cult film freak: TUESDAY WELD KILLS 'PRETTY POISON' WITH ANTHONY PERKINS

Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in PRETTY POISON Year: 1968 Rating: ****

In Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO, few women were safe around Anthony Perkins... and in PRETTY POISON, gorgeous young blonde Tuesday Weld turns tables after seeming to fall in love with Perkins' Dennis Pitt, ironically just freed from a mental institution (because of a childhood arson) and, working for a chemical company, his fantastical symptoms persist in that he thinks himself a secret agent...

Yet the plot's not what he thinks but what Weld's high-schooler Sue Ann Stepanek buys into... progressing from a kind of LILITH style young-lovers arthouse romance to a dark-comedy/drama far ahead of its time, setting the stage for BADLANDS and Quentin Tarantino's script of NATURAL BORN KILLERS...

Quentin Tarantino's Hollywood Marquee of PRETTY POISON

And in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, Brad Pitt lives behind a drive-in theater where this movie's second (after LADY IN CEMENT) on the marquee: Perkins' name is Pitt, and he lives inside a trailer...

While here, serving as a needed anecdote for his PSYCHO typecast, and especially clear upon second viewing after already knowing the turnout, PRETTY POISON centers mainly on Tuesday Weld's character-arc, from childlike-curious to seriously deadly... particularly during the second and third act when most of the later couple-killer-thrillers would begin the vicious climb...

Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in PRETTY POISON

Leaving the best sequences for the build-up since PRETTY POISON exists mostly in the conception of what they eventually turn into that (with a small town that's colorful like the late-1960's but bleak-conservative like the 1950's) is a strange and unique, unfairly neglected gem with creative camerawork by director Noel black and featuring John Randolph as Pitt's parole officer, Beverly Garland as Sue's doomed mother...

And wait for first-time actor Ken Kercheval in a nifty epilogue that provides the most telling glimpse into the following loosely-decadent decade and different from the previous Golden Age Hollywood: that crime, no matter how drastic, doesn't always have to proceed equally-deserved punishment.