Pretty Poison (1968)

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

He is weird and disturbed,she is clever cold blood and poison as suggest the title,when they meet something is gonna happen....Anthony Perkins was made for this kind of character,mentally unbalanced,Tuesday Weld in your best performance ever play a pretty girl who find a interesting young man which self called CIA's spy,she soon realize that could be take advantage of this unstable guy using him for another purpose....quickly he is in your net without notice,this low budge movie has a very clever premise which the hunter is catch by the prey.....remarkable forgotten gem to the sixties that every movie fan must to see!!! Resume: First watch: 2000 / How many: 2 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 8.25

A quirky little picture based on a quirky little novel—Stephen Geller's 'She Let Him Continue' (E.P. Dutton, 1966)—'Pretty Poison' delves, Hitchcock-like, into realms of psychotic violence that sometimes lie just beneath the facade of tidy American normalcy. Already firmly typecast as a perpetual deviant, Anthony Perkins ('Fear Strikes Out'; 'Psycho') plays Dennis Pitt, a mentally disturbed young man who is out on parole after serving a long stretch behind bars for setting a house fire that killed his aunt when he was fifteen years old. Temporarily evading his parole officer (John Randolph) by relocating to "Winslow" (actually Great Barrington) Massachusetts, Dennis takes a job at a small chemical factory but indulges his overactive fantasy life by pretending to be a CIA agent. His self-imposed "secret mission": to sabotage the discharge pipe that dumps the mill's polluting effluent into the river. At a nearby lunch wagon Dennis meets Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld), a pretty, blonde 17-year-old high school student and drum majorette who seems to personify the all-American girl-next-door. Dennis enlists Sue Ann in his sabotage mission but Sue Ann turns out to be much more than Dennis bargained for; she bludgeons the night watchman who interrupts their caper then proceeds to shoot her own mother (Beverly Garland) to death—and blames both murders on Dennis, whose track record leaves him highly vulnerable to such charges. With Dennis back behind bars, Sue Ann is last seen seducing another gullible young man, though under the watchful eye of Dennis's suspicious parole officer: a scene tacked on after preview audiences reacted negatively to the film's evident cynicism toward wanton killing (Sirhan Sirhan had just assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy). A modest hit when it first appeared, 'Pretty Poison' has achieved enduring cult status, thanks no doubt to Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s savvy script, David Quaid's picturesque cinematography, and the disarmingly witty acting of Tony Perkins. (Tuesday Weld blamed an uncharacteristically dull performance on director Noel Black, a shy, socially awkward man who was not able to bring out the best in her). Lawence Kasdan's 1981 noir thriller, 'Body Heat', utilizes a similar plot. DVD (2006).

First off, I agree that Tuesday Weld was already too old to be cast as an impressionable teen, no matter how beautiful she is here. But then there is this wild premise that soon gets out of hand when an ex-con, yes, cons a young blonde into... well, what? Does he just want a relationship with her? Or is he aiming for mischief? In any case I believe he really believes that the plant he works at is truly poisonous and needs to be stopped. But at what cost? But (some) acting and dialogues that fall short (even if a few lines are nothing short of perfect), even if it's certainly not all terrible. One could argue that this is a black comedy and therefore the tone of it may be kept light at times and credibility is not a foremost thing, but - to name just one - if you've seen 'Fargo', you know how perfect drama and comedy can be together. The way things turn out implies that Sue Ann had been waiting all along for the ex-con to come by, and she is ready to strike again. To me, that's just a little too easy. P.s. the way things turned out, reminded me of the Starkweather / Fugate case.Still, I'm willing to forgive 'Sweet Poison' quite a lot, because the premise is deliciously devious, as are most of its zigzag turns. So, no less than 8 out of 10. So, forget my critical notes for for at least ninety minutes, and try this. The direction and look of the film is quite nice, with intercutting of scenes thatreminded me of 'Point Blank' (1969).

Noel Black's darkly comic masterpiece "Pretty Poison" may owe quite a debt to "Psycho", (Anthony Perkin's Dennis is cut from the same cloth as Norman Bates), and in turn would influence the likes of Malick's "Badlands". What's even more surprising than the failure of the film to be better known than it actually is, (it's certainly a 'cult' movie), is that Black never went on to anything like a real cinema career though his direction here is exemplary. The plot, about a gormless sap being lead very badly astray by a femme fatale, (in this case, a very young femme fatale), is as old as the cinema itself and has served many a film-noir and gangster movie very well indeed though this is a lot more off-the-wall than most genre pictures. Perkins is Dennis Pitt, recently released from a correctional institution where he has been incarcerated for arson and Tuesday Weld is the high-school senior who latches onto him. Dennis may be as nutty as a fruitcake but it's Weld's Sue Ann who is the film's pretty poison and it's she who eggs Dennis on and leads down much more dangerous roads than even he might have gone by himself. Both players are superb, Weld particularly so and there are brilliant supporting turns from Beverly Garland as Weld's tramp of a mother and John Randolph as Perkins' probation officer. The source material is a novel by Stephen Geller and the brilliant adaptation is by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Cult movie it may be; Noel Black's only real film of note it may be but this is still a small classic.