Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Burkettonhe This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

NORDIC-2 A quirky little picture based on a quirky little novel—Stephen Geller's 'She Let Him Continue' (E.P. Dutton, 1966)—'Pretty Poison' delves, Hitchcock-like, into realms of psychotic violence that sometimes lie just beneath the facade of tidy American normalcy. Already firmly typecast as a perpetual deviant, Anthony Perkins ('Fear Strikes Out'; 'Psycho') plays Dennis Pitt, a mentally disturbed young man who is out on parole after serving a long stretch behind bars for setting a house fire that killed his aunt when he was fifteen years old. Temporarily evading his parole officer (John Randolph) by relocating to "Winslow" (actually Great Barrington) Massachusetts, Dennis takes a job at a small chemical factory but indulges his overactive fantasy life by pretending to be a CIA agent. His self-imposed "secret mission": to sabotage the discharge pipe that dumps the mill's polluting effluent into the river. At a nearby lunch wagon Dennis meets Sue Ann Stepanek (Tuesday Weld), a pretty, blonde 17-year-old high school student and drum majorette who seems to personify the all-American girl-next-door. Dennis enlists Sue Ann in his sabotage mission but Sue Ann turns out to be much more than Dennis bargained for; she bludgeons the night watchman who interrupts their caper then proceeds to shoot her own mother (Beverly Garland) to death—and blames both murders on Dennis, whose track record leaves him highly vulnerable to such charges. With Dennis back behind bars, Sue Ann is last seen seducing another gullible young man, though under the watchful eye of Dennis's suspicious parole officer: a scene tacked on after preview audiences reacted negatively to the film's evident cynicism toward wanton killing (Sirhan Sirhan had just assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy). A modest hit when it first appeared, 'Pretty Poison' has achieved enduring cult status, thanks no doubt to Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s savvy script, David Quaid's picturesque cinematography, and the disarmingly witty acting of Tony Perkins. (Tuesday Weld blamed an uncharacteristically dull performance on director Noel Black, a shy, socially awkward man who was not able to bring out the best in her). Lawence Kasdan's 1981 noir thriller, 'Body Heat', utilizes a similar plot. DVD (2006).

dougdoepke Plot-- An outpatient uses his fantasy skills to entice a blonde cutie into his dream world, but gets more than he bargained for, to say the least.One of the squirrliest pairings in movie history. Weld and Perkins are darn near perfect as the young couple from heck. And to think that the sweet-faced little Sue Ann (Weld) turned up at random out of a highschool drill team. No wonder Pitt (Perkins) wants back into the safety of an asylum. If she's the outside world, we'd all better hide. He may be a James Bond fantasist, but at least he doesn't straddle corpses in ecstatic delight. In fact, he's got a social conscience when it comes to what his employer is doing. And that's the problem. He's got a sense of limits, but she doesn't.So why does he go along with her betrayal of him. I can understand why he wants back into confinement, but why turn seductive Sue Ann back loose on society. After all, he's trying to keep mill gunk out of the stream. Maybe it's because, unlike the ugly river poison, she's a pretty poison.Really original premise, expertly played out. No doubt the screenplay couldn't have been produced ten years earlier. The sixties lifted the lid on the exotic, and this one goes about as far as any. I like the working class locations that lend both realism and flavor. And get a load of the stream that's used as everyone's dumping ground. No wonder the two kids are weird. Stodgy old Hollywood would never give awards to a movie like this. But in my little book, I'd give one-eyed Oscars to both Perkins and Weld, and a real one to screenwriter Semple. Meanwhile, I'll never look at a girls drill team the same way again, and you may not, either.

Dash Dixon Promising concept -- "troubled" young man called on his Walter Mitty bluff by teen sociopath who has no qualms about committing to her true, vile, nature. Perkins is fragile, sympathetic, restless. He's Dean and Clift without the method contrivances, effortlessly haunted, still managing to project real need through his ambivalence. Tuesday Weld is too old for the part (supposedly 17, she looks her real age, and then some). We never believe her as an innocent; her gauzy insincerity is supposed to be charming, but it grates against the profound pain of Perkins' "Dennis Pitt", and you see how doomed he is from the moment he first sees Weld's "Sue Ann", leading her charges as a small-town drum majorette. Pitt's wiles are the disarmed wiles of the innocent; Sue Ann probably (tough to tell, really, given Weld's flat performance, and the hesitant, amateurish, direction and framing) sniffs out Pitt's ingenuous fraudulence from the beginning, and subsequently uses him accordingly. The two murders that follow are almost incidental, but what stuns and endures is how Perkins' confession resounds with a fascinating implication: is Pitt merely a martyr to his own mock-heroic madness, or is there an extraordinary patience, and calculation, to his elaborate ruse?

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.