Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Brian T. Whitlock (GOWBTW) Anthony Perkins(1932-92), who is well known as Norman Bates in "Psycho", gets to play something close to him in "Pretty Poison". Perkins plays Dennis Pitts, a paroled mental patient who was sent there for arson. Now that he's released, he gets to start over life. He acts like a "Secret Agent" when he starts taking pictures. While he works at a factory, he meets a blonde teenager name Sue Ann(Tuesday Weld), she would tag along on his missions. However, he doesn't know that her agenda is a far cry from his own. When they started dating, her mother starts to have her negative views of Dennis. Appalled by her behavior, Dennis is made uneasy. On his "mission", he wants to create espionage at the factory he works at, Sue Ann takes out the guard on duty, and kills him. She would take his gun, and use it to kill her mother. Knowing that he won't condone to murder, he would go to prison, because he will feel safer there than on the outside. Unlike Norman Bates, Dennis Pitts is a little more out there. With such an imagination, this man is fun to be around. Not as questionable as Bates. Just a little tamer. A fun movie to watch. 2 out of 5 stars.

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.

edwagreen Miserable film. What was this supposed to be a continuation of Anthony Perkins in "Psycho."He made this dreadful film 8 years after "Psycho" and he was certainly building on the type of a sick person. While Perkins did make the far better "Friendly Persuasion," he did the marvelous "Fear Strikes Out," but again he seemed to be typecast as a guy with severe emotional and mental hang-ups.This picture certainly proves that poison is bad for you. Perkins is really demented here and how the Tuesday Weld character could fall for him as a secret agent is beyond me. All right, so she is supposed to be a naive 18 years of age in the film.Murder, mayhem and other misery best describe this film.

shark-43 I can see that this film is not for everyone but for a small crime noir/character drama it really packs a punch. Perkins gives a very good performance as the damaged parolee who meets the bored small town firecracker Sue Ann - played by the always sexy Tuesday Weld. Weld had such a beautiful damaged quality to her - if you read articles on her - you'll know she had a very screwed up childhood - her Dad died when she was a toddler and she became the breadwinner - child model, commercials, etc. and she was messed up even before she was a teenager. And there's always a quality of fragility to her performances (Who'll Stop The Rain, Looking For Mr. Goodbar, etc.) and she is fantastic in this. Nice little moments between the leads and veteran character actors like John Randolph and Beverly Garland give strong supporting performances. Check out this POISON.