Customer Reviews

Psychopathia Sexualis

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you enjoy reading the text-book aloud for hours on end, you'll love Bret Wood's depiction of Kraft-Ebing's compendium of repressed eroticism. Sexual perversity, properly mingled with sadness, loneliness, and shame. Soundtrack by Paul Mercer heightens the funerial tone. Pitch-perfect Victorian costumes and settings. Such interesting faces and figures...the casting was excellent. This DVD belongs in the collection of anyone who is serious about such matters. However, I recommend the Brian King edition of the Psychopathia, if you are considering the book for purchase. My only regret is that there was no place in the film for side-stories in the book not specific to sex, such as the maiden aunt who would shriek "bewitched" when visitors laid umbrellas, gloves, or purses onto a certain side table in the parlor, snatching up the bewitched item and secreting it in a location in the house not discovered until after her death. These little touches are missed...but one cannot have everything in life that one might desire.

This movie if nothing elese is beautifully made. The cinematography is superb. There isn't much dialoge and not much of a plot per se but the vignettes taken from the book are artfully and masterfully created. Visually stunning.

The movie is an attempt to talk about Krafft-Ebing work to understand and classify human sexuality confined as he was by Victorian morality and science. The problem is that it attempts to focus on at least five different cases, sometimes skipping between one and another. The result is that I could not feel much of anything for any of the stories except that of the young woman and her governess who are lesbians. I was amused by the ending which demonstrates that even the "best therapy" may not be a cure for what society considers sexual problems. Regardless of the warnings the movies feels the need to have, it is not very sexual explicit nor did I find it particularly arousing. I also didn't think "Victorians are weird" but instead "Victorians were sad" but I knew that before from working with the ideas and erotica from that period.

This movie was really really boring. Seeing the birth of fetishism but the plot sucks. It this was going to be in vignettes they could a least started with a story and finish. So movies do benefit between going be stories it made it worse. Do waste your time. I stream it on Netflix.

i bought this video to show in a class that i teach on sexuality. i was under impressed.