Light years ahead of its contemporaries, Poison is inventively filmed and full of fresh ideas and images that challenge and entertain. It contains three separate stories, filmed in different styles and set in different periods, that are weaved together to give a generally dark impression of the realities and histories of homosexuality. Titled “Hero”, “Horror” and “Homo”, it draws loosely on the work of Jean Genet, but owes more to early-90s AIDS media hysteria than anything else.
“Hero” deals with a young boy who has apparently escaped his unhappy home, and his freshly-murdered father, by flying out the window. The media descends, and his mother (Edith Meeks) tells his story via a commercial current affairs TV program (think “60 Minutes”). The boy has disappeared, after saving his devoted mother from an imbalanced relationship, and literally cutting his father out of the picture. “Hero” is witty but a bit predictable, and it’s drowned out by the other two stories.
“Horror” is the highlight of Poison. It’s a blue-tinted "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" story about an energetic young scientist and his dangerously ambitious experiment involving a synthetic and highly concentrated human sex-drive potion. Exhilarated by his discovery, Dr Graves (Larry Maxwell) feels he can beat the world, until he accidentally ingests an overdose of the potion, and his irreversible physical and mental decay begins.
Allegorical to the energetic rise of virile gay communities and the subsequent onset of the AIDS epidemic, “Horror” is distinctive in the way it implicates the afflicted man in his fate. He might have accidentally swallowed the sex drive potion, but only after he’d spent so much time messing around with it, concentrating on it an producing it – it’s his fault that it was there, lying around on the bench in the first place. Before it all went bad on him, he thought he’d really found something perfect and important. It’s reminiscent of what Dr Selma Dritz worried about on the eve of the AIDS epidemic, that “too much (was) being transmitted” – that the concentration of sexually active gay male populations and the commercialisation of gay sex via bathhouses and so on in the late 70s/early 80s was creating enormous incidences of relatively harmless STD infections, and that if a serious pathogen “got loose” in such conditions, they’d be “hell to pay”. This is what happens with Dr Graves (note the name), who plays around ambitiously and with the best intentions, before slipping up and inadvertently letting off a viral bomb.
At first, the general public shun him for his pustular appearance, but as the epidemic spreads, and “innocent” people become afflicted, it’s Dr Graves who is correctly identified as the originator of the plague, and summarily hunted down and goaded to his death. His girlfriend is suitably loyal, a pretty and intelligent woman who sticks by her buddy when everyone else is baying for blood (see: Elizabeth Taylor). Cornered and suicidal, Dr Graves says his piece about everyone being caught up in the same messy well of human nature and freakdom, implying that he’s just been unlucky enough to become infected with a disfiguring, disgraceful disease. It’s not a convincing argument though, as Graves is a different kind of freak from the start – fooling around after dark with things that are best left untouched. His infection wasn’t immaculately conceived, but bound to his peculiar activities and interests, which are also part of his crucifixion. There’s also a real humour in this section of the film, almost an admiration of media driven public hysteria and the contagious energy of the mob. It’s a big step up from the early-90s don’t-blame-us AIDS angst, the whole Grandpa Reagan doesn’t love us, let’s get in the car and rob some 7-11s martyr/groover routine.
“Homo”, the Genet-inspired prison romance, is less successful. All the basic Genet elements are there – a homoerotic all-male environment, repressed romantic desire and love, grimy leads in tattered costumes. But a schoolyard flashback which gives a bit of tear-jerking backstory about the two main men, is non-Genet, and it adds a cloying sentimentality to things. Though this flashback features a notorious spitting scene that had Sundance Festival audiences leaving the theatre in disgust (returning in time to award the film the Festival’s grand prize), it’s overlaid with longing looks at schoolboy nostalgia and tortuous adolescent cruelty. With its hulking male bullies and the suffering angelic boys they torment, “Homo” is closer to “Hero” or TV talk shows and the teen-love element that it brings to the central adult romance is unneeded and diluting.
