Would You Be My Mommy?

Ever have one of those nights where you binge on movies, but you are just grabbing titles at random from sources online or off your streaming device of choice. You see a title that grabs you, and you figure, "What the hell?"

But the evening turns weird when every title turns out to be stories about psycho-sexual lunatics who suffer from every fetish and/or perversion prone to make you feel that washing with pure lye and water will never get you clean enough. How the hell can you keep picking these things at random? Is The Universe attempting to tell you something, or is God trolling you for shits and giggles? And even though you are watching the films alone, you find yourself sinking lower and lower in your seat and you glance at the windows to make sure no one can see what you are watching.

One of those films happened to be "Sweet Kill", aka "The Arousers", from 1972. Apparently "Sweet Kill" was the original title, but the film did not do well, so, as the rumor goes, Roger Corman, who was an uncredited producer of the film, requested sexy additional footage be shot, and the film was released under the title "The Arousers". "Sweet Kill" is actually a touch misleading. "The Arousers" would only work ironically and/or as a rather cruel joke given the subject matter. Actually, now that I think of it, I don't think the titles had much impact on the popularity of this film. Most folks aren't keen on watching a perv freak out and kill a bunch of people. Well, not back in the early 70s, at least.

We have former 50/60’s heartthrob Tab Hunter playing Eddie Collins, a guy who, as a child, used to hide in the closet (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and watch his mother undress and sleep mostly naked on her bed. Apparently this kink of his makes him afraid of the up-close intimacy of women. Bad timing as the Seventies was a time for women to take charge of their sexuality. Women weren’t all retiring wallflowers waiting for a man to shower them with attention; some wanted sex and/or a relationship and were not afraid to demand such things.

Eddie does not like pushy dames, so when one rips his pants open, he punts her into a shelf where a whack to the back of her head snuffs out her life. Does he freak out? Not really. As if it is almost a daily occurrence, he wraps her up in a sheet, ties it off, and dumps it into a pigeon loft on the top of his apartment building. You almost get the feeling our main character has done similar things in the past.

This guy makes me ill. If I had a quarter of the women that comes on to him just in the movie, I’d have more women than I’d know what to do with. Eddie? He just kills them if his verbal abuse doesn’t drive them away (and it usually doesn’t). But even feeling a sense of revulsion at the sexually aggressive women doesn't seem to be a clear indication that Eddie needs mental help; in fact, he even actively starts conversations with women when he knows full well that he’s most likely gonna be either pissing them off when he acts like a fussy gay man or sliding a knife into their torso at the drop of a hat.

A little research seems to indicate that the original script as written by director Curtis Hanson had a female character behind the murders. And that still kind of fits as Eddie’s obsession with killing the women for sexual gratification just doesn’t seem to fit the character’s profile. Yet one female character, Barbara (played with skill by Nadyne Turney), seems closer to Eddie than the other women, and she reveals a rather traumatic event from her youth that leads you to think she would probably kill the women throwing themselves at Eddie. Would have been a better film and it doesn’t leave you disgusted with the main character.

A good bit of acting by Tab Hunter does not hide the rather ugly film that Roger Corman pushed Curtis Hanson to make in place of a more psychological thriller the director intended. Worth watching, but try to avoid watching 3 sexual killer flicks back to back.