framptonhollis 31 Days of Spookoween: DAY ELEVENFilm #11: Poison (1991)Review: It feels both right and wrong to classify Todd Haynes' brilliant feature film debut "Poison" as a horror film. It is unlike any other film that would fit into the genre (although one of its three segments obviously replicates the sci-fi/horror B-Movies of the 1950's), and yet it is still spine tingling and disturbing and, in all honestly, occasionally horrific. But, it is many other things as well, a long list of adjectives taking up line after line could easily be the remainder of this very review. One moment may have some fittingly mild black comedy, while the next may be a poignant love scene, while the nest may be gripping, while the next may be terrifying, while the next may be madly surrealistic. It's deftly unpredictable and oddly engaging, not a minute is wasted and the pacing feels like a gentle breeze that suddenly morphs into a Hellish blaze of howling wind. Back in the early 90's when the film was first released, it was rather infamous. Hotly debated and heavily controversial, the film was met with outrage from some, and a totally unreasonable NC-17 rating from the MPAA. Yes, it is true that this film tackles heavy themes, particularly those that deal frankly and explicitly with homosexuality, and there are some brief flashes of rather strong sexual imagery, but the film never dwells upon anything that is at all "obscene" or "vulgar". Often, these "dirtier" sequences evoke a feeling much different than lust...they evoke feelings of pain and heart ache and horror and beauty, there's never the sense that what you're watching is in any way "filth"; no, everything feels tasteful and necessary and meaningful, and this creates an experience filled with enigmas and experiments and romances and an overall entirely unique expression of the pains, pleasures, and paranoia that comes with human sexuality.

lasttimeisaw 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.

nycritic Todd Haynes is one of those directors whom I've come across with due to his more recent works (FAR FROM HEAVEN) but with whose earlier work I was totally unfamiliar with. If anyone would have told me that POISON was part of his filmography, I wouldn't have known -- that's how obscure this movie is. At a brief 85 minutes, it tells the three separate vignettes, all of them loosely based on the writings of Jean Genet: "Hero" presents a mockumentary of a boy who shoots his father and then flies away. Of course, we later learn out why. "Horror" ventures into science-fiction territory and has a 1950s feel (down to the cheap-looking make-up, wooden acting, and bad dialogue), in which a scientist extracts a hormone that not only unleashes his sexual desires, but turns him into a monster and thus sets free a mutating virus not unlike AIDS. The third installment is the one which most closely resembles the writing of Genet: "Homo" is a gay love story complete with male rituals and lots of repression set in prison and is the only one of the three to feature actual homoerotic content -- but has one very nauseating sequence in which one character's demons come to light in a flashback sequence in a juvenile detention that involves spitting into one of the character's mouth (and John Leguizamo, as excellent as he is as an actor, portrays sheer nastiness as one of the inmates who is enjoying himself a little too much). It is the most disturbing of the three and the one I least connected with, mainly because for obvious reasons it was fetishistic and implausible as well as humiliating. It's the only one of the three to make me feel like an outsider when venturing into gay-themed stories: for some reason I find that this sort of tale, where games of extreme humiliation seem to be rampant in gay erotica. Even so, POISON might be of some interest to those interested in gay-themed cinema, but it should be approached with a caveat for anyone a little sensitive to the degrading behavior that "Homo" offers.

crash_into_me420 After reading a bit about Todd Haynes' "Poison" and the homosexual comparisons that people seem to only be drawing from it, I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't deserve to just be tagged as a seminal film of the "new queer cinema". It's so much more than that.First of all, I found "Homo" to be the least intriguing of the 3 stories. "Hero" is actually more disturbing, showing the sudden disappearance of a mentally-inflicted, patricidal child who, according to his mother, was sent from the angels. I was particularly impressed by Haynes' creative use of layering in the adultery and spanking scenes.But, in blending three prominent aspects (color, black and white, documentary) of the film medium into his film, the beautiful b&w "Horror" is the most notable, showing the sudden downfall of a scientist's prosperity. Haynes conveys the scientist's hysteria to his audience by using slanted, extreme close-up camera techniques and spastic editing, not to mention a haunting soundtrack.The film is a bizarre one, indeed... but undeniably artful, and it certainly doesn't deserve to simply be pigeonholed into nothing more than a cornerstone for homosexual cinema.