Cathy Sargent Am not sure who is enabling whom in this 1968 sociopathic thriller?Is it Anthony Perkins who plays a disturbed man named Dennis or Tuesday Weld who plays Sue Ann as his pretty sidekick?All I know is that I never felt any desensitized violence in the killing. No agent orange here. There were too many pregnant pauses evoking images of the rippling effects of actions and their effects upon others. How does a sociopathic thriller evoke empathy? Visionary director Noel Black made it happen by planting Hollywood in New England and drawing on styles of the past.He brought neat touches, flashbacks, naive and knowing together in a magical way."There is an extraordinary patience and calculation to Anthony Perkins elaborate ruse" writes one reviewer. I couldn't agree more as in spite of the hectic pace of the plot, Dennis seemed to be in the slow time as his earlier film "Psycho"Pretty Poison was reel therapy for the Vietnam Era and casting Anthony Perkins for the disturbed young man was brilliant. There was no slow time or cinematic moments on Vietnam's Hamburger Hill. Instead there was only cold beer, hamburger and the Follies Bergere after seeing your buddies get blown away.It has been over 30 years since Vietnam and the war is still not over because of the herbicide agent orange sprayed into the de militarized zone. Dennis was right after all about the poisoning in the water.

Robert J. Maxwell This is an exceptional movie. The budget was clearly less than monumental and there were no bankable stars. It belongs to no genre so there is no base to appeal to. The sex is subdued and there is little violence. No computer-generated images. I wonder who had the huevos to greenlight this. Somehow I doubt it would ever be made today.Anthony Perkins is a young man who has just been released from a psychiatric facility, having accidentally burned his aunt to death when he set fire to the house years earlier. John Randolph is his sympathetic but skeptical parole officer. Perkins sets up residence in the town of Winslow, Massachusetts, evocatively photographed by David Quaid in a flat, TV style. You get to know Winslow -- the chemical factory, the river that purls through the town, the modest working-class home that Tuesday Weld lives in with her mother.Weld is the champion member of the high-school band, and what a succulent piece she is, with her lustrous blond hair, her voracious and toothy grin, her unimpeachable figure. She bumps into Perkins at a hot dog stand. Perkins is a fabulist, maybe a trait he picked up in the funny farm, and he sweeps Weld up in his narrative.Perkins pretends to be a secret agent from the CIA, keeping an eye on the chemical plant where he now has a job. They may be polluting the river. It's his job to find out if they're poisoning the water. "In a few years there may be nothing but monster fish between here and New York." One should not believe that the pollution is a symptom of Perkins' derangement. In 1968, there were virtually no laws governing the process. The film illustrates this lack of concern when the owner of the hot dog stand dumps his garbage in the river, then stops to wipe some mud spatters from his motorcycle. Two kids in New York caught cholera, of all things, from eating a watermelon they'd found floating in the Hudson. In any case, Weld is thrilled. She's eager to help him and wants to be a deputy secret agent.The plot gets complicated and twirled around but not to the extent that we can't follow it. If, at first, Perkins is the fake and Weld is the naif, it gradually becomes clear that it's the other way round. I don't want to give away too much of the plot.I attribute the success of the movie mostly to Lorenzo Semple's screenplay, which is full of oddments and stylishness. Noel Black's direction is functional -- not more than that -- but the story becomes so gripping that one's attention never drifts. Semple was also responsible for the outré and equally paranoid "The Parallax View." After "Psycho," poor Anthony Perkins seemed consigned to the role of not just maniac, but maniac being taken by thyrotoxic storm. Jerky and twitching and stuttering. Here he's merely given to excess fantasizing but is otherwise intelligent and, well, normal. Smart, maybe, but he doesn't know much about women, and he's abrasive towards his dumb superiors.Perkins' and Weld's roles are pretty complex. They both handle the complexity well. Perkins must change from being slyly but playfully conspiratorial to being aghast. Weld has to morph from a gullible teen ager into a calculating young woman thoroughly committed to pursuit of hypothetical imperatives.It all comes together quite well and I applaud everyone involved. Wish there were more like it today instead of all those trumpeting mastodons and monsters thumping their way across the megascreens.

sunznc Pretty Poison is interesting to watch just for the cast. Beverly Garland, Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. How did anyone get all of these people together? Doesn't Anthony Perkins seem strange outside of Psycho?Anyway, Pretty Poison isn't a bad film it just suffers from a 'made-for-TV-feel' at times. The acting isn't bad but it seems kind of soapy or lurid whenever Sue Anne's mother comes onto the screen. She almost seems like a mother from a daytime soap.The dialogue in the film is not deep. It almost could have been written by a bunch of high schoolers. I think the interesting thing here is watching Tuesday Weld's character responding to Anthony Perkins fantasies of the CIA and undercover work. Does she let on that she believes him to use him later? Or does she really believe his wild stories in the beginning?This is the part that keeps a person interested in the story and it's up to you to decide. Nothing earth shattering here but I've seen much worse.

christopher-underwood This is a very unusual and quirky movie with great performances from Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. It is also a bit of a worrying film in that everybody seems a bit unbalanced or at least not quite up to scratch and we are never quite sure where it is going to go. At first things seem straightforward enough, in fact Perkins' fantasies/make-believe tales for Weld are becoming just that much too silly when the whole thing takes off when the little lady gets a bit bigger. Not just a little bit bigger, either because she begins to dwarf Perkins. All very well done for no sooner have we begun to write Perkins off as an out and out psychopath, he becomes all vulnerable and we are forced to begin to re-evaluate Weld. My only criticism is that the film should have either been more hard nosed or played the whole thing for laughs more. Listening to the director at the start of the commentary on the DVD it seems that there was a deliberate attempt by the studio to soften the effect following the real life assassinations of the time. Well worth watching.