The team of writer David Stanley and director/cameraman B. Skow has made some excellent videos, notably "Homecoming" and "Daddy's Girls" for Girlfriends Films, but this earlier pretentious Vivid release should have been much, much better. I blame Mr. Skow, not Mr. Stanley this time.
With Michael Powell's great "Peeping Tom" the film buff's choice in this genre, I was nevertheless holding out for quality approaching Coppola's "The Conversation". Stanley's script offered potential in that direction, but the decision, likely at the Vivid q.c. level, was to opt for porn over matter.
David has written a love story about two perverts, his familiar notion being that these lonely souls might find solace in each other's company, away from the cruel jests of the straight world. It's an obvious metaphor for the pornographer, even in "chic" eras like the late '70s and sort-of currently, still shunned by the mainstream.
First mistake in executing the story was hiring Tommy Pistol as lead. Skow likes him (he even cast him as Pee-Wee Herman in an inevitable crap "parody") and TP has industry respect, but I find him repellent: tiresome and overbearing. His mainstream equivalent (for me) would be Kevin Spacey.
Pistol looks too much the part of a pervert to be successful casting. Making matters worse he is inappropriate for Stanley's specific perv, an obsessed voyeur beating off to beat the band to an array of video screens using CCTV cameras planted all over the country (plus Canada) to observe folks having sex.
After he gets caught observing house guests Jerry and Giselle Leon humping in his mansion's guest room, Tony (yes, Tommy gets renamed for the role) rents out the room to the first comer, Allie Haze. Stanley's first and effective plot twist is Allie soon discovering Tony is spying on her, but she digs it. They enter into a sort of circle jerk for two club when he tells her he can't stand being touched and only gets off watching others live on screen. Why he can't just watch her in the same room or get off on canned porn is left unexplained.
But the "no touchy" aspect, made clear when he adamantly refuses to shake hands and later freaks at Allie impulsively touching his johnson (recall: she's a perv too), makes dear Pistol unsuitable for the role. He's of the current porno breed covered in vast tattoos, and how someone who can't abide even a handshake could sit for endless hours while they were being applied is left hanging too - I assume he was anesthetized.
With this premise established Skow settles for a series of sex scenes observed by the duo, each almost competing with the other in search of self-induced orgasm. The female cast is of the natural body type, but Skow errs in casting Liza Del Sierra as a chief surveillance victim. Her big breasts plus anal sex proclivities and especially a lingering highlight shower scene shot (nonsensically in context) from delightful low angles, steals the show away from star Allie.
And it is in the area of camera-work that Skow, a cameraman by trade, fumbles most drastically. We get the story arc leading to Pistol & Haze finally overcoming the former's tactile aversion, and after their romantic hump climax, Stanley's thematics kick in with a "what next?" coda directly implicating the filmmakers (Skow & Co.) and equally the audience as "pervos" = voyeurs.
This is achieved visually by a device previously used in the show (and which bothered me a great deal) wherein we see the CCTV visual on a large-screen TV monitor and in the foreground a hand-held camera in frame staring at that screen. At one extra level one is aware of an unseen camera photographing the hand-held camera to get it into the frame. This shot is repeated at the very end, peeling the layers of the onion of voyeurism several times removed, and of course representing the sex at a safe distance that fills the coffers not only of Vivid Entertainment but all professional pornographers.
But Skow has used multiple cameras, reverse shots and interesting camera angles throughout the show, departing from what the CCTV hidden camera could capture most of the time, not just occasionally. Sure, it's all porn and "who cares?", but if he was truly serious about his project, rather than just reverting to assembly-line execution of an interesting premise, then he could have made the shots realistic. No stunning gynecological close-ups and no artistic low-angle distortion shots of Ms. Del Sierra, but a convincing depiction of what he and Stanley set out to do.
So "Peepshow" (it's run together as a single word on screen), for all its morbid and serious mood in the earlier reels, emerges as episodic porn fodder, hardly worth the detailed consideration I'm affording it as part of my current examination of both Stanley's and Skow's careers (I was going to type "David and..." but Skow was apparently born with only an initial and not a first name). Even in BTS short subjects, all the porn people like Evan Stone refer to him in the third person relentlessly as B. Skow, much to my irritation as a seeker of truth. Or maybe his parents named him after Aunt Bee in "The Andy Griffith Show".
With Michael Powell's great "Peeping Tom" the film buff's choice in this genre, I was nevertheless holding out for quality approaching Coppola's "The Conversation". Stanley's script offered potential in that direction, but the decision, likely at the Vivid q.c. level, was to opt for porn over matter.
David has written a love story about two perverts, his familiar notion being that these lonely souls might find solace in each other's company, away from the cruel jests of the straight world. It's an obvious metaphor for the pornographer, even in "chic" eras like the late '70s and sort-of currently, still shunned by the mainstream.
First mistake in executing the story was hiring Tommy Pistol as lead. Skow likes him (he even cast him as Pee-Wee Herman in an inevitable crap "parody") and TP has industry respect, but I find him repellent: tiresome and overbearing. His mainstream equivalent (for me) would be Kevin Spacey.
Pistol looks too much the part of a pervert to be successful casting. Making matters worse he is inappropriate for Stanley's specific perv, an obsessed voyeur beating off to beat the band to an array of video screens using CCTV cameras planted all over the country (plus Canada) to observe folks having sex.
After he gets caught observing house guests Jerry and Giselle Leon humping in his mansion's guest room, Tony (yes, Tommy gets renamed for the role) rents out the room to the first comer, Allie Haze. Stanley's first and effective plot twist is Allie soon discovering Tony is spying on her, but she digs it. They enter into a sort of circle jerk for two club when he tells her he can't stand being touched and only gets off watching others live on screen. Why he can't just watch her in the same room or get off on canned porn is left unexplained.
But the "no touchy" aspect, made clear when he adamantly refuses to shake hands and later freaks at Allie impulsively touching his johnson (recall: she's a perv too), makes dear Pistol unsuitable for the role. He's of the current porno breed covered in vast tattoos, and how someone who can't abide even a handshake could sit for endless hours while they were being applied is left hanging too - I assume he was anesthetized.
With this premise established Skow settles for a series of sex scenes observed by the duo, each almost competing with the other in search of self-induced orgasm. The female cast is of the natural body type, but Skow errs in casting Liza Del Sierra as a chief surveillance victim. Her big breasts plus anal sex proclivities and especially a lingering highlight shower scene shot (nonsensically in context) from delightful low angles, steals the show away from star Allie.
And it is in the area of camera-work that Skow, a cameraman by trade, fumbles most drastically. We get the story arc leading to Pistol & Haze finally overcoming the former's tactile aversion, and after their romantic hump climax, Stanley's thematics kick in with a "what next?" coda directly implicating the filmmakers (Skow & Co.) and equally the audience as "pervos" = voyeurs.
This is achieved visually by a device previously used in the show (and which bothered me a great deal) wherein we see the CCTV visual on a large-screen TV monitor and in the foreground a hand-held camera in frame staring at that screen. At one extra level one is aware of an unseen camera photographing the hand-held camera to get it into the frame. This shot is repeated at the very end, peeling the layers of the onion of voyeurism several times removed, and of course representing the sex at a safe distance that fills the coffers not only of Vivid Entertainment but all professional pornographers.
But Skow has used multiple cameras, reverse shots and interesting camera angles throughout the show, departing from what the CCTV hidden camera could capture most of the time, not just occasionally. Sure, it's all porn and "who cares?", but if he was truly serious about his project, rather than just reverting to assembly-line execution of an interesting premise, then he could have made the shots realistic. No stunning gynecological close-ups and no artistic low-angle distortion shots of Ms. Del Sierra, but a convincing depiction of what he and Stanley set out to do.
So "Peepshow" (it's run together as a single word on screen), for all its morbid and serious mood in the earlier reels, emerges as episodic porn fodder, hardly worth the detailed consideration I'm affording it as part of my current examination of both Stanley's and Skow's careers (I was going to type "David and..." but Skow was apparently born with only an initial and not a first name). Even in BTS short subjects, all the porn people like Evan Stone refer to him in the third person relentlessly as B. Skow, much to my irritation as a seeker of truth. Or maybe his parents named him after Aunt Bee in "The Andy Griffith Show".