative film.Mark Lewis (Karlheinz Böhm) is an introspective, shy man who works as a production assistant on British films. When he is not working on the film set, Mark takes pictures of naked women to be sold somewhat secretly by a store in town. Mark attempts to take artistic shots but is always brought back by the owner of the shop who constantly reminds him to only photograph naked women, as that is what sells. When Mark is not on film sets, or at a porn shoot, he spends the majority of his spare time tucked away in a bonus room in his flat watching reels of footage, that he makes, trying to chase his dream of becoming a filmmaker. The unsettling aspect is what Mark is viewing, Mark shoots murders, ones that he commits, and then watches them later in his flat. Mark's sexual repression is never more clear than when he is watching these films and becoming aroused by them. It becomes clear that Mark is obsessed with the effect of fear, and how it is experienced by others. Believing he is doing somewhat of a service by continuing his father's work on fear and the central nervous system, Mark views his films as research, thereby absolving himself of any guilt of committing murder. Mark fills his life with the different forms terror assumes, becoming obsessed with the emotion and willing to chase it no matter the cost.The most mesmerizing thing that Peeping Tom does is explore hypocrisy. Mark has the drive to create art, he wants to be a filmmaker, creating something for the rest of mankind, but is continuously denied the chance. Mark has taken to photographing subjects believing it to be an artistic outlet until he realizes he is supposed to take the most carnal of photos. Art is only valuable if it sells, and the naked women are all that his boss is interested in selling. Powell's ability to make such a statement on art and the way it is created and consumed was masterful. Peeping Tom is a wonderful suspense film, with each line of dialogue and image shown to the camera having a distinct place in the film. Any decent suspense film is dependent upon its score, and Peeping Tom has the perfect score for a suspense film. Another stand out technical aspect of the film is the interesting way in which color is used. Powell creates a world in Peeping Tom and uses color as an aid in such a way that the audience actually feels drawn into Mark's screening room. Karlheinz Böhm absolutely makes the film, creating a creepy yet unassuming Peter Lorre-type of performance, demanding attention from even his most subtle times on screen. Peeping Tom laid a foundation for many films to come yet continue to hold the respect of being one of the first of its kind, that "originals" often lose.

This is one perplexing film, almost as odd as Anna Massey's, the heroine's, face. Her features -- eyes, nose, lips, chin, neck -- seem to have been plucked at random from some genetic hat and flung together by the creator and, happily, came out right, almost by accident. Half the time I couldn't tell whether a scene was aimless or held some deeper, clinical significance that was lost on a dullard like me.The bare bones of the story are plain enough. Handsome, introverted, young Karlheinz Böhm works as some kind of focus puller in the British movie industry. He occupies the top floor of a rooming house and the largest room is dark and filled with mysterious cinematographic junk, like one of those chambers in a horror movie.Due do his child abuse, he loves to see women being frightened and then he kills them with a sharp spike on the end of one of the feet of his tripod, filming their faces all the time. He doesn't do it very often but when he does, she switches his persona from his usual reticent, shambling self, to a cockeyed maniac.Is there hope for him? I mean, we really DO want him to get caught or at least stop committing these little sins because he's pathetic. He sounds like Peter Lorre. For a few moment, in the middle of the film, yes, there seems to be a way out of his obsession. Anna Massey, a winsome young lady of twenty one, talks him into a date and more or less forces him to leave his movie camera and tripod behind. He's surprised to find he's enjoyed himself and promises himself never to kill her -- unless he sees her frightened.As the lunatic, Böhm is bland. Anna Massey is far more interesting. When she speaks, it seems that only her lips are moving while the rest of her face remains at rest. (That really IS worth making a movie about.) Moira Shearer has a small role as one of the first victims. She's given some clunky choreography except that she gets to bust one or two ballet moves that I think are called kick fans. She's quite a dancer. She's the only woman I've ever seen who can be en pointe sitting down.Nobody else is of much importance except Massey's blind mother, Maxine Audley, who makes up for the challenge to her sight by being practically clairvoyant. The police are no more than drones.It's not hard to understand why Böhm is more comfortable with cameras than with people. Conversing with other people is an extremely complicated business. It's only because we do it so often that it seems routine. But it's not. We have to manage our body language, our facial expressions, our utterances, our inflections, and the distance we keep between ourselves and the other. We don't notice these commonplace decisions except in people who make the wrong ones, as schizophrenics do.But those careful and precise judgments don't need to be made when a camera or a computer or radio can act as a transducer, shielding us from the judgment of others. We're safe behind that baffle. You doubt? Ever have stage fright? Well extreme introverts like Böhm have people fright.But, in the end, I don't know what to make of this movie. It's a mistake to read too much into a thing. It's like looking at a random assortment of stars in the sky and connecting them in such a way that you wind up with the outline of a bull or, for the Chinese, a rat. The prominent director may have led some viewers to make that error, but I'll have it some points for its meanderings being the result of deliberation; for the rest, felix culpa.

This film is not a thriller but more of an experience in which you put the pot of water on the stove but remove it before it begins to boil furiously; a slow-burner, if you will. What really matters is the aura that cloaks the male protagonist Mark. There is something fragile about him, something *vulnerable* that Vivian--the daughter of the couple renting the bottom floor of Mark's house--immediately notices and attempts to reach out to him. The viewer already knows that Mark is dangerous, but despite the psychopathy he has demonstrated in the precision of his killings, despite the perverseness of him filming it while it happens, and despite him developing said film so he can relive the moments over and over in the comfort of his makeshift studio, you pray that not only will Vivian be able to slip from his fingers unharmed as she unwittingly treads closer and closer to finding out his secret, but that her desire to know him better and to smooth out the kinks in his demeanor (the visible ones, anyway) makes for a surprisingly endearing couple.As the title of this review should tell you, it reminds me a lot of Francis Dolarhyde's relationship with Reba in Manhunter (much more pronounced and tragic in the Red Dragon version), in which the killer finds temporary solace in an unlikely 'Morality Pet', which, despite her attempts to help their secret killers, are in the end unable to do so, and to me they serve as reminders to the viewer that compassion and empathy are indeed imperative in the handling and treatment of the mentally ill or disturbed, but they alone cannot solve the psychosis (as Vivian's intuitive mother hinted to Mark near the end of the film).I would recommend watching this for those who are curious about the psychological horror genre but are intimidated by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick's works.