☆ ☆ ½
Pretty
Poison (1968) – N. Black
This film seems to exist only as a
reaction to other films. Hitchcock’s
Psycho is most prominent as Tony Perkins’s young arsonist could easily be a
reimagined Norman Bates released from an institution and a little shaky on the
outside. Meeting young Tuesday Weld
allows him to engage fantasies of being a CIA agent and fighting industrial
pollution (!!!) but she turns out to be even more sociopathic than him. Thus we also receive echoes of the previous
year’s Bonnie and Clyde. However, the
tone of Pretty Poison is strange – the music cues soft and sentimental feelings
even as the young pair get deeper into trouble (including murder). So, the film can’t quite decide if it feels
sorry for an increasingly anxious Perkins or wants to take the sex and violence
exploitation route with Weld.
Unfortunately, it winds up somewhere in between and loses some momentum
as a result.
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