The Voyeurs (2022)

Imagine L B "Jeff" Jefferies and Lisa Fremont getting off on watching, through a feverishly passed back and forth shared pair of binoculars, Lars Thorgood regularly doing it and you get the idea of Amazon Prime's The Voyeurs, a movie that starts promisingly, riffs interestingly on eyeballs, titillates regularly with a tangle of young, beautiful bodies, but ultimately insults by flinging carelessly at audiences a series of glib, eye-roll inducing twists that only the most unquestioning of viewers will accept.

★★☆☆☆

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Disturbia (2007)

In the more engaging first two-thirds of this suburban thriller, Shia LaBeouf's Kale Brecht is put under house arrest and like Jimmy Stewart's L B 'Jeff' Jefferies finds himself with nothing better to do than spy on his neighbours, but in the less engaging last third, this Rear Window premise gives way to an uninteresting serial killer thriller with David Morse obviously trying to channel Raymond Burr's Lars Thorwald as he stares back down the binocular lens but nothing else is trying very hard, least of all the writers.

★★★☆☆

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Sliver (1993)

A short-lived genre in the 90s was the "erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone" and in this not very erotic nor very thrilling addition, based on the Ira Levin book, Sharon Stone is the new resident in a NY apartment complex that happens to be not just under the thrall of a serial killer but also a shadowy voyeur who has the building under complete video-surveillance, affording viewers a look at what Director Phillip Noyce evidently thinks titillating: highly improbable, choreographed soft porn interactions between Sharon Stone and the likely culprit.

★☆☆☆☆

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Rear Window (1954)

Alfred Hitchcock's mystery suspense masterpiece has an incredibly elaborate purpose-built film-set of 31 apartments (eight of them fully furnished) and it stars James Stewart as a wheelchair-bound man who entertains himself by sitting at his apartment window observing his neighbours, one of whom may be a murderer!

★★★★★

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Psycho (1960)

A woman steals from her boss, goes on the run, and ends up in a chilling encounter with a psychopath at the Bates Motel in this Hitchcock thriller that really did introduce "a new and altogether different screen excitement" to cinema.

★★★★★

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Psycho (1998)

This is a 1998 remake of Hitchcock's 1960 thriller about a woman who goes missing after visiting a roadside motel, with so much identical to the original that it begs the question why it needed to be remade at all, particularly given everything about it is so constrained by what has come before that even the A-list stars seem like thinly disguised, taxidermied versions of their past counterparts, conspicuous in a hand-me-down wardrobe of fedoras, black skivvies, flared pant legs, and delivering lines too readily like actors going through the motions of an over-rehearsed play.

★★☆☆☆

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Peeping Tom (1960)

Psycho made a mystery of its killer's identity and motives whereas this technicolour predecessor reveals alot more much earlier on, leaving just one detail as a surprise for the film's climax, but the reveal is hardly worth it: the pace is plodding and the killer such an obvious weirdo from the start surrounded by so much garishness (pornography in the 60s and its purveyors) that today this serial killer thriller is not shocking nor suspenseful, just very hard to like. 

★★☆☆☆

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

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