Coventry "Sweet Kill" was the very first film of writer/director Curtis Hanson who would become reasonably successful and acclaimed more than twenty years later thanks to a couple of popular mainstream titles such as "The River Wild", the Oscar-winning "LA Confidential", "Wonder Boys" and the Eminem biography "8 Mile". But like so many other now famous & influential film makers (Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme…), Curtis Hanson in fact owes his entire career to the support and mentoring of one of the most important individuals in the history of cinema; namely Roger – "King of the B's" - Corman. Back when "Sweet Kill" was first released and quickly turned out unsuccessful at the box-office, it was executive producer Roger Corman who came to the rescue and instructed Curtis Hanson to add a lot more female nudity and change the title to "The Arousers". It didn't help all that much, but at least and thanks to Corman we're treated to copious amounts of gratuitous B, B and B (which stands for boobs, bums and bush). During the first five minutes, for example, 3 different nameless and totally random women are walking nonchalantly through the screen butt-naked! Not taking into account all the bare female flesh, "Sweet Kill" is half fascinating and half of a failure. The film is undoubtedly inspired (like countless of other movies) by Hitchcock's "Psycho", with another cinematic madman that is actually good- looking and sophisticated, but socially incompetent due to his sexual fixation on mommy. Hanson introduces Tab Hunter, a former poster-boy from the fifties, as an introvert serial killer slash gym teacher Eddie Collins. Numerous beautiful and predatory women literally throw themselves at Eddie, but he's only turned on when he pays a prostitute to dress up like his own mother. "Sweet Kill" opens quite promisingly, with the murder of some beach girl and subsequently the hiding of her corpse in the pigeon loft above his apartment (where she remains throughout the entire movie, by the way) but then the film gets gradually more boring, repetitive and predictable. I'm honestly convinced that Curtis Hanson wanted to draw a profound and insightful portrait of his protagonist serial killer, but Eddie Collins remains a bland and largely uninteresting character and he hardly ever succeeds in generating suspense or discomfort. It's a forgettable film, with a nevertheless good performance of Tab Hunter and a fairly uncanny score, and you could probably never guess from this early work that Curtis Hanson would hold an Oscar for best screenplay in his hands 25 years later.

punishmentpark I was mostly curious how Curtis Hanson handled his debut feature film, but the exploitation genre has my dear attention as well - thusly, a good combination. 'Sweet kill' is partly a character study of a man who was somehow traumatized in his youth, but offers plenty of kills (not much blood, though) and nudity to be an exploitation flick as well.The writing is pretty good, showing early signs of Hanson's competence in that area. Things may appear to be happening rather haphazardly, but through all these random acts, the struggle of Eddie Collins is broadly illustrated; his fetish, his attempts at fighting off his dark side and the part that coincidence plays in his ultimate downfall - even if it not sure that he gets caught at all.This is pretty low budget, but the director made do with the littlest of means. The acting varies, Tab Hunter plays the lead reasonably well. A good 7 out 10.

Scott LeBrun 1950s matinée idol Tab Hunter here gets a juicy role into which he can sink his teeth, and does: he plays Eddie, a Phys. Ed. teacher in Venice, California, who's sad and lonely. He has a real problem when it comes to making love to women, and it stems from a traumatic incident in his childhood (no surprise there). When he accidentally kills one young women, it sets off something inside him, and then he graduates to actually murdering the sexy ladies of Venice.Not that this film, written, co-produced, and directed by budding young talent Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential", "8 Mile"), is really about jacking up a body count. It's more of a character study than anything else, and Hunter proves up to the task of helping us get to know this man with severe psycho sexual issues. The whole film is simply but effectively done, with some solid atmosphere and a bit of gore.There's also a delectable dose of nudity in this thing; when originally released under the title "Sweet Kill", it wasn't too successful; (uncredited) executive producer Roger Corman then went to Hanson and ordered him to "sleaze up" his film a bit with additional sex scenes. Unfortunately, this move didn't help the films' fortunes. Still, it will make many a voyeur quite happy as the female co-stars show the goods.Hunter is well supported by the appealing Latimer, Nadyne Turney as Barbara (the one well meaning woman with whom Eddie tries to make a connection), veteran actress Isabel Jewell as a landlady, a pre-fame Angus Scrimm as her husband, 70s drive-in starlet Roberta Collins as a call girl, and John Aprea of "The Godfather Part II" as Latimers' boyfriend.With a chilling score by Charles Bernstein as accompaniment, this is well done overall and worth a viewing for trash devotees.Eight out of 10.

Oliver-50 It's hard to imagine that Curtis Hanson, the man who directed the exceptional films 'L.A. Confidential' and 'The Bedroom Window' could make such an unmemorable film. Too bad, because it had potential to be a real cult classic. Tab Hunter's performance is terrific as the man who is unable to make love to women, so in order to compensate he murders them. Everything is in place for a great movie and the first third of the film is really quite intense.To show everything from Hunter's point of a view is voyeuristic treat at first, and it all seems quite real. Sadly, director Hanson loses sight of this edge early on and uses the same gimmick throughout, making it quite monotonous and ultimately boring. Not only that, but he shows us other unimportant characters just to fill the already short running time (84 min), because there really isn't enough of a movie here.I managed to find this film under it's alias name 'The Arousers.' Despite my negative remarks, the movie is worth a look, if anything to see one of Curtis Hanson's firsts and Tab Hunter's creepy performance. Maybe some viewers will get into it, but I lost it after a half hour.