Kill Or Be Killed: Pretty Poison

Out now! My essay in the newest Ed Brubaker "Kill Or Be Killed" # 7 all about Noel Black's Pretty Poison starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. Art by the great Sean Phillips. Order here.

Here's the first paragraph:

Those little eyes So helpless and appealing One day will flash and send you Crashing through the ceiling -- Maurice Chevalier (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe)

I got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming La la la la La la la lie Sooner or later, we all gotta die -- Nick Cave

There’s a scene in Noel Black’s 1968 Pretty Poison that’s so creepy- sexy, so erotically unnerving, that it still makes a viewer feel off balance and disturbed in 2017. Tuesday Weld’s beautiful, blonde 17- year-old high school majorette has just bashed some poor night watchmen on the side of the head – near dead. She and her new boyfriend, psycho but sensitive Anthony Perkins, have been mucking around at the chemical plant he works for on one of their dates/clandestine missions. Perkins is loosening a chute that dumps chemical waste into the town’s water supply and, filling her head with lies that he’s a spy for the CIA, she’s excitedly helping him. She loves the intrigue and mischief and she loves being bad. The factory guard catches him and Perkins stares back terrified – for good reason – he’s recently been released from a loony bin. Weld is not scared of anything. She’s a remarkably pretty girl with enviable hair and straight A grades and a bright future ahead of her. She calmly brains the old guy, blood oozing all over his face, and she seems a little proud of herself too. Like she just solved a relatively hard algebra equation. Without asking or alerting the freaked-out Perkins she, with all of her sociopathic common sense and know-how, drags the dying man’s body into the water. He’s now good and dead. And then she sits on his back.

Read it all here.

Comments

[Phil O.]

I've never seen this film, but I was obsessed with trying to back in 1992-3, having read favorably about it (especially following Perkins' too-early death). At the time, I couldn't find a video store that stocked it, so I used my precious disposable income (I was a teenager) to mail order the VHS tape. Sadly, what I got instead was a Lorne Green-hosted documentary on monarch butterflies that went under the same name!! Perhaps it's time to try seeking this out, again.

[gmoke]

I remember David Quaid, the cinematographer, was proud of the film. If I recall correctly, he did it as a favor to the director, Noel Black.