People sure do love them some cinema about killer kids, and I wonder why that is. From The Bad Seed to Children of the Corn to Orphan, the interest in this horror subgenre suggests many have an inherent fear of children. I may not particularly like kids, but I am not, on the whole, scared of them. Still, the allure of such films as 1972’s What the Peeper Saw eludes me.
The blame can’t be put on Mark Lester, as I completely bought into him being an evil little fucker. In fact, I was bewildered by how the film seems to waffle on the idea of whether or not he is a murderer, when he so obviously is. Never mind the usual bunch of adult idiots in a picture like this, who can’t conceive of him being such a monster.
One person very solidly in his corner is his dad, played by Hardy Krüger. This is the kind of parent who thinks anybody who accuses their precious offspring of anything bad must be somebody who is out to get them, which makes…no sense.
The most recent of these people to make such an observation is Britt Ekland, as the new wife step-mother. I found it weird Lester only meets her after she has married his dad. He surprises her at the family mansion in Spain. She ask him why he isn’t in school, and he claims there was an outbreak of chicken pox.
She later learns from the headmaster (Harry Andrews) there was no such epidemic. Instead, Lester was expelled for getting up to all sorts of nastiness, including the murder of a cat, which I will not abide, even when we spared any visuals of that. Some other things are alluded to in a more elliptical manner.
What stunned me is nobody suspected the lad of murdering his mother, an act we see in a tasteless opening scene. We don’t see him do anything directly, but we see a naked woman get into the bath, where she gets electrocuted when she tries to turn off the tap with her foot, unaware of the electric wire connected to the pipe.
I questioned the mindset that would make a film where the first thing we see is a fully naked woman watching herself as she writhes in front of a mirror. I found the idea of a woman prepping for a bath this way to be as ridiculous as how women’s locker rooms are usually presented in films. That is merely tacky—having her immediately killed is despicable. And there is definitely a tawdriness to how she bucks and thrusts while the current is surging though her.
Ekland will also show quite a bit of skin in a film that has no shortage of ick. Most of her nudity is in scenes with Lester, such as one where where she removes an article of clothing for each additional piece of information she wants. When she’s finally starkers, he happily confesses to killing his mother, saying he laughed when he saw her corpse: “She looked so surprised.”
Given the way such shots are framed, Lester may be in them or he might not. He’s definitely in a bit where she’s topless as she gets into bed with him. The actor was fourteen at the time, which is unacceptable. Even worse, he looks younger than that.
Her character seems to be quite daft in the first act, with an astonishingly naivete. In particular, her reaction is nowhere near as strong as is warranted when she’s on the phone with his dad and he tries feeling her up from behind. Eventually, she will become the only character with real backbone, trying to convince anybody her stepson is a liar, thief and a murderer.
The one person she will never convince is Krüger. He’s an accomplished author, and I imagine the stuff he writes is in the mold of Norman Mailer, who I am betting he longs to be. In keeping with being all things manly, he flies his own plane. In his mind, his son can do no wrong and a woman can do no right. I think it’s safe to assume he regards the fairer sex as intellectual inferior, as he dismisses the evidence Ekland produces with such statements as, “Do I have to spell it out for you? Are you that obtuse?” I think it’s also telling he has Lester address him by his first name.
What the Peeper Saw is an unpleasant film that takes place in a world consisting of one psychopath and one sane woman, but everybody else is oblivious beyond help. Its most uncomfortable element is how it frames its gratuitous nudity. One brief moment that stands out in my mind is a party where sexual overtones seem to creep into everything. Most notably, there’s a buffet consisting of a naked Black woman lying on her back and covered in fruit. In that moment, I wondered if the film was partly a comment on how oversexed society was becoming at the time. Then I thought some more and realized, nope, it’s just a naked woman being groped by strange men under the delusion they are actually wanting some fruit.
Dir: James Kelley
Starring Britt Ekland, Mark Lester, Hardy Krüger
Watched on blu-ray