Review #283: Midnight Peepshow (2022)

Gabe's Supplemental Horror Review #6 - Midnight Peepshow (2022)

This is it- the last review before October! This has been a wild year and I'm glad I've gotten you all to come along to read my reviews up until this point. Tune in tomorrow for more info.

I really didn't know what to expect from Midnight Peepshow; I found it on a list of recent horror films and decided to watch it with my wife. It's an anthology-style film where Graham, a distraught man in Soho, drunkenly stumbles into a mysterious Peepshow venue, and sees a collection of stories revolving around an extreme fetish website/app called "The Black Rabbit"- and to Graham's horror, these stories end up hitting a bit too close to home...

The first story is about a husband and wife whose flat is invaded by a gun-wielding rapist, but it turns out there's a lot more going on than any of them realize. The second story has a woman and three previous partners wake up in a Saw-like deathtrap, and they have to perform various intimate acts or forfeit their lives. And the third story is about Graham's marriage, when his wife becomes a member of The Black Rabbit and it tears their home life apart as she gets deeper and deeper into this web of sex and mystery.

The thing about this movie is that I like the vibe and I (kind of) see what it was going for, but I really think it missed the mark in a lot of ways. The Black Rabbit is vaguely portrayed as this fetish website where tons of rich people pay tons of money to watch others act out their fantasies, but I really don't understand why any of these characters voluntarily got involved in it. Like, it's implied that they get paid to go along with these things? Right? The first scenario has Helen livestreaming a staged home invasion so people can watch her get "raped" by this attacker (and then presumably watch some people get killed, as I'm assuming that was part of the plan from the beginning). But is she getting paid to do this or is she just doing it for the thrill of it all? Because it really seems like she and her husband are barely scraping by, and The Black Rabbit's whole deal doesn't really work if the payout isn't massive as well. (I don't think it's explicitly stated that its clients are all rich, but all of the people we see accessing it certainly look rich, and it's clearly mimicking movies like Hostel where the clientele is, explicitly, very very rich.) 

The second story has the same problem: one of the three ex-partners is revealed to have been behind the whole deathtrap at the end of the story, but he also doesn't seem rich. There doesn't seem to be any financial incentive at all, it seems like he only did it to get back with his ex (and I have to ask why anybody would have paid to watch that event go down in the first place). And the third story has Isabel leave her well-paying job and wealthy husband for a world of exciting sexual encounters, but it's also strongly implied that she'll be paid so much that she'll never need money again. But her final encounter was supposed to involve cutting off her hand and leg (something she clearly was not informed of beforehand) so how would money have been adequate compensation for that? The logistics of this story just don't really make much sense and the more I think about it the less it seems to work.

Also, the ending of the movie seems to try to act like there's a moral judgment being passed on Graham for investing in The Black Rabbit at the beginning. I know that it makes sense for his character to feel guilt over this, but is that all the movie is trying to say? It really feels like they're telling me, the viewer, that he's a bad person. His involvement in the startup capital of this fetish website is such a half-baked idea and it only got two brief mentions in the whole movie, so it feels incredibly weird having the climax of the film be "Look at this terrible human being, who invested in a struggling website that he didn't know would eventually turn out to be evil! Shame him! Shame him!"

And finally- this is really a minor gripe, but it needs to be said- this film was way more tame than I was expecting. It's about a guy who goes to a Live Nude Girls peepshow that's run by a hardcore sex consortium, he's told the ladies in there "bare all", and then he's shown a scene of a husband and wife arguing about a bad Valentine's Day. In this entire film I think there were only two boobs briefly shown and one or two brief penis shots, and that just feels weird. Now I'm not saying I would have liked this movie more if there was more nudity- but I get the distinct impression the filmmakers wanted this dark sexual energy in the film but were unwilling or unable to actually commit to that.

Anyway, I think this movie had a good idea behind it and a nice vibe but I think it was a bit too low-budget and scattered to really pull it off.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Deathtrap Marriages

Best Actor Award: The black rabbit at the end of the film (the actual animal, not the naked dude with the creepy mask) was played by a pet bunny named Atlas!