Sameer Callahan
It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.
Stephanie
There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
tonymurphylee
Poison, the first theatrical film of Todd Haynes, is a grotesque, pessimistic, and extremely disturbing picture that is both celebration of misery and cruelty and a reflection of human tenderness and sexual freedom. The film interweaves three very different stories together into one narrative line. The film goes back and forth between each story, and each story is completely different from one another in theme, content, style, musical choice, genre, and tone. One story, titled 'Horror', is shot in the style of a 50s B-horror film and is about a scientist who manages to alienate the human sex drive into a vial of fluid. Unfortunately, he accidentally drinks the fluid and mutates into a blistering pile of pus and proceeds to go on an infectious rampage, spreading his disease to all he comes into contact with. Another story, titled 'Homo', is a sinister, gritty, muddy, and emotionally tender love story set in an underground prison of some kind in which two male prisoners slowly descend into an obsessive and violent S&M relationship. The story contains flashbacks to their traumatic youth. The remaining story, titled 'Hero', is shot in what appears to be a documentary format in which several members of a distraught community are interviewed about a recent bizarre tragedy involving a disturbed family. A little boy named Richard shoots his sexually abusive father and then flies out the window, and the entire incident was witnessed by his mother who considers her son to be an angel sent from God to watch over her.Poison is a rather strangely enchanting film. One of the most enchanting things about it is that it never quite gives you any time to breathe. From frame one, the film plunges you into a world full of cruelty and chaotic confusion and you're left on your own to pretty much sort through the images. It's all rather elegantly pulled off. Haynes manages to capture a lot of the charm and the overall structure from each film medium his stories represent. With 'Hero' he manages to present that optimistic 50s family sitcom outlook gone slightly wrong found in David Lynch's Blue Velvet. He does this by using a lot of bright colors and simplistic architecture. The effect is unsettling, but it is also strangely hypnotic in it's own weird way. By using mostly mastershots and by allowing a little more time for talking heads, he's able to create a real creepy sense of foreboding fury that fits really well with the other two stories. With 'Homo', he uses a lot of low angles and close-ups. He also uses more natural lighting, at least in the scenes that aren't flashbacks. It's a much more testosterone driven story, and so the dark look really helps to highlight a lot of the sweatier, more vulnerable aspects of the bodies of these characters. This adds a much more psychological aspect of male sexuality to the film that carries over to the other two stories, making 'Hero' seem ever so slightly more perverted to the average viewer and making 'Horror' seem a lot more metaphorical and realistic in some ways. With 'Horror', we get the bleakest and most disturbing tale of the three. In order to create that classic horror movie feel, Todd Haynes uses a lot more fade-outs, more specific music cues, and noticeably melodramatic narration. He allows us to really feel sorry for this disturbed character, and that feeling of uncleanliness pervades the rest of the film as a result.It seems to me that Haynes wanted to create this film in order to develop an intricate puzzle of how genre pictures can manipulate other genre pictures, the viewing experience of each picture, how watching one sort of theme in one picture can invisibly affect a separate viewing of another picture, and to recreate the style of multiple viewing itself. His personal reasons for making this film, however, seem to be much more complicated. Poison is what I would consider the quintessential gay picture. It has everything I love and hate about most gay themed films (the depressing endings, the perverted camera-work, the abundant strange behavior, the gratuitous sex), but it's self-awareness is so fun to watch that it rises above all the schlock and finds it's own path toward narrative freedom.Above all, Poison is a masterpiece. Along with In a Glass Cage, If...., My Own Private Idaho, Mysterious Skin, and the films of Derek Jarman, it's one of the more challenging gay themed films that you're likely to see. Even if the subject matter disturbs you, there is still so much to digest in terms of imagery and in the wonderful music score. Even if you put aside all that, however, you still have one of the most unusual storytelling structures you will likely see for this kind of film. You can spend the entire film just studying the structure and you will learn so much about scene and theme composition. Even putting aside THAT, however, the ambition of the film is enough to admire. I find that there is way too much going on here that can simply be written off. The things I've noticed upon re-watching this film have chilled me to the bone, and watching it only makes me want to watch it again. It's one of those films that really hit the right notes with me. I will admit that the first time I watched it I couldn't quite comprehend it. It is a dizzying film in that sense, and I don't expect most viewers to digest a lot of the imagery on their first viewing. However, it's a film that I think really says a lot about human progress in terms of sex, imagination, violence, and physical desire. It's a powerful film with a lot of quiet emotion with an ending that left me feeling very polarized. Watching it once is simply not enough.*to read more, go to cuddercityfilmchronicles.blogspot.com*
Sheldonshells
I really thought this film was going to be a particularly memorable one. It seemed to have all the workings of a possibly memorable film for me: the director impressed me with My Own Private Idaho, the title is compelling, and the title together with it x rating (in retrospect, I wonder why this film is still rated x.....or why it was rated x even then) evoked in me an excitement at being challenged and confronted by a presentation of innovative ideas and taboo subjects and images. But the film doesn't reside prominently in my memory, except for a few images. Those images are unsettling and repulsive, for instance the scientist who ingested the essence of sexuality serum face appears to drip or melt in some scenes (this probably an analogy for AIDS), and the scene where a young man's mouth is used as a bullseye target for what seems to be a spitting contest.I don't know if director Todd Haynes was putting forth a concerted effort to make this a serious or important film or is rather just seemingly unspooling various thought threads of his views and that of society's on gayness at the time. The term "gay"(with is positive connotations in happiness and gladness) doesn't seem appropriate here, as homosexuality in the film coexists with often degraded and repugnant imagery, and is itself depicted often negatively. The film splits between three different yet still connected stories, as it moves back and forth between the three instead of presenting them in separate blocks. In so doing, the darker themes of imprisonment and confinement (the story set in prison) are juxtaposed with ideas of freedom, as when the strange (queer?) little boy ascends presumably into the heavens from the window sill (at first thought one assumes the boy jumping out the window is committing suicide). This gives the film an odd supernatural flavour and redeeming hopefulness, although upon further reflection the hope seems lost when considering that it has to be presented as supernatural (can unity and peace among and for gays only be expressed in this unrealistic way?) But on another level, the film may be an accurate reflection of the regressive attitudes and ambiguity towards homosexuality during the height of the epidemic of AIDS, so that the depictions aforementioned are expressing dark and angry emotions perhaps present in this particular gay film maker; maybe the thought that gays were sexually liberated at the beginning of the eighties but became stigmatized once again (due to a deadly disease, no less)was the cause for much frustration and anger among gay artists like Haynes. Perhaps it seemed for a while that salvation only lied in such a dreamlike solution.At any rate, the boy ascending out the window did give this movie an interesting, unexpected turn, and did mitigate some of the darkness that pervaded most of the film (this is represented visually as well, as the prison story cinematography appears colour desaturated and the diseased scientist one is black and white). But I found it sometimes too bleak....and way too slow. Perhaps this very slow (almost excruciatingly slow) pacing was deliberate for one reason or another on the director's part, but I almost had to shake my head from nodding out a bit to keep up my involvement in the film as an attentive viewer.An unusual story telling technique, some jarring and disturbing scenes, and just a general underlying weirdness are qualities I like, but the pacing is too slow and the message(s) seems too cynical and negative–at least for my own private subjective standards (which may or may not agree with you the reader). Then again, the film is called Poison, so that may be expected and required. I'll allot this seven stars because despite its flaws as I see them, it is nonetheless a work of film art--just not one particularly memorable for me.
gftbiloxi
Filmed in 1990, POISON was an extremely obscure art house film--until Senator Jessie Helms, a hysterical homophobe, threw a public temper tantrum over the fact that it had been financed in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Helm's tirade had the effect of piquing public curiosity, and while it never played mainstream cinemas POISON did indeed go on to a wider release on the art house circuit, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and receiving an unexpectedly rapid release to the homemarket as well. Thereafter it rapidly returned to the same obscurity from which came.In a general sense, the film is inspired by the writings of Jean Genet (1910-1986), a French author associated with the existentialist movement. A deliberate outsider, Genet spent so much of his youth in and out of prison that he was ultimately threatened with a life sentence as a habitual criminal. In his writings, Genet fused his homosexual, criminal, and prison adventures into a consistent point of view--one that championed freedom of choice (no matter how unattractive the choice), self-determination (no matter how unfortunate the result), and generally gave the finger to any form of authority (no matter how necessary.) POISON specifically references three of his most celebrated works: OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS, THE MIRACLE OF THE ROSE, and THE THIEF'S JOURNAL, all of which were to some extent autobiographical.At the same time, the film also references a host of other films--so many that it is sometimes difficult to know whether a single reference is deliberate or simply a fluke, an effect that Genet himself would have likely admired. The most obvious of these references is D.W. Griffith's 1916 silent masterpiece INTOLERANCE, for like that film POISON tells three distinctly stories, cross-cutting between them that they might heighten each other. Unlike INTOLERANCE, however, each story is also told in a distinctly different cinematic style, and these too seem to reference various other films.The first of these stories, HOMO, is very specifically drawn from Genet. It tells the story of a constant criminal and homosexual who, while in prison, meets a man whose repeated sexual humiliation he witnessed when both were children in a reformatory. He forces the man, who is unwilling mainly due to fear than from morality, into an emotional relationship and later rapes him. The "present" sequences are shot in a murky half-light, the prison presented as a labyrinth of potential sexual destruction. When the prisoner recalls his youthful past, however, the tone changes to a surrealistic and extremely artificial beauty--not unlike that seen in such films as James Bidgood's PINK NARCISSUS and Fassbinder's QUERELLE. It is worth pointing out that these different styles are ironic in use: although shot darkly, the events of the "present" sequence are only mildly shocking in comparison with the events of the "past" sequence, which is shot in a bright and rather romantic style.HORROR references the 1950s and early 1960s cinematic style of such "B" directors as William Castle and Roger Corman, and it frequently borrows cinematic ideas from Rod Sterling's television series THE TWILIGHT ZONE. In this particular tale, a scientist has labored to isolate the essence of the human sex drive--and succeeds only to ingest the element by accident. With human sex drive raging out of control in his body, he develops oozing sores, and his physical contacts with others spread the condition. It is difficult not to read this as a reference to the AIDS epidemic.The third story, HERO, is actually presented very much like a modern television news story and is told through a series of interviews. Here, a young boy has shot his father--and then, according to his mother, leaps from the window sill and simply flies away. Neighbors comment: the boy exposed himself. School teachers comment: the boy was unnatural, the boy was normal, the boy was creative, the boy was a liar. A doctor comments: it is possible the boy had a, er, disease of the genitals. As the story progresses the layers add up--but it leaves us without clearcut answers, much less a clearcut response, and in this last respect it is exactly like the other two stories.It is extremely, extremely difficult to know how to react to POISON. It has moments of remarkable beauty, but these are coupled with moments of equally remarkably off-putting disgust. It is often an erotic film, but the eroticism is tinged and occasionally saturated with revulsion. And in all of this it is remarkably true to its original source: Genet, whose works typically provoke exactly the same sense of beauty, disgust, sensuality, revulsion, and uncertainty of response. I cannot say that I like POISON, which was the directorial debut of Todd Haynes, presently best known for FAR FROM HEAVEN--but then, it is not that sort of film; it does not invite you like it, but rather to consider it both in whole and in part. It strives to be interesting, and in that it is often quite successful.Unfortunately, it may also be a little too interesting for its own good. While it certainly has its visceral moments, occasionally to the gag point, it asks us to solve a puzzle from which pieces are missing. This not a necessarily a bad thing, but in the case of POISON too many pieces have gone astray; it seems deliberately unsolvable. This may actually be intentional, but if so it was a mistake. A sense of mystery is one thing, but mystification is another, and given its overall strangeness--not to mention the subject matter--I think it very, very unlikely that it will ever have more than curiosity appeal outside an art house audience.GFT, Amazon Reviewer
FilmBoy999
I was excited about seeing this because I loved Safe and Velvet Goldmine, but this was just a bizarre bizarre piece of filmmaking. There are I suppose points to be made about the unreasonable fear of the AIDS virus which emerge in the story about the man who drinks the sex drive and becomes a leper, but they weren't so amazingly poignant. Haynes denies that this sequence connects with AIDS of course, so who knows. The story that was the most interesting was the mockumentary about the boy who kills his father, but the structure of the film as three stories proceeding in succession prevents you from really getting interested or emotionally involved in the movie. I didn't know what was so offensive about the prison scene, I just found it boring, as well as the rest of the film.
