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Poison

  • 1991
  • 16
  • 1h 25m
IMDb RATING
6.3/10
5.3K
YOUR RATING
Poison (1991)
A boy shoots his father and flies out the window. A man falls in love with a fellow inmate in prison. A doctor accidentally ingests his experimental sex serum, wreaking havoc on the community.
Play trailer2:27
1 Video
70 Photos
Body HorrorDramaHorrorRomanceSci-Fi

A boy shoots his father and flies out the window. A man falls in love with a fellow inmate in prison. A doctor accidentally ingests his experimental sex serum, wreaking havoc on the communit... Read allA boy shoots his father and flies out the window. A man falls in love with a fellow inmate in prison. A doctor accidentally ingests his experimental sex serum, wreaking havoc on the community.A boy shoots his father and flies out the window. A man falls in love with a fellow inmate in prison. A doctor accidentally ingests his experimental sex serum, wreaking havoc on the community.

  • Director
    • Todd Haynes
  • Writers
    • Jean Genet
    • Todd Haynes
  • Stars
    • Edith Meeks
    • Larry Maxwell
    • Susan Norman
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.3/10
    5.3K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Todd Haynes
    • Writers
      • Jean Genet
      • Todd Haynes
    • Stars
      • Edith Meeks
      • Larry Maxwell
      • Susan Norman
    • 31User reviews
    • 35Critic reviews
    • 67Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 4 wins & 6 nominations total

    Videos1

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    Trailer 2:27
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    Photos69

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    Top cast82

    Edit
    Edith Meeks
    • Felicia Beacon (segment "Hero")
    Larry Maxwell
    • Dr. Graves (segment "Horror")
    Susan Norman
    Susan Norman
    • Nancy Olsen (segment "Horror")
    • (as Susan Gayle Norman)
    Millie White
    • Millie Sklar (segment "Hero")
    Buck Smith
    • Gregory Lazar (segment "Hero")
    Anne Giotta
    • Evelyn McAlpert (segment "Hero")
    Lydia Lafleur
    • Sylvia Manning (segment "Hero")
    Ian Nemser
    • Sean White (segment "Hero")
    Rob LaBelle
    Rob LaBelle
    • Jay Wete (segment "Hero")
    Evan Dunsky
    Evan Dunsky
    • Dr. MacArthur (segment "Hero")
    Marina Lutz
    • Hazel Lamprecht (segment "Hero")
    Barry Cassidy
    • Officer Rilt (segment "Hero")
    Richard Anthony
    Richard Anthony
    • Edward Comacho (segment "Hero")
    Angela M. Schreiber
    • Florence Giddens (segment "Hero")
    Justin Silverstein
    • Jake (segment "Hero")
    Chris Singh
    • Chris (segment "Hero")
    Edward Allen
    • Fred Beacon (segment "Hero")
    Carlos Jimenez
    • Jose (segment "Hero")
    • Director
      • Todd Haynes
    • Writers
      • Jean Genet
      • Todd Haynes
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews31

    6.35.3K
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    Featured reviews

    5ThurstonHunger

    Choose your Poison carefully

    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
    crash_into_me420

    Not just a "queer" film.

    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.
    7lasttimeisaw

    as an experimental juvenilia, POISON throbs with vitality, ambition and knowing archness

    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.
    8NateManD

    An intoxicating experience of emotion.

    Todd Haynes became well known with his film "Poison", which was successful at the Sundance film festival. What I like about "Poison" is that is not another stereotypical gay film. It contains three separate stories, all shown out of sequence. So it's like watching three bizarre surrealist films within one movie. One story "Hero" is a mockumentary which deals with a young boy and his abusive father. After killing his dad, he mysteriously flies away. Another story deals with a disease like epidemic, which seems to be symbolic of aids. This part is filmed in a style of a campy 50's sci-fi film. The man drinks some sort of potion and is given the disease. A colleague still loves him even though he's infected. Then the last story "Homo" deals with two men in prison and their homosexual relationship. These two guys have known each other from their youth and the one has flashbacks of the torment he has faced. "Poison" is a unique experimental masterpiece of queer cinema, reminiscent of Derek Jarmon. The film went through much controversy with its NC-17 rating. But really, there's R-rated films which are much worse. "Poison" is definitely not a film for everyone, but if your looking for something strange and different you'll probably enjoy it.
    LeSamourai

    oddly mesmerizing and unique

    Make sure that you are not tired when watching this film. Although this film introduces some outstanding performances by some little known actors, the film falls short. One of the three short stories of the film is shot in black and white and is strangely reminiscient of David Lynch's masterpiece "The Elephant Man." When Dr. Graves is ordered out to the fire-escape, I was just waiting for him to shout, "I'm not an animal; I'm a human being." The prisoner story, unlike the black and white story, is full of emotion and intensity. Issues such as homosexuality, abuse, and longing for love are enmeshed in this tale. The third story is shot documentary style. An unseen interviewer questions neighbors, family, and friends about the events leading up to the shooting and death of an abusive father. This movie will intrigue you, confuse you, and bother you. It's worth a watch.

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      John Leguizamo is credited as "Damien Garcia" due to an unspecified SAG rules problem.
    • Goofs
      A man runs past the bedroom window during the second interview with Gregory Lazar.
    • Quotes

      John Broom: [V.O] Prison was not new to me. I'd lived in them all my life. In submitting to prison life, embracing it... I could reject the world that had rejected me.

    • Alternate versions
      Edited, "R" rated version is available on video.
    • Connections
      Featured in Celluloid Closet (1995)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • November 27, 1991 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Gift
    • Filming locations
      • New York City, New York, USA
    • Production companies
      • Bronze Eye Productions
      • Killer Films
      • Poison L.P.
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • $250,000 (estimated)
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $787,280
    • Gross worldwide
      • $787,280
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 25m(85 min)
    • Color
      • Black and White
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.66 : 1

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