Amazon.com video 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 (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
