EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

This was directed by Steve Lustgarten, who won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Student Film. When you read the plot — “Unstable thirty-something introvert, who works as a photographer’s assistant, becomes obsessed with his underage female neighbor” — you might think that this is going to be exploitative. It’s not. Instead it comes across as completely real even if we’d never make the decisions that the characters live through.

Written by Lustgarten and his leads, Jay Horenstein (who plays Paul) and Nicole Harrison (who plays Lisa), this movie feels like we’re looking at actual lives. Sadly, American Taboo was the only movie Harrison made during a time that she said that she was “a poet from the Northwest who joyously misspent her youth in Hollywood.” Even more depressing is the fact that she died in 2011 from brain cancer. She feels like someone who could have broken through in some way to be a star.

You can see this as troublesome and wish fulfillment because the young girl is the aggressor in this movie, but it’s also so well made that I didn’t come away feeling strange or grossed out by it. Paul seems like someone who can’t connect with anyone and so when he does feel something with Lisa, it does seem like something that is only happening in his head even if it is the reality within the movie. He feels regret because he sees this as something that he could have kept from doing but Lisa is more of a realistic person, knowing that she wanted it and that it seemed like it was happening regardless of whatever front of morality Paul had erected.

What a strange film to be in the Visual Vengeance library of movies.