Pretty Poison

Pretty Poison (1968)

Slightly Trashy
Ranking: Incomplete

Caught only about the last forty minutes of this film on Scream last night, Mr. White and I were waiting for the head movie to come on and then we were all like, "Hey, it's Anthony Perkins". I find it unusual for movies to be even watchable when you start watching towards the end, but this is an exception.

The plot, as far as I can tell, is about a crazy guy (Anthony Perkins) who tells a teenage girl (Tuesday Weld) that he's a secret agent and then I guess they go on a killing spree or something.

I actually really enjoyed the little bit of this movie I saw, and kind of want to see it from the beginning now. It was strangely sweet and totally horrible at the same time. It was dark, man, you know?

That girl scared the shit out of me. She was fuckin evil man. And Anthony Perkins, though slightly gross was still kinda endearing. After having seen all the sequels to Psycho, it was sort of nice to see him not being totally repulsive, although his character in this film did seem like another riff on the Norman Bates-type.

I dunno if it was just me, but I kept noticing Hitchcock-esque stuff in there. Just the way some stuff was shot. Maybe?

Yeah, I thought it was pretty good, kinda sick and all that. There was some crappiness to it (the camera jostled when chickie's lifeless corpse hit it - that really stuck out to me), but I enjoyed it. I'm going to see if my library has it and then maybe I can do a review of the whole movie some time.

END

Directed by: Noel Black. Written by: Lorenzo Semple Jr., based on the novel She Let Him Continue by Stephen Geller. Starring: Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Beverley Garland, John Randolph, Dick O'Neill, Ken Kercheval