Midnight Peepshow review.
Sex and violence are on the menu in this horror anthology. Three segments of varying quality amount to a more cohesive story than usual.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Midnight Peepshow
Directed by Andy Edwards, Airell Anthony Hayles, Ludovica Musumeci and Jake West
Written by Andy Edwards, Airell Anthony Hayles and Jake West
Starring Zach Galligan, Derek Nelson, Ryan Oliva, Jamie Bacon, Richard Cotton, Mark Hampton, Dylan Baldwin and Rusty Egan
Midnight Peepshow Review
What Midnight Peepshow lacks in consistency it makes up for in cohesiveness. A case where the framing story leads to segments that make narrative sense…even if they don’t always hit on quality. There is a strong core idea here that elevates the full package.
That framing story is a simple one…but it becomes a bigger deal during the final segment it contains. We’ll get to that in our look at the segments. Graham (Richard Cotton) is the main character in Midnight Peepshow. He stars in both the framing device and that integral final segment. The other two segments feel more disconnected from the story as they happen. Their purpose makes more sense by the end of the movie. It doesn’t elevate them to a higher quality in retrospect…but it does give the whole story a bigger scale.
We meet Graham drunkenly stumbling around Soho. He’s clearly dealing with some (wait for it) trauma over something that happened to his wife. A long night of drinking finds him entering a local peepshow and striking up a conversation with a stripper. There’s something off about her but Graham learns he can’t get away…his booth is locked. She wants to show him something. Something that he can’t look away from.
The concept of Midnight Peepshow revolves around a dark website called The Black Rabbit. It features videos of people acting out violent sexual fantasies. The three segments inside the framing device serve as a look at the making of these videos. By the end of the story…The Black Rabbit, Graham, his wife, and the individual segments will all tie together.
We aren’t going to rank the framing story because it differs so much from the three segments. It’s a decent one. Mostly for how it ties everything we’ve seen together. If anything, it suffers from the most interesting parts of Graham’s story receiving their own segment.
Without further ado, let’s rank these segments. In reverse…as is our way.
3. Personal Space (segment 1)
The first segment in Midnight Peepshow is, unfortunately, it’s weakest one. It does a good job setting up the concept of The Black Rabbit…well…in explaining it. The way in which Personal Space chooses to relay that information is far too choppy to be entertaining. The story centers around a home invasion. A husband and wife are held at gunpoint. The husband is tied to a chair and forced to watch the assailant have sex with his wife.
There are an almost comical number of twists after that. Some are necessary to explain The Black Rabbit concept. Others feel like a story desperate to find an ending. The effects don’t work to the level they need to either. Violence is more distracting than shocking. It borders on the wrong side of ridiculous too often down the stretch.
2. Fuck Marry Kill (segment 2)
Personal Space is followed by another segment that initially feels disconnected from Graham’s story. Fuck Marry Kill is…well…pretty much what it sounds like. The classic game is given a Saw style twist with the help of noted Gremlins mass murderer Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan in a voice role). A woman named Helen (Miki Davis) wakes up in a wedding dress to find three former lovers tied to chairs. There’s Chester (Derek Nelson) …who she had a four-year relationship with. Maxwell (Jamie Bacon) …who she cheated on Chester with. And Liam (Jack Fairbank) …a one-night stand from years ago.
The Games Master (Galligan) informs Helen that she has a limited amount of time to determine which of the men she will perform each of the acts with. It’s a decent twisted take on the game. There are some fun moments here…mostly when the clock begins to tick down on each of her choices. The punishment for not going through and completing each act is death. To leave the room…Helen will have to commit to marrying someone, have sex with someone else…and kill the other one. There’s another twist, of course…but that’s the gist of it.
1. The Black Rabbit (segment 3)
The final, and easily strongest, segment of Midnight Peepshow is The Black Rabbit. As the name implies…this is where we learn everything that we ever wanted to about the mysterious website. Graham and his wife Isabel (Sarah Diamond) lead the story. Isabel becomes fascinated with The Black Rabbit website. It gives her the thrill of her life to role play with an unwitting Graham and upload the videos to the site. This, obviously, leads to inevitable trouble in their marriage.
This entire segment is extremely well done. It also leads to a violent finale that pays off what the movie has only teased to that point. You won’t shake off everything in The Black Rabbit easily. As a bonus…seeing the complete backstory for Graham puts everything that came before in context. It forges Midnight Peepshow into a surprisingly cohesive story. Especially for an anthology film.
Scare Value
For most of its runtime Midnight Peepshow seems unwilling to go all the way. The stories hold back more than you’d expect from an anthology specifically about deviant sexual violence. Fittingly, however, it does save its explosion of violence for the climax of the story. It makes that scene more effective. The movie effectively teases you until that moment. It makes for an unforgettable finish…but the two uneven segments that precede it put a cap on how high the package can go.
3/5
Midnight Peepshow Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from VUDU and Amazon
