Thriller maestro Curtis Hanson made his feature debut with the sleazy exploitation favorite Sweet Kill about a high school gym teacher (Tab Hunter) who doles out dating advice to his students during the day, and at night takes out his own dates… with a knife. Compulsively murdering hot hippie girls threatens his thin façade of a cover life and two detectives start closing in, his insatiable carnal appetite ever growing with his staging of artful chiaroscuro murder set pieces influenced by Hitchcock and Murnau. But it is Hunter who is the truly shattering piece of the puzzle as the crazed psychopath who kills whenever he is aroused – a haunted performance that proves Norman Bates’ maxim: “We all go a little mad sometimes.”
