Peeping Tom (2010)

Director: Joe Russo
Stars: Dean Veglia, Eva Hamilton and Tyler Janes

This film was an official selection at the 6th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Tempe in 2010. Here's an index to my reviews of 2010 films.

Opening a film with a scantily clad female butt swaying away from the camera and a guy trying to be David Beckham following her into the bedroom is a pretty good way to grab our attention. The answerphone soon tells us that this is Tom and Alexa's house, but while this is Alexa that isn't Tom. We can be sure of that because Tom is the one ringing her, with the news that he's just round the corner and he'll be there in a minute. By the time he arrives, it doesn't take much imagination to work out what's going on at the end of the trail of discarded clothes, so he... well, this short film runs a mere four minutes so I can't really say anything more without spoiling the story and you'll just have to go watch it yourself. As with all shorts this short, there's only a single punchline but it's a good payoff to the neatly built suspense. Someone should write a pop song around the story and turn it into a music video, but only if that punchline stays intact.

Tom is Dean Veglia, who I last saw in an IFP Phoenix 48 hour film called Finger Food. When I first saw Peeping Tom, I wondered if it could have been a 48 hour film too, given that it's so short and has so few scenes, but it turns out that it was shot in a single day for a measly thousand bucks, chicken feed in movie money. It's quick work too so, as the technical quality is easily professional grade, kudos is very much due to the filmmakers. What's more, they had the sheer bad luck to pick the one day this century that it rained in Phoenix to shoot the thing, thus requiring 18 hours of colour correction to fix. Veglia's fellow actors are less experienced than he is: Tyler Janes has no other credits at IMDb and Eva Hamilton only has a couple. For experience we need to look behind the camera, at a slew of seven producers. One building his filmography is writer/producer/director Joe Russo. He directed Finger Food (and almost everything else Dean Veglia has been in) and he backed up Brian Pulido on The Graves. Here's hoping for a longer picture at next year's festival.