Peeping Tom - Special Edition

Peeping Tom - Special Edition [DVD] [1959]
Directed by Michael Powell

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£4.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Delivery. Details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
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 (the director 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, colourful 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 colour photography, documentary techniques and especially its uneasy connections between sex, violence and the cinema. We can thank Martin Scorsese for sponsoring its 1979 re-release, which presented the complete, uncut version to appreciative 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, Amazon.com

Special Features
New and exclusive Introduction by Martin Scorsese New and exclusive Commentary by Ian Christie New and exclusive Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker, Oscar-winning Editor and Michael Powell’s widow Documentary ‘The Eye of The Beholder’ Documentary ‘The Strange Gaze of Mark Lewis’ Behind-the-Scenes Stills Gallery Original Theatrical Trailer Booklet containing essay by Ryan Gilbey, interview with Screenwriter Leo Marks and extract from Michael Powell’s autobiography ‘Million Dollar Movie’

Synopsis
An acclaimed and abhorred film about a man raised by a scientist who devoted his life to the study of the psychology of fear, using his own son as his guinea pig. As an adult the boy is obsessed with filming the deaths of beautiful young women, after causing them personally with his knife-wielding tripod. Powell aficionado Martin Scorsese brought the film out of obscurity in 1979.

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