Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

christopher-underwood This looks so good and appears far more seriously intended than the same years Psycho, yet I hesitate to enthuse. I feel it would have been a better idea to use a likable English actor in the central role and imbue him with a more subtle creepiness. It seems too easy to just make the baddie a German so that we may assume the worst. True, we are supplied with background evidence of abuse of the abuser, thanks to the survival of his father's films of him as a child and there is word from a psychiatrist towards the end regarding the needs of a pathological voyeur. But the real horror of the need to create fear in another to excite is not properly explored which is a shame especially as only a few years later the horrors of the Moors Murders would be upon us. Nevertheless the use of colour is extraordinary, the recreation of the seedy newsagents (complete with copies of the UK glamour digests, Spick and Span) the alley way prostitutes and the glamour photography wondrous. Anna Massey always strikes me as a most awkward actress but she does very well here almost covering up for the more tentative performance from Karlheinz Bohm as the man with the killer camera.

Robert J. Maxwell This is one perplexing film, almost as odd as Anna Massey's, the heroine's, face. Her features -- eyes, nose, lips, chin, neck -- seem to have been plucked at random from some genetic hat and flung together by the creator and, happily, came out right, almost by accident. Half the time I couldn't tell whether a scene was aimless or held some deeper, clinical significance that was lost on a dullard like me.The bare bones of the story are plain enough. Handsome, introverted, young Karlheinz Böhm works as some kind of focus puller in the British movie industry. He occupies the top floor of a rooming house and the largest room is dark and filled with mysterious cinematographic junk, like one of those chambers in a horror movie.Due do his child abuse, he loves to see women being frightened and then he kills them with a sharp spike on the end of one of the feet of his tripod, filming their faces all the time. He doesn't do it very often but when he does, she switches his persona from his usual reticent, shambling self, to a cockeyed maniac.Is there hope for him? I mean, we really DO want him to get caught or at least stop committing these little sins because he's pathetic. He sounds like Peter Lorre. For a few moment, in the middle of the film, yes, there seems to be a way out of his obsession. Anna Massey, a winsome young lady of twenty one, talks him into a date and more or less forces him to leave his movie camera and tripod behind. He's surprised to find he's enjoyed himself and promises himself never to kill her -- unless he sees her frightened.As the lunatic, Böhm is bland. Anna Massey is far more interesting. When she speaks, it seems that only her lips are moving while the rest of her face remains at rest. (That really IS worth making a movie about.) Moira Shearer has a small role as one of the first victims. She's given some clunky choreography except that she gets to bust one or two ballet moves that I think are called kick fans. She's quite a dancer. She's the only woman I've ever seen who can be en pointe sitting down.Nobody else is of much importance except Massey's blind mother, Maxine Audley, who makes up for the challenge to her sight by being practically clairvoyant. The police are no more than drones.It's not hard to understand why Böhm is more comfortable with cameras than with people. Conversing with other people is an extremely complicated business. It's only because we do it so often that it seems routine. But it's not. We have to manage our body language, our facial expressions, our utterances, our inflections, and the distance we keep between ourselves and the other. We don't notice these commonplace decisions except in people who make the wrong ones, as schizophrenics do.But those careful and precise judgments don't need to be made when a camera or a computer or radio can act as a transducer, shielding us from the judgment of others. We're safe behind that baffle. You doubt? Ever have stage fright? Well extreme introverts like Böhm have people fright.But, in the end, I don't know what to make of this movie. It's a mistake to read too much into a thing. It's like looking at a random assortment of stars in the sky and connecting them in such a way that you wind up with the outline of a bull or, for the Chinese, a rat. The prominent director may have led some viewers to make that error, but I'll have it some points for its meanderings being the result of deliberation; for the rest, felix culpa.

FlashCallahan Lonely photographer Mark Lewis works in a film studio and moonlights supplying cheesecake photos to a magazine store. He lives in the house that he inherited from his parents, and rents to tenants to help him pay the bills and keep the building. Mark was the subject of bizarre experiments of effects of the fear conducted by his scientist father when he was a child, and since has become obsessed by the faces of frightened women in the moment of death. He kills women, filming their face, so they can see their fear. When Mark meets his neighbour and tenant Helen on her birthday, he befriends her and soon becomes intimate. Mark has become infatuated with Helen, and begins to become even more unhinged......Powell risked his illustrious career with this movie, and all it's controversy and lambasting it received on its initial release has only helped its cause as the years have passed.It's a very unnerving film to say the least, because unlike other films in this genre, we are with Mark for the duration of the narrative, other characters are in the film to either help, hinder, vex, or endear him, thus making him the hero of the film, the only character you can really show empathy for.And this is why the film is so disturbing, Powell has made a film where all the characters are highly unlikeable dirty and insufferable, so in many instances, Mark is the hero, and you find yourself justifying his actions, because of his suffering, because of his isolation, and most of all, his choice of employment.It's a shocking movie that paved the way for many films that have referenced many of its scenes, and characters.Not comfortable viewing by any means, but essential.Would make a great companion piece with Blow up and Frenzy.

Alice Digsit I had a rather odd viewing of this film in that I half-watched it at a the house of friend of mine who happens to be colour-blind. We were talking and the sound was down for much of the time and I didn't see the beginning or the end. But what I saw mesmerised me.Having not really caught much of the plot except for moments when my host was making tea, I am reminded more of Blow-Up, made several years later, than of any other film. The main character of the film seemed to be photography itself, and the psychology of the antihero and his victims faded into insignificance in the fragmented view of the film that I had.Not only did cameras abound in the film, and were at once the means of vision - both in the sense of the making of film itself and also in the sense of being the main agency in allowing the protagonist to fulfil his aims - they are perhaps also cyphers for seeing and for viewpoint and for perspective and outlook, drawing the viewer into a world of questions on these subjects.What fascinated me most about the film though was the colour. This was frustrated by my only having my colour-blind friend to discuss it with, and while he does see quite a lot of colours he doesn't see them all and this undermines his interest in colour generally.This film was made long after 2-colour films were obsolete, yet the film is shot to look like 2-colour Technicolor. IMDb credits it as using Eastmancolor 35mm film, so the colour set-ups in the film are self-consciously reproducing an earlier era of film by controlled use of hair colourings, set design, light gels and costume. The palette of the film is fascinating and beautiful, revisiting the stylised colour gamut which had decades earlier - after it's initial impact - come to leave film audiences unsatisfied by its unrealism. By the time this film was shot audiences were accustomed to rich full-spectrum photography and the colouring of the film subverts that, while highlighting the beauty of the older films at their best with, perhaps, an added glow that memory and nostalgia and better technology can create.Having missed most of the plot of the film, I have no idea if this colour lushness is purely a sensual layer of technical beauty this film is imbued with or whether it has an important interaction with the film's philosophical or psychological elements - but it sure was good to look at.