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Poison

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Poison (1991)

April. 05,1991
|
6.3
|
R
| Horror Science Fiction Romance
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A trio of interweaved transgressive tales, telling a bizarre stories of suburban patricide and a miraculous fight from justice, a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague, and the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates.

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Hottoceame
1991/04/05

The Age of Commercialism

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Dotbankey
1991/04/06

A lot of fun.

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Voxitype
1991/04/07

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

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Fleur
1991/04/08

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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lasttimeisaw
1991/04/09

Queer filmmaker Todd Haynes' debut feature POISON dazzles as a multi-faceted cinematic triptych, three segments: Hero, Horror, Homo, all inspired by Jean Genet's novels (with his texts sporadically materialize on the screen as inner beacons), are intertwined altogether yet each is bestowed with a sui generis visual style that speaks volumes of Haynes' eclectic idioms. Hero takes the form of a grainy and slipshod pseudo-documentary, interviewing sundry characters about a deadly homicide further confounded by a surreal twist, a 7-year-old boy, shoots his father dead and then wondrously flies away from the window witnessed by his mother Felicia (Meeks), various interviewees recounts the boy's aberrant deportment before the incident, some are startlingly perverse, finally, through Felicia's account, the boy's ascension smacks of something punitive and defiant in the face of family dysfunction and violent impulse, rather dissimilar in its undertone and timbre from that WTF upshot in Alejandro González Iñárritu's BIRDMAN (2014, 7.6/10). Horror, shot in retro-monochrome and abounds with eye-catching Dutch angles, namely is a none- too-engrossing pastiche of the erstwhile B-movies and body horror, a scientist Dr. Thomas Graves (Maxwell), accidentally ingests the serum of "human sexuality" which he has successfully extracted, starts to transmogrify into a leprosy-inflicted monster, and his condition is deadly contagious, which threats lives around him, especially his admirer Dr. Nancy Olsen (Norman), who against all odds, not daunted by his physical deterioration. In comparison, this segment is less savory owing to its own unstimulating camp, where Hero ends with a subjective ascending, the upshot for a beleaguered gargoyle is nothing but plummeting. Last but not the least, Homo is plainly a more self-reflexive treatment conjured up à la Fassbinder's QUERELLE (1982), another mainstay of queer cinema derived from Genet's text. A prisoner John Broom (Renderer), grows intimate towards the blow-in Jack Bolton (Lyons), whom he has met before during his stint in a juvenile facility of delinquency, Jack's humiliated past emerges inside John's mind, now it is his turn to exert his suppressed libido. This chapter is as homoerotic as one can possibly imagine, a maneuver Haynes would have unwillingly relinquished en route pursuing mainstream acceptance, one tantalizing sequence of Broom groping an asleep Jack is divinely graphic and atmospherically transcendent. Credited as an experimental juvenilia, POISON throbs with vitality, ambition and knowing archness, though the end result is far from flawless, it potently anticipates many a Haynes' modus operandi, say, the segmental structure and interview-style in I'M NOT THERE. (2007, 8.0/10), his distinct prediction for the photogenic period setting and outfit in FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002, 9.2/10) and CAROL (2015, 8.9/10), not to mention his latest sortie into black-and-white mystique and paralleled storytelling in the Cannes-premiered WONDERSTRUCK (2017). Not many can embrace perversity as plucky as Mr. Haynes has done, whether it is a tragedy can easily take place around us in real life, or a man living through his most egregious incubus, or a blatantly idealized contest of one's sexuality (motifs like wedding, saliva and scars are all defying their accepted norms), just like a child's stretching hand in the opening credit, Haynes' first directorial outing jauntily treads through many taboo subjects and in retrospect, vindicates that it will be our profound loss if his talent fails to be acknowledged and utilized in full scale.

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Merwyn Grote
1991/04/10

One of the things that writer-director Todd Haynes tries to do in POISON has been done before and seldom, if ever, has it worked. The most infamous example is perhaps D.W. Griffith's intolerable INTOLERANCE, a 1916 silent film epic featuring four revolving stories, each from a different period in time, interlaced so that they keep interrupting each other. INTOLERANCE is seldom praised for its quality but more often remembered for the boldness of its effort and the critical and box office failure of its end results.In POISON, Haynes apes Griffith's foolhardiness as he tries to tell three stories (subtitled "Hero," "Horror" and "Homo") and he tries to tell them simultaneously, despite the fact the stories have nothing in common as far as narrative, style or point. Haynes tells his tales in tiny bite-sized chunks of scenes, cutting from one to another to another in an endless rotation. The result is less like powerful film-making than it is like trying to watch TV with the scan button on the channel changer hopelessly stuck. It is an insipid gimmick trying desperately to prove itself as innovative film-making.As such, POISON is more annoying than shocking, despite the material's obvious attempts to be controversial. Furthermore, the three stories themselves suffer, as none of them can gather momentum or maintain coherency or consistency. And certainly these stories could have used all the help they could get."Hero" is a story of domestic violence; told in retrospect, it is largely a series of talking-head interviews discussing the circumstances that led up to a 7-year-old boy killing his father, before jumping out a window and literally flying away. According to the boy's mother (who is the only witness, but should be the only suspect), she gave birth to an angel who came to rescue her from an abusive husband. It is told in the dour, deadpan style of a mock documentary, not unlike Woody Allen's TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, though it's not nearly as cleverly done. If the subject matter wasn't so grim, it could be assumed the film is a comedy. As is, it has a joyless goofiness to it that doesn't really make any sense. At best, the story is a weird idea that's barely been given a chance to be anything else."Horror" is equally grim and joyless, even as it appears to be a parody of old black-and-white horror movies. A young and idealistic scientist is studying the biological secrets of sexuality and accidentally becomes infected with a virus that turns him into some sort of sexually contagious leper. The story wants to be a parable about the AIDS epidemic, I suppose; but Haynes' attempts at creating an analogy between science fiction and medical tragedy is undercut by his self-conscious awareness of old movies. His film-making technique strives to replicate the socially conscious "B" thrillers of the 1950's, like THE FLY or THEM, but the end result comes closer to the sincere, yet ludicrous D-level films of Edward Wood, only without the clumsy campiness that make them at least funny-bad.With "Homo," Haynes is playing closer to home and makes no obvious attempt to recreate an old movie genre, but that doesn't mean that this tale works any better. It deals with two inmates in a French prison who are reunited, having also been in juvenile detention as well. The story hints at it being a love story, but in the end it is about rape, humiliation and domination. Though POISON is considered a groundbreaking work in gay cinema, this vision of homosexuality is dark and violent. It is hard to judge the overall merits of "Homo" because, like the two other tales, it is so hacked up by incompetent editing (by Haynes himself) that it is devoid of any compelling passion.It can't be argued that Haynes lacks a strong eye for the visual; despite the low budget, each segment of the film looks great in its own way. But there is a certain cowardice in Haynes' films. He wants to deal with serious social issues, but he buries it all in inappropriate homages/parodies of genre films that trivializes rather than reinforces his messages. Just as he did in his later hit, FAR FROM HEAVEN, which dealt with racism and homophobia, he dilutes his material by resorting to some ill-fitting, superficial, bygone cinematic style. You sense that he feels compelled to somehow justify his love of old movies by loading them down with serious intentions. It's like he is afraid to either tackle issues head-on or to admit that he is a film geek at heart.Thus, he fails going in both directions: the serious social issues are cheapened by the movie campiness, while the fun of movie parody is chilled by pretensions melodrama. Like so many young filmmakers, Haynes relies on the safety of imitation in his film-making. Great filmmakers (like Spielberg, Woody Allen, etc.) outgrow this and find their own voice. Lesser filmmakers like Haynes (and Tarantino and De Palma and Lucas, etc.) don't even seem to try.

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slake09
1991/04/11

Poison was a total snooze fest. I had trouble even keeping awake it was so dull. The director is so obviously trying to make an art film that it jumped over the line into pretentious boredom. Not just over the line, either, but miles over it, whole degrees of longitude over it, light-years over the line into the land of pretentious boredom.The three stories don't hang together in any way, and the frequent cutting back and forth between them wasn't made to be interesting or unusual - it was just cuts back and forth between scenes. The stories themselves may have been interesting in some other film, but here they are made incredibly dull. Inescapably dull. So dull that you begin to think of grocery shopping, trash hauling, ice melting, exciting stuff like that.The actors are excellent in their roles, it's only too bad that their roles were so shallow and pointless. The directing is at fault here, and not just a little. Nothing spells "I'm trying to make this an art film" like frequent black and white. You might as well have put it in the opening credits. The heavy use of shadow and dark rooms to obscure the camera view - didn't they teach that in Film Making 101? Yeah, it was the chapter called "how to make your movie pretentious beyond belief".In any case, you can like art-house films without having to watch puerile junk like this.

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ThurstonHunger
1991/04/12

This film is probably best viewed as part of a film class (and not necessarily one on Queer Cinema although Todd Haynes prefers gentlemen).I prefer "Safe" and also "Far From Heaven" from this clearly talented director. His suave incorporation of 50's style sci-fi and 80's TV docudrama and a stagey prison play is more engaging here than the three intercut stories themselves.The film starts with an actor going out a window, and ends with a similar scene. There is a moment in the sci-fi "Horror" substory where the lead mutters "And so it begins..." Temporally what would have followed is the scene that actually does start the film.Despite a low budget, Haynes does employ a lot of clever camera tricks and cinematic tacks. He squeezes out some efficient acting from his mostly unknown cast. (Okay, that was John Leguizamo in for two scenes...) If anything, I feel Haynes could have spent more money on lighting. The B&W sci-fi shots were often heavy on the B, and much of the prison footage was a darker shade of murky, at least on DVD at home. But then one of the displayed Jean Genet quotes speaks of the necessary darkness for the seed of dream. The stories here may be genetically Genet, I am more familiar with who he was in person than in print. Again for a student of Genet, I think this would be a more satisfying expenditure of time, thought and money than it was for myself.There's also a socio-political bent to the release and funding of this film. Rev. Donald Wildmon provided protest and thus inadvertent P.R. for "Poison." Meanwhile others cite an AIDS angle to the movie.For me, I walked a way with a sense of sex linked with shame. A child catches his mother in infidelity, prison passion is stolen in the shadows, lasciviousness makes lepers of a community. Also while not the focus, each episode had some sex entwined with violence. Sex was portrayed as anything but erotic throughout. Ultimately I could not make out whether Haynes was trying to decry society's reaction to sexual "deviancy" as more dangerous than said deviancy; or if he was just trying to revel in sordid shock? I doubt the latter, probably he wanted to take the challenge of presenting Genet to audiences today. Better than another modern take on Shakespeare surely.But while Genet's writings were surely scandalous in his day, what about Haynes' audience now? I realize that there are still throngs of folks who fear thongs...much less anything as pointed as a penis. Yes those folks are out there, I just don't know any of them...and I doubt I'll be wresting a copy of "Poison" from their hands at the local videodrome any time soon. We keep our distance, I recommend you keep your distance from this disk as well. I do think such distance and decorum can exist....along with same sex marriage.So unless you are assigned to watch it, to study it... choose another "Poison."5/10

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