PRETTY POISON

"HAS AN EROTIC ALLURE THAT WILL JOLT YOU!"
– Entertainment Weekly

(1968) “Boy what a week. I met you on Monday. Fell in love with you on Tuesday. Wednesday I was unfaithful. Thursday we killed a guy together; how bout that for a crazy week, Sue Ann?” In a small Massachusetts town, troubled Anthony Perkins, on probation from an institution for something about a fire, pauses en route to his first day of work at a blood-red-pollution-spewing chemical plant, to watch as Tuesday Weld bears the flag for an all-girl rifle drill team — when they meet later at a lunch counter his opening line is “We’re under surveillance.” Thirtyish man with a past with a high school girl — guess Perkins is playing another nutso — but then Weld’s first post-coitus remark is “Hey Dennis, when do we do something exciting?” Noel Black’s first feature after his acclaimed short Skaterdater is both a sometimes excruciatingly suspenseful thriller, with industrial sabotage and two murders, and an ecologically prescient black comedy, with outstanding performances by the two stars: Perkins, only eight years after Psycho, creates perhaps his most sympathetic character, and 25-year-old Weld deadpans the dewiest of seemingly gullible teenagers — but those dark undercurrents keep coming. Approx. 89 minutes.

REVIEWS

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"EDITORS' PICK! A WELCOME REVIVAL!"
– New York magazine

"STRANGE, SEXY AND SLIGHTLY PSYCHEDELIC! Seems to exist as a playful, hard candy-colored dystopia in parallel with Red Desert... It feels as if it was dropped into the past from the future. The titular poison is colored chemicals, the plot is comic book noir, yet the performances are natural. Perkins gives a career-topping performance as the painfully smart lanky weirdo with a dark past. He’s clearly crazy but it almost seems possible that majorette Weld, with her blue convertible and very lovable curves, could rescue him from a fate of permanent creepiness, until it’s revealed that her attractive vacantness might swallow him whole. The manipulated is the manipulator; the role-switch is exhilarating, and the heartbreak is sharp."
– Miriam Bale, The L Magazine

"A simmering small-town New England noir with an acidic comic streak. Retains its vintage 1968 aura, a studio film casting stars as its unlikely and unsavory couple, linking the blood-spattered eros of Bonnie and Clyde (produced the year before) with coming indie pulp like the The Honeymoon Killers... Perkins's deadpan, stilted spy nonsense (‘We're striking a blow for every decent citizen in this area’) sounds like the delirious hambone speeches Semple wrote for the loopy Batman TV series, though it's Weld at the center of the movie's indelible images of a teen queen playing at murder: straddling a corpse in the shallows of a river or taking charge of vengeance against her sneering, chain-smoking mother."
– Bill Weber, Slant Magazine
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"Weld was beautiful, blond, and sun-kissed with freckles, but her milk-fed beauty came alongside a lip-gnashing delivery that betrayed a head buzzing with distractions... an alarm of dangerous possibilities. Like Weld's best parts of the period, Sue Ann is a role that drew on the actress' particular ambivalence, the appearance of invincible all-American health alongside deeper agitation."
– Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

"SATISFYINGLY SORDID!"
– Melissa Anderson, Artforum
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"Noel Black planted Hollywood in New England, and, like a biologist, showed how well the species thrived there. The procedure was New Wave-ish; the motive and the result were political; without a word about Vietnam, civil rights, or any of the variety of heated conflicts that were roiling America and, for that matter, the world, the movie, made in 1968, feels hectic with the political and social passions of the moment, even as it draws on the styles of the past."
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Artfully elliptical... Twenty-five when she made Pretty Poison, and having perversely turned down the female leads in Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary’s Baby, Weld nevertheless managed to simultaneously embody—and chillingly subvert—the image of the typical high school golden girl. In the end, her character is as American as napalm pie."
– Ken Salikof, New York Daily News
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"For those who have yet to experience its dumbfounding spell, the chance to discover this lost gem should not be missed... A strikingly singular postmodern take on the outlaw couple genre that still feels ahead of its time."
– Davin Reich, Cinespect
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“SUBTLE AND VERY SMART! Perkins gives what may be his most sensitively conceived performance... Weld plays a small-town girl, crazy for excitement, who accepts his fantasies in a matter-of-fact way and proceeds to act on them. Lorenzo Semple, Jr., wrote a beauty of a script (based on Stephen Geller’s novel, She Let Him Continue); the horror in the movie isn’t just in the revelation of what the pretty young girl is capable of — it’s in your awareness that the man’s future is being destroyed.”
– Pauline Kael

“WELD BOASTS THE DELIRIOUS BLOODLUST OF A 200-PROOF SOCIOPATH!”
– Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club

“SENSITIVE AND UNSETTLING! Dumped into theaters as an exploitation cheapie, this lyrical thriller is a minor American classic... Perkins gives perhaps his richest performance, certainly his most touching... The twist is that [Weld is] every bit the psychopath people assume [he] is. And since she’s bored with the small town and hates her mother, she’s ready for anything... And when violence breaks out in the suburban setting, Mr. Black plays it straight, not for the cheap irony that won so much praise for Malick’s Badlands. A large part of what makes Pretty Poison chilling is Ms. Weld’s amazing performance... [She makes] Sue Ann seem even more like a normal, carefree teenager after she kills. Pointing a gun, as she’s preparing to commit a murder she has long dreamed of, her smile has never been sweeter.”
– Charles Taylor, The New York Times

"Perkins’ role, as a dedicated fantasist employed at a chemical factory, treads on Psycho ground without ever causing the usual feelings of déjà vu; Tuesday Weld is the film’s linch-pin, brilliantly playing a girl whose drum-majorette demeanour hides the most amazing emotions. In a word, recommended."
– Time Out (London)