So Sweet... So Perverse (1969)

An Exercise In Nonsense

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

It seems that prior to Dario Argento's The Bird With The Crystal Plumage that normal template for gialli was the 'mystery amongst devious people' rather than the 'loads of babes being sliced up'. This is yet another one of those films, with a rather low body count (two!).Jean (he's a fanny rat, but hard to like, because he's French), is a rich playboy who is not getting any of his wife (Erika Blanc - she looks like David Bowie), so looks for other avenues to explore. When the film opens, he's banging his mate's wife, but soon he discovers a new blonde has moved into the apartment above his.There's something strange going with this new blonde too, because Jean is hearing the scraping of furniture and what sounds like someone being slapped around, but when he goes to the front door of his new neighbour, no one answers. When he does finally get to meet her she claims that her boyfriend Klaus loves beating her up and stuff.Soon the two fall in love (queue montage!) much to the dismay of Blanc and the delight of Klaus, and it's roughly about the halfway mark that the twists start happening so I'll stop there. Needless to say that one character goes from being vulnerable to evil, allegiances changes again and again and the hippy vibe of the late sixties shines through loud and clear.However, Lenzi seems to have had a vision of the state of Italian film ten years later and injected the film with scenes that make no sense whatsoever, for instance the credits sequence. Jean drives about with a rifle in his car and we get flashes of one of his lovers but this has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Plus, Carrol Baker has a velvet lined cabinet in her apartment full of instruments of torture. This has nothing to do with anything either.On the other side, Lenzi also injects an amazingly high amount of style into the film too, what with an early example of the use of primary colours (soon to be a trend in the gialli) - there's one scene that's stands out when Jean is forced to snog Carrol Baker while someone keeps changing the lighting to various colours, Nicely done.

Umberto Lenzi Giallo's range in quality from sublime to trash, but his earlier genre entries tended to be the best; and So Sweet...So Perverse is certainly at the higher end of Lenzi's Giallo achievements. One of the trademarks of Giallo is a high dosage of sex scenes; but despite the fact that this film has the word 'perverse' in it's title; So Sweet...So Perverse is actually not all that perverse at all, especially not by Giallo standards. Rather, the film focuses more on the plot details than perversity, and it just about serves it well. Italian directors were famous for ripping of successful films from other countries, and the plot here is clearly lifted from the French classic 'Les Diaboliques'. We focus on a couple with marital problems; Jean and Danielle. When Jean hears a woman screaming in the upstairs apartment one day, he immediately decides to investigate. There he finds Nicole; a woman frightened of her boyfriend Klaus. The pair soon begin to fall in love, but it later transpires that this was just a trap set to snare Jean...So Sweet...So Perverse is a classy little thriller and much unlike later Lenzi Giallo's such as Eyeball, almost everything about the film is well done. The film benefits from a good cast, which feature early Lenzi muse Carroll Baker in the central female. Baker's role here initially appears to be a lot like her role in the earlier 'Orgasmo', but she soon gets to switch to a more interesting character. Baker is joined by the sexy Erika Blanc, and like most Giallo's with two sexy leading women; the pair do get to get it on, although you shouldn't go in expecting a full blown lesbian sex scene. Jean-Louis Trintignant rounds off the cast, but isn't given as much to do as the ladies. The plot does get a bit slow at times, but the film never slows down to the point of becoming boring. The second half is much more exciting than the first as that is when the plot gets into full flow. When the twists start to come into play, So Sweet...So Perverse really is an intriguing thriller and unlike many Giallo's, this one also features an ending that wraps most of the plot up nicely. This film is highly recommended to Giallo fans!

This movie (not to be confused with another Carroll Baker vehicle "Kiss Me, Kill Me" aka "Baba Yagi--the Witch")is Umberto Lenzi's follow-up to his groundbreaking classic "Paranoia". It came out the same year as Dario Argento's "The Bird with Crystal Plumage" (the film which started the deluge of Italian gialli) and was produced by the Martino brothers, who later made a number of interesting giallo films (usually featuring Eugenio Martino's alluring mistress, Edwige Fenech). It stars Carroll Baker, demonstrating her acting chops here by playing a character that is the exact opposite of the naive victim she played in "Paranoia", and it also features two excellent, native European actors--Jean Loius Trintignant and the gorgeous Erica Blanc. The script is surprisingly well-written and full of suspense and genuine surprises. It is a clever variation on the classic French film "Diabolique" with a decadent, high-society husband (Tritignant), wife (Blanc), and mistress (Baker) all crossing and double-crossing each other. It cleverly plays with the viewers awareness of the earlier film before throwing in an unexpected curve.It also seems to be very well filmed. (It's hard to believe that years later Lenzi would be making nauseating and inept cannibal films like "Cannibal Ferox" or just plain inept American slasher movies like "Hitcher in the Dark"). I say seems, however, because this film is only available on second or third generation copies of Greek videotapes that are not only panned-and-scanned, but are very badly panned-and-scanned so that the characters are often halfway off the screen. Trying to appreciate this movie is like trying to appreciate a beautiful painting that has both sides cropped off and is covered with really murky cellophane (and burnt-in Greek subtitles). If Lenzi's crap movies like "Ferox", "Hitcher", and even, god help us all,"Eaten Alive", can get the star DVD treatment, why can't "Paranoia" or this little gem?Oh, but I almost forgot--despite the title there isn't too much perversity here. Baker has a lot more nude scenes in "Paranoia". There is some Blanc-related nudity (although, in my opinion, you can never have enough of that), but the lesbian relationship between the two of them is unfortunately only hinted at. Of course, it may just have been cropped out. . .

this movie had some interesting strangeness to it but it could have been better. --possible spoiler--some of the things i favored about the movie was the creative way it showed that the bondage woman was the person causing all the mischief. however, it doesn't really explain why. there is really no explanation why the main character photographer was possessed by a witch. some other thing that caught my eye was the symbolism in her dreams... perhaps showing her guilt for causing things to happen (in the dream for instance, she punches out her friend in a boxing rink). some of the scenes reminds me of something David lynch would put into his movie.furthermore, some things are left unexplained like the hole and the nazis. maybe the hole symbolizing PLOT holes in the movie? hah.--end spoiler--but all in all, the movie had little substance. it's basically just a movie about a pretty woman photographer that gets possessed by a witch (and we do not know why the witch is doing that) and they add some strange symbolism to explain her feelings.6/10