Peeping Tom ( Face of Fear ) ( Röntgenci )

Peeping Tom (DVD) (*)

~~$25.99~~ $19.97

Original Title: Face of Fear
Alternate Title: Röntgenci
Language Selections:
English ( Mono )
English ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
United Kingdom ( PAL/Region 2 )

Running Time:
97 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.66:1)

Special Features:
Cast/Crew Interview(s)
Commentary
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Trailer(s)
Remastered

Movie filmed in 1960 and produced in:
United Kingdom ( Great Britain, Ireland )

Directed By:
Michael Powell

Written By:
Leo Marks

Actors:
Karlheinz Böhm ..... Mark Lewis
Moira Shearer ..... Vivian
Anna Massey ..... Helen Stephens
Maxine Audley ..... Mrs. Stephens
Brenda Bruce ..... Dora
Miles Malleson ..... Elderly Gentleman Customer
Esmond Knight ..... Arthur Baden
Michael Goodliffe ..... Don Jarvis
Martin Miller ..... Dr. Rosen
Jack Watson ..... Chief Insp. Gregg
Shirley Anne Field ..... Pauline Shields (as Shirley Ann Field)
Pamela Green ..... Milly

Synopsis:

Filmmaker and photographer Mark Lewis (Karl Heinz Böhm) spends days searching for just the right female models for his films which are studies of fear. He was raised by a psychologist father who used Mark as a subject for his own studies of fear and the exposure has left him marked psychologically so that he now is compelled to continue his search for women he murders for the camera as he films their reactions. Mark lives in the upper floors of his family house where he also has his photo lab and rents the downstairs to Helen Stephens (Anna Massey) and her blind mother Mrs. Stephens (Maxine Audley) whom he avoids until one day on Helen's birthday when the young nubile girl introduces herself to the photographer and they feel a connection. Mark trusts Helen enough to show her the films that his psychologist father took of him as a boy and the images disturb the girl but draws her closer to Mark. Mark's jobs as studio camera man for a film studio and cheesecake photographer for a local photo shop allows him easy access to women whom he murders while photographing to show their reactions to fear. When Helen accidentally sees some of his killing films she is appalled but wants to help Mark but the release of his secret is too much to bear as the police close in.

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.

A young man murders women, using a movie camera to film their dying expressions of terror.

This product was added to our catalog on Friday 17 September, 2010.

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