Voyeur #6

Newsgroups: alt.sex.movies
Subject: Review of "The Voyeur # 6"
From: [email protected]
Date: Thu,  4 Apr 1996 00:32:42 UTC


REVIEW OF "THE VOYEUR #6" BY JOHN LESLIE

The tapes in the "Voyeur" series consist of about six scenes, usually 
independent of each other. Voyeurism is the theme in both of its 
varieties: watching people without their knowledge, or asking people (strangers,
hired sex workers, or special others) to perform in front of the voyeur.
In all cases most of the sex is viewed from the point of view of the 
Voyeur, who has a hand-held video camera, but this restriction is freely
relaxed for close-ups. 

First the summary. This tape is over two hours long and has six scenes. In
two of them, the participants do not appear to know that the Voyeur is
watching, while in three of the others he either has arranged the event and
invited the participants, and in one, one of the participants has invited him to
watch. The six scenes are unrelated and are summarized next:

Scene 1.- Leslie invites two male friends to have sex with a woman while he
watches and encourages them. This takes place in a living room while porno
movies are shown in a big TV screen and Leslie keeps up some dirty talk off
camera. The woman is really into it and everybody has a very good time.

Scene 2.- A couple arrive at their home with a woman they have just picked up
somewhere. The Voyeur is hidden upstairs. The three people have sex in
the downstairs living room. Most of it is filmed from upstairs, the
voyeur's point of view. The effect is truly voyeuristic. Plenty of anal
sex for both females.

Scen 3.- A brunette in a tight dress, lying on a bed, is in conversation with
Leslie about how sexy the dress is. As she masturbates, she recalls or
imagines a scene in which she is fucked with a strap-on dildo by a blonde woman.
The blonde woman is rather overweight and never says a word.
This takes place in a bathroom and it is intercut with the masturbation scene.
Towards the end, a man enters the bedroom where the woman and Leslie are,
and fucks her. This is unexpected, but the viewer is cleverly made to feel
that it is a normal development.

Scene 4.- A tough looking blonde on a pool table at her place. She talks
to Leslie for a while, then two black men walk in and have her on the pool
table. DP and everything. The pool table scenario is not very original but
at least the two men did not come to deliver a pizza.

Scene 5.- A blonde and two men walk into a house, followed at a distance
by the Voyeur. One of the men seems to be the woman's husband or boyfriend,
this is not explicitly said, but he just acts more familiar with her. They
have three way sex (DP included) in the living room. This is a very similar
situation to that in scene 2, except for the reversal of the sex ratio. However,
scene 2 is more erotic, in part because of the voyeur's vantage point from
above, and in part because the actors perform more realistically.

Scene 6.- Leslie invites two women, a cute blonde and a brunette with very short
hair, to his living room, where three men share the two women. A nice orgy,
mostly in two groups of two and three paople, switching around. Everybody gets 
into it very well. Sexy, but the voyeuristic angle is not exploited very well.

The "voyeur" point of view in this series has some pros and cons, and which
wins depends on your taste. The cons are obvious: the view is sometimes not
very good, the camera work is shaky, and the sound spotty. Most important,
you do not know for sure who the characters are and how they got together.
The pros are less obvious but become evident after you watch the better
scenes for a while: there is something very pleasantly perverted in adopting
a realistic voyeur's point of view. If a person really were to follow people and
watch them have sex without their knowledge, that person would really be in the 
situation of the "Voyeur" in some of the scenes in these tapes: he would not
know who the people were, or how it came about that they were having sex. 
This is true for the very appealing, in a 'cinema verit'e' way, scenes 2 and
5 of this tape, where the people involved supposedly do not know that the
Voyeur is watching. We are led to guess, with the Voyeur, what is their
relationship and we do so, as he does, by picking up cues from their
conversation (the part we can hear) and even more from their behavior. Thus,
in Scene 2 it slowly becomes obvious that the man and the darker brunette are
a couple, and the other woman (who seems to be a voyeuse herself)
has just been picked up (but not hired) for the occasion. In
Scene 5, we hear little, and we must figure out the relationships from
the behavior of the participants, just as at a restaurant we might try
to figure out if the couple in the next table are on a first date or
a long term relationship.

Scenes 1 and 6, in which the people are invited by the voyeur to perform
for him, are psychologically weaker, but the intercut scene 3, which
has very erotic implications as the woman's masturbatory fantasy or recollection
is developed, is better. The commonplace scene 4, where the woman simply
invites the Voyeur to watch a clicheed porn scenario, is the weakest of the
tape from the psychological point of view. Scenes 1 and 6 would be more
interesting if we were told more about why is it happening. Is the woman in
secene 1 out to fulfill her own fantasy? Or is she a friend of Leslie, out to
help him play out his fantasy?

When real people invite others to watch them have sex, particularly group
sex, they do it for a reason. They may want to submit themselves to the
voyeur's desires, or might just want to show off, or would like their fantasy
to be recorded. The woman in scene 4 is just crude, and the scene fails for
this reason. The very pretty women in Scene 6 seem more interesting, but we
do not find out why they are there. They are nice, girl next door types. What
makes them get involved in this? Scene 1 would also be a miss if it were
not for the woman's obvious eagerness.

Leslie can be very good at keeping us guessing. Recall "The Dog Walker" movie,
where we really do not know what is going on until the very end. Even in his
cheaper tapes he does not follow the porn convention (exemplified in its 
extreme form in the 'Private' movies, for instance) of minimally setting up
the situation at the beginning, and then switching to sex only. We have to 
figure out during each sex scene, what is supposed to be the state of mind of
the participants, and we often don't quite succed as we find out that there is
a twist at the very end. In his recent "Dirty Tricks" for example, there is a
wonderful scene that begins with a couple getting out of a truck and walking
into a house. We find out that they are married and the reason for the outing
is that the man has hired a male prostitute for his wife. As the prostitute
earns his fee while the husband watches and then joins in, we learn that the
couple has done things of this kind before, but we are left hanging as to why
and how.  Best of all, after the climax, when the couple are about
to leave, a loud argument breaks up between them. Before we can guess why, the
scene is over. This kind of tantalizing teasing is, I think, erotic movie
making at its best.

In "Voyeur 6" none of the scenes is completely successful
in developing this tension with the viewer, but nevertheless this is
overall, a very successful tape and rates very high in erotic content.
You can always fast forward through a scene or even two and still have left
a ninety minute tape. I recommend it very highly for a rental, and for 
watching with some special person (except for scene 4). Leslie is
one of the few directors who seems to worry about making the viewer feel
what sexual kinkiness is like.  He shows us, even in this very low budget
production, that he is a creative movie maker.
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