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Just perfect...

best movie i've ever seen.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Former 1950s teen heartthrob Tab Hunter, still looking very handsome here in his early 40s, stars as Eddie, an outwardly respectable high school phys ed teacher who is tormented by both his impotence and some childhood trauma involving his mother (which is left obscured by the filmmakers). Because of his good looks and friendly demeanor, Eddie seems to attract all sorts of neighborhood women; many of whom are young and beautiful. Unable to make love to them or become intimate enough with them on a non-sexual basis to open up to them about his past, he simply murders them. Triggering this behavior though is the accidental killing of a young woman who gets a little too aggressive and dies after Eddie pushes her off and she hits her head on a table. He hides the body in some hatch on the roof and afterward something snaps inside of him and he moves beyond the stage of repression and voyeurism to full blown murder, as well as necrophilia (which is handled with some subtlety here); apparently the only way he can 'get off.' Might explain why he's been paying a local hooker (played by 70s drive-in favorite Roberta Collins) to dress up like his long gone momma and "play dead" while he undresses and gropes her. Seems like pretty seedy stuff, and this is pretty seedy stuff; but it's done with more thought and care than many others in this genre and I liked it.Despite what some of the reviews here state, I actually prefer the way the filmmakers decided to handle all this. Instead of a bunch of heavy-handed dialogue blatantly spelling everything out, giving a direct explanation to Eddie's behavior or visualizing of all Eddie's dirty deeds, we get more suggestion than anything else. The opening scene is a childhood flashback of a woman stripping naked, taking off her earrings and lying down in bed while a pair of kids tennis shoes are visible behind a barely opened curtain. That's the only real glimpse we get of Eddie's childhood, but it's enough to raise a few questions. Is his mother a whore/prostitute? Has Eddie always been voyeuristic and/or not right in the head? Was there incest involved? Nothing is explained in a cut-and-dry way, but we know that Eddie refuses to talk about any of it, even when directly confronted about it by the one woman in this film who does care about him. That person is Barbara (Nadyne Turney), who lives in the same apartment house as Eddie. She's not quite the looker the other women in this movie are, but is patient and wants to help Eddie. He's gone on quite a few dates with her but nothing even remotely sexual has happened between them. Barbara questions why and wonders whether he's not attracted to her or if something else is going on.Originally titled SWEET KILL and actually filmed in 1970, the title was later changed to the more exploitative-sounding THE AROUSERS (with a new poster to match) a few years later. There are several instances of nudity that seem needlessly tacked on, and I see here in the trivia section that executive producer Roger Corman had the director go back and film these scenes so the film could be sold on the drive-in circuit as a sex film. Though unnecessary, I didn't feel these newly-added scenes (which are brief) were too detrimental to the overall film and they tried to tie them into the 'voyeuristic' aspect the best they could.It's obvious what would attract former teen idol Hunter to this kind of role - THE AROUSERS was an opportunity to branch out, possibly open up new opportunities for himself as an older actor, and also a chance to prove he could handle heavier drama. In any case, he does an effective job in his part and is well-supported by Turney (who's very good here) and the rest of the cast. Popping up here in smaller roles are veteran actress Isabel Jewell (in her final role) as his landlady, as well as future horror star Angus "Tall Man" Scrimm (billed as "Rory Guy") as her husband. Neither have much to do other than complain about some awful smell coming from upstairs... The lesser-known cast members also did a fairly good job in my opinion.

It must have been hard to imagine in 1973 that the director of this low budget shock flick would go on to make one of the very best crime films of the nineties with LA Confidential, but indeed that was the case. Anyway, this was his first attempt at directing, and it's a rather lukewarm film. I never go into films like this expecting too much; generally these film were made with the intention of getting as many people into a theatre as possible and that isn't usually the best base for a great film. This one focuses on Eddie Collins, a disturbed man who gets into murdering women after one unsuccessful encounter and then ends up not being able to shake off the urge to do so. The film was obviously made on a shoestring budget and it does look very cheap. There's also rather too many sex scenes in the film which were obviously included to help sell the film, but actually end up making it all the more boring. Naturally the point of the film is to see the lead character butchering some women rather than any kind of character study, and that's really all we get. Still, Sweet Kill is not a total dead loss; it makes for an interesting watch and fans of low budget seventies exploitation will probably get a kick out of it.

Former 50's teen idol Tab Hunter gives a superbly chilling and convincing performance as Eddie Collins, a lonely, impotent and sexually frustrated high school gym teacher who was driven around the bend by his shameless whore mother who used to parade around naked in front of him as a little boy. Eddie viciously murders any lovely young lass who tries (and fails) to turn him on. Writer/director Curtis Hanson, who went on to win an Oscar for the terrific "L.A. Confidential," does an expert job of creating and sustaining a creepy, clammy, clinical tone for this luridly compelling portrait of homicidal madness and seething misogyny. Moreover, Hanson astutely nails the whole right-on groovy swingin' 70's zeitgeist, evokes a highly credible sense of everyday mundane reality and builds plenty of nerve-wracking tension which reaches a harrowing fever pitch in the terrifying final third. The abundant gratuitous distaff nudity, the seedy seaside Venice, California locations, the shockingly blunt'n'brutal violence and the profoundly unnerving conclusion all give this picture a raw, sleazy, unsettling edge that's mighty tough to shake. Nice supporting performances by Nadyne Turney as fed-up, long-suffering unhappy single gal Barbara, Isabel Jewell as a snoopy landlady, a pre-"Phantasm" Angus Scrimm as Jewell's husband, and longtime favorite 70's drive-in flick starlet Roberta Collins as a brassy call girl. Charles Bernstein's supremely spooky'n'shuddery score and Daniel Lacambre's crisp, polished cinematography are both up to par. The inspired casting of Tab Hunter in the warped lead qualifies as the film's masterstroke; Hunter's blandly handsome boy next door persona makes for the perfect front for the severe dementia bubbling just underneath the surface. An excellent and unjustly overlooked little nugget.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** Little more, really, than a '70s exploitation flick, Sweet Kill (a.k.a. The Arousers) has a few points of interest beyond its plenitude of bared breasts and buttocks. First of all, it marks the very early directing and screenwriting debut of Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile). Beginning in the 1960s, many of them in Roger Corman's raffish moviemaking academy, a number of directors who would later achieve prominence made their bones in horror schlock and soft-core porn; Hanson would wait until the '80s to do his next film.Second, its star is Tab Hunter, who's the best thing in it. Plainly, he had more talent than his dispiriting filmography and his reputation as a 60s-beefcake golden boy (and worse) might lead one to believe. Here he's a high-school gym teacher (this doesn't lead to much, and his buttocks stay chastely sheathed) living in Venice, California. He has a big problem, though. Owing to some cloudily referenced incident in his boyhood (which seems to involve Oedipal incest), he can't get it up. His rage and humiliation lead him down a dark path. When a girl he's picked up turns aggressive after his failure, he kicks her away. As happens with such kicks, she conks her head and dies. He hides the body away in a pigeon hutch on his apartment rooftop. And from then on it seems he can function only with a fresh corpse. When attempts at normalcy prove futile (he pays a hooker to dress up, presumably as his mother, and lie immobile), he prowls the beaches with his butcher knife...And that's about it. The movie's cheapness is often evident in its sound levels, which veer erratically. The `thriller' angle isn't worked out, and the movie ends with a shot of Hunter à la Norman Bates in Psycho (homages to Hitchcock abound). Its most noteworthy feature is the empathy it shows for the murderer, a victim of circumstances which he cannot surmount.