"Sweet Kill" was the very first film of writer/director Curtis Hanson who would become reasonably successful and acclaimed more than twenty years later thanks to a couple of popular mainstream titles such as "The River Wild", the Oscar-winning "LA Confidential", "Wonder Boys" and the Eminem biography "8 Mile". But like so many other now famous & influential film makers (Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme…), Curtis Hanson in fact owes his entire career to the support and mentoring of one of the most important individuals in the history of cinema; namely Roger – "King of the B's" - Corman. Back when "Sweet Kill" was first released and quickly turned out unsuccessful at the box-office, it was executive producer Roger Corman who came to the rescue and instructed Curtis Hanson to add a lot more female nudity and change the title to "The Arousers". It didn't help all that much, but at least and thanks to Corman we're treated to copious amounts of gratuitous B, B and B (which stands for boobs, bums and bush). During the first five minutes, for example, 3 different nameless and totally random women are walking nonchalantly through the screen butt-naked! Not taking into account all the bare female flesh, "Sweet Kill" is half fascinating and half of a failure. The film is undoubtedly inspired (like countless of other movies) by Hitchcock's "Psycho", with another cinematic madman that is actually good- looking and sophisticated, but socially incompetent due to his sexual fixation on mommy. Hanson introduces Tab Hunter, a former poster-boy from the fifties, as an introvert serial killer slash gym teacher Eddie Collins. Numerous beautiful and predatory women literally throw themselves at Eddie, but he's only turned on when he pays a prostitute to dress up like his own mother. "Sweet Kill" opens quite promisingly, with the murder of some beach girl and subsequently the hiding of her corpse in the pigeon loft above his apartment (where she remains throughout the entire movie, by the way) but then the film gets gradually more boring, repetitive and predictable. I'm honestly convinced that Curtis Hanson wanted to draw a profound and insightful portrait of his protagonist serial killer, but Eddie Collins remains a bland and largely uninteresting character and he hardly ever succeeds in generating suspense or discomfort. It's a forgettable film, with a nevertheless good performance of Tab Hunter and a fairly uncanny score, and you could probably never guess from this early work that Curtis Hanson would hold an Oscar for best screenplay in his hands 25 years later.

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.

A handsome and lonely gym teacher Eddie Collins can't perform sexually due to his constant watching of his mother undress while he hid in her closet as a child.His only recourse is to kill the women he tries to sleep with and stash them in a pigeon hutch on his roof.He hires a prostitute to dress as his dead mother,the only way he is able to achieve sexual gratification..."The Arousers" is the first film of director Curtis Hanson.Originally shot in 1971 under the title "Sweet Kill",this film lingered on the shelf until 1973 when executive producer Roger Corman had Hanson shoot two days of nudity inserts to spice-up the film.Angus Scrimm of "Phanatsm" fame has a small cameo here.Overall,this is a good piece of sleaze from the early 70's that should satisfy the exploitation fans out there looking for plenty of nudity,sex and violence.7 out of 10.

Current A-list director Curtis Hanson's first 1970 film portrayal of a sexually-deviant gym teacher and serial killer features an incredibly creepy performance by Tab Hunter which is so good, it raises the quality of the whole movie. Unfortunately, the production values are rather inferior: the film has the flat lighting of a TV-movie, mixed sound quality, an underdeveloped script, and a few embarrassingly awkward scenes - one with Hunter giving a male student advice about girls that reminded me of a cheap educational filmstrip, and another with police finding marijuana in a character's bathtub. With all of the realistic serial killer films which have come out since this film, it probably had greater originality when first released, as an early attempt to portray a serial killer's actions squarely in the middle of mundane everyday reality. However, part of the creepy quality here is that Hunter portrays a character who seems exceedingly normal on the outside but is obviously incredibly disturbed. The whole sexual impotence aspect of his compulsions thankfully remains low-key, as simply slipping this guy some Viagra would probably not solve his difficulties.All in all, definitely not a bad time-filler or debut for Hanson; there are a couple of memorable shock scenes. However, for a much more substantial treatment of similar subject matter, I suggest Robert Altman's very obscure 1964 film "Nightmare in Chicago."