The voyeur thriller is a weird sub-genre that Hollywood sure likes to make every few years. Whether it’s looking our one of them there rear windows, across a valley in LA with a telescope, at the next door neighbors in suburbia, people in Hollywood scripts are always peeping on each other. All I know for sure is if I ever move to Hollywood, my first purchase is gonna be blackout curtains.

Yeah, Amazon Prime’s The Voyeurs is a decidedly adult-focused erotic thriller. It’s about a couple who move into a high-rise apartment with a lack of window shades. And before you can mumble “Good fences something something good neighbors”, they immediately notice the sexy couple in the apartment across the way… and how horny they. So they watch… and get binoculars… and some Tom Clancy surveillance gear. And things get naughty.

I was pretty engaged for the first half of this movie. I didn’t exactly know where it was going, but I kind of liked the couple watching. I was waiting for the shoe to drop… the mysterious masked intruder who’s gonna sneak in and murder because that’s what happens in these movies. And, ultimately, I was pleasantly (if a little eye-rollingly) surprised by the meta-commentary the film delivers on the sub-genre.

But that mild respect required me to sit through some heightened melodrama that strikes in the second half. Once the basic plot starts to unfold, it just gets 50 Shades of Ridiculous. The neighbor hot guy comes across as skeevy and ridiculous but somehow he seduces all the ladies. Hell… maybe he is that seductive and I’m not the target audience. I just know that I laughed and rolled my eyes when it worked.

And then the shoes start to drop and it’s just corny and cheesy and unbelievable and a bunch of other pejorative descriptors that mean a movie has (intentionally or otherwise) gone off the silly end. Melodramatic and corny. There’s a few more words.

So, yeah, this is sometimes a decent movie that’s actually shot fairly well. The actors – at leas the protagonists – are usually appealing. The first half is intriguing and naughty in all the lip-biting ways. I was willing to go along with it before it got goofy. I blame the screenwriter.

Score: 74