Midnight Peepshow (2022) Review

We meet businessman Graham (Richard Cotton) in the midst of drowning his sorrows in a London bar. He runs into a boorish acquaintance, warns the guy about ever getting involved with a shady website called Black Rabbit, then stumbles around the alleyways of Soho, One post-scrape escape later, finds himself in front of a building bearing the titular neon sign. Once inside, he discovers that his couple of quid doesn’t afford him the titillation he was seeking but what he does receive is a series of stories, told by the women who ended up there…

Yes, it’s anthology time! Ever since I first clapped my eyes on those early Amicus productions, my affection for the portmanteau movie has developed over the years and remains undimmed. Wild shifts in both tone and quality are familiar features of the landscape, along with the unshakeable fact that if you don’t enjoy one tale there’ll be a different one along soon enough.

These rules generally hold true for Midnight Peepshow, although the tone and visual style is more consistent than many others in this subgenre, due to most of the talent behind the camera being involved across the whole production. A major driving force of the production is Airell Anthony Hayles who, apart from providing input into the script and overarching concept, directs opening story Personal Space, focusing on a role playing exercise between a married couple which is disrupted by a home invasion.

As watchable as the segment is, it’s also a little too predictable and serves to show what works and what doesn’t as far as the film goes in a wider context. The bloody moments are effective but the erotic content is surprisingly coy, with little explicit nudity, never coming close to push the boundaries the early moments of the wraparound hint at. Interestingly, in these times of a new puritanism regarding the relevance sex scenes in movies, the content in Midnight Peepshow will still give those folks an attack of the vapours. However, for those of us who remember renting Greg Dark erotic thrillers in the 1990s the antics here might feel a shade on the tame side.

Second up is writer/director Andy Edwards’ Fuck, Marry, Kill, which takes that particular game and gives it a Saw-style spin, complete with grimy, single location mayhem and a ticking clock. This was by far my favourite of the stories due to its amusingly dark dialogue and a genuinely mean-spirited vibe throughout, topped off by sterling voice work from none other than Zach Galligan as the Games Master, dishing out the instructions and the cruel comments. The blunt, downbeat resolution may divide but my overall feeling is that Fuck, Marry, Kill headed to places the rest of Midnight Peepshow should have.

Rounding off our trio of tales is The Black Rabbit, directed by Jake West (of those ace Video Nasties documentaries) and featuring Graham as a major player in a tale of (another) marriage circling the drain following our main protagonist’s other half Isabel finding herself in way too deep as she takes her fantasy life to extremes and their hitherto happy home life unravels to a score by genre stalwart Simon Boswell.

Having this section track forward to where Graham initially came in is a nice touch and if you like a splash of chainsaw violence then you’ll want to hang around for that, but this feels a little on the long side. A subplot involving Jill the IT geek is necessary for exposition purposes but it’s also quite dull and there’s no surprise as to where it ends up. On the plus side, Graham’s increasing desperation is decently played and the eventual kiss-off to the framing device is solid if unspectacular.

Within the pantheon of anthology movies, Midnight Peepshow may not find itself mentioned in the same breath as Tales From The Crypt but it’s certainly not going to be consigned to the dark recesses occupied by such items as Night Train To Terror. The Soho locations add sleazy atmosphere of a refreshingly British sort and there’s a feeling that all involved were aiming to provide something a little different, even if the bigger moments don’t always hit the mark and the shady, dark web elements rarely feel as pervasive and powerful as they should. Still, it’s an interesting digest of downplayed dirt.

Movie Rating:

Midnight Peepshow trailer