Movie Ad of the Week: SWEET KILL (1972)

Those fine folks at the IMDb have Curtis Hanson's SWEET KILL listed as a 1973 release, but we've found an opening date of March 15, 1972 for the sexy psychothriller on two screens in El Paso, TX (The film was submitted to the MPAA in 1971 as SWEETKILL). After playing through the rest of the year and failing to set box-offices ablaze, Roger Corman reportedly had Hanson shoot additional nude scenes so SWEET KILL could be reworked into a sexploitation movie and re-released as THE AROUSERS. This is the version that was released on VHS by Embassy Home Entertainment in the '80s and is now available on DVD from Shout! Factory (misleadingly packaged and being sold under the SWEET KILL handle and advertising campaign). The ad below is from the May 16, 1973 opening of THE AROUSERS in Findlay, OH. Jim Hillier and Aaron Lipstadt's 1981 book Roger Corman's New World (BFI Dossier #7) lumps SWEET KILL/THE AROUSERS together in the same entry, with a May 9, 1973 release date and no indication that two different cuts of the film exist.