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Peeping Tom 1960 ★★★★
Time to revisit an old classic. A movie so reviled at the time that it efefctively broke the director's UK career.
And for what? If anything, it now holds up as a very well crafted psychological thriller. One could even see a prototype for what later became Maniac.
As the movie progresses, we get deeper into Mark's disturbed psyche and how he became the man he is in this story. The product from all the experiments his father put him through. A killer who executes his victims with a camera while filming them in their utterly terrified last moments. Making not only for what can be considered as a precursor to what later became found footage, but also for some very disturbing scenes.
Not in the least in the scenes with Helen, where we see how he still has a small connection with reality. Or how he takes his own life in the end. Since he feels he has nowhere else to run, he ends it all. In the only way he knows how.
Great horror. Four stars.
Spider Baby 1967 ★★★½
A fifties horror that kind of drew from Freaks. I like how the makers tried to shift our sympathies back and forth between their innocence (he will hate us) and the start where one of the girls made no bones about mercilessly killing the mailman.
The bad people were the right kind of cartoony (with Schlocker resembling Oliver Hardy, but with a bit more of an explicit Hitler-stache), wanting the children and Bruno to leave. I also got the feeling this was the type of family that (partly) inspired the Deetzs in Beetlejuice. Bruno (aka kind Walter Matthau) is the right kind of gentle and protective. And while it's sad, he takes the right decision at the end.
A fun watch for fans of fifties stuff.
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