Poison Ivy: Cheap Lesbian Thrills in (Mostly) Straight Packaging

If you were a young lesbian in the mid-’90s and your parents had cable, you were most likely aware of Poison Ivy. It was the perfect tawdry late-night fare, with a little something for everyone. Your more lascivious straight guys were there, of course, for the lurid sexual content featuring a jailbait antagonist. For everyone else, you had Drew Barrymore’s delightfully perverse machinations and Cheryl Ladd as an emphysema patient dying an unusually glamorous death.

Lesbian overtones (and lip locks) shared by Barrymore and Sara Gilbert were an added bonus for gay adolescents like myself. It wasn’t as titillating as the Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler (back then, few things were), or romantic like Fried Green Tomatoes. But its legend was burnished by two simple things: Gilbert, we already sensed, was one of us. And Barrymore was widely rumored to be bisexual. In that prehistoric pre-“Puppy Episode” era, you had to take what you could get.

The film is front-loaded with lesbian subtext. As free-spirited Ivy (Barrymore) swings high above a cliff with abandon, reserved Sylvie Cooper (Gilbert) watches intently, sketching Ivy’s thigh tattoo in vivid detail. Sylvie’s voice-over narration is part coming-of-age movie, part noir. It hums with neurotic Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst energy, for any of you readers who enjoyed that Lois Lowry series.

Sylvie: She was definitely a turnoff. Too overt. Look at her—obviously, big problems. I mean, most girls don’t fly through the air with their skirt around their waist. Supergirl at least had the decency to wear tights—not that I read comics. I’m more the politically, environmentally correct, feminist, poetry-reading type. You know, boring.

poison ivy (1992)

After digressing about Ivy’s “obvious bleach job—too bad it’s six months old,” Sylvie continues.

Sylvie: I guess she’s sort of beautiful. I don’t know. Those lips. You know, lips are supposed to be a perfect reflection of another part of a woman’s anatomy. Not that I’m a lesbian. Well, maybe I am. No, definitely not. I told my mother I was, just for shock value. She said “Fine, just as long as you don’t smoke.” Which, of course, is my main joy in life. Probably oral compensation. I don’t think I was breastfed.

POISON IVY (1992)

She refers to Ivy as “scangie,” but wishes they could be friends. The opportunity arises when their paths cross in the principal’s office. Ivy catches Sylvie staring at her thigh and reveals the tattoo’s a stick-on. “The cross makes me think of death, but the ivy is life. Sort of the tragic and the hopeful, you know?” she explains in a way only Drew Barrymore could. Ivy, in turn, admires a unique (and rather gay) detail involving Sylvie’s hair. Sylvie accidentally makes things awkward by recalling that Ivy attends their expensive private school on a scholarship.

“You make it sound like Jerry’s Kids,” Ivy protests. “It’s not a disease.” She’s struggling in one of her classes, which is nothing compared to Sylvie’s transgression. The budding artist phoned in a bomb threat to a local news station in response to an editorial delivered by her father. “Wow! That’s great,” Ivy enthuses. “I’m gonna break this to you real slow. Your dad’s an asshole.” She has no idea how right she is, but we’ll all find out soon enough.

The girls bond over their friendlessness. (“Everybody hates me.” “Oh, well, everybody hates me, too.”) Sylvie, self-conscious about her family’s wealth, denies her parentage and falsely claims she’s biracial. Mother Georgie (Ladd), she declares, “spends her life dying.” Georgie is in fact dying, slowly and painfully, while looking luminous; she removes her oxygen mask occasionally to swallow fistfuls of pills. Father Darryl (Tom Skerritt) is in the throes of a midlife crisis, unable to accept his wife’s prognosis or his increasing professional irrelevance. Plagued by TMJ, which he notes “almost killed Burt Reynolds,” he’s forever massaging his jaw.

Ivy’s backstory is the dark and tragic sort that’s irresistible to her new friend: a neglectful father, and a mother dead from drug addiction. “Hey,” Sylvie theorizes, “I bet that’s why you look so sexy. So that your dad will notice you.” Ivy says it didn’t work: “He left anyway.” Sylvie responds by pointing to a scar that Ivy can’t quite see. “I tried to commit suicide once. It used to be much worse,” she assures her. She wears a necklace, a gift from Darryl, that Ivy envies. It’s one of many luxuries Sylvie takes for granted that Ivy would like for herself.

Georgie overhears the girls talking about death and chides her daughter. “What kind of girl would be impressed by suicide? I’d think you’d be embarrassed, getting caught lying all the time.” But lying is also a favorite pastime of Ivy’s, and she’s the more seasoned veteran. She almost immediately intuits what each member of the troubled Cooper clan needs from her, and provides it with a smile that’s alternately winsome, scheming or seductive. “Energy never dies. It just changes form,” she brightly offers while comforting Georgie. The same is true of her guile.

It isn’t long before Ivy is (platonically) sharing Sylvie’s bed and liberally borrowing both Georgie’s wardrobe and her husband. Having previously only seen the film chopped up for basic cable, I was blissfully unaware of just how long and graphic its sex scenes were. That salaciousness (Barrymore was 16, Skerritt nearly 60) detracts from a story that’s more interesting as a portrait of teenage friendship and alienation than as an erotic thriller.

Sylvie and Ivy take turns trying on poses because their identities are still in flux. (We don’t know Ivy’s real name; that’s what Sylvie calls her because of the tattoo.) Sylvie is obviously a lesbian, but hasn’t yet figured that out for herself; the cannier Ivy already recognizes and accepts this about her friend. She kisses Sylvie twice in the course of the movie and it rattles her both times, for very different reasons. Tepid lesbianism is one of my least favorite kinds, so I found Poison Ivy frustrating as a kid. As an adult, I appreciated that the characters’ bond wasn’t grist for the sexploitation mill.

Gilbert, whose dramatic limitations have made The Conners frustratingly mawkish at times, is the cast’s weakest link. Fortunately, her role mostly consists of rearranging her considerable hair. Ladd, soon to star in Dancing with Danger, is interesting in an odd and undeveloped role; the fractured family story might’ve packed more wallop if we’d seen the Coopers in better times through more than old Polaroids. Skerritt, who must’ve been anxiously waiting to be led away in handcuffs during filming, is appropriately chagrined throughout.

Best of all is Barrymore, who saunters away with the film. As a femme fatale, I’d say she ranks alongside Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction and Jennifer Tilly in Bound as one of the best of the ’90s. It’s a precocious performance from an actor barely old enough to drive, seemingly delivered with minimal support from the screenplay (by Andy Ruben and Katt Shea) or Shea’s direction. (Billowing curtains and David Michael Frank’s dramatic score do a lot of Shea’s heavy lifting.) Ivy is sometimes cited as a memorable movie villain, which isn’t incorrect; perhaps more overlooked is that she is also a memorable victim.

Streaming and DVD availability

Poison Ivy is available on DVD. Its first release included both the original R-rated theatrical cut and an unrated version disavowed by writer-director Katt Shea. A second release presents full-screen, unrated versions of the original Poison Ivy and two inferior quasi-sequels that respectively star Alyssa Milano and Jaime Pressly.

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… But wait, there’s more!

Sara Gilbert’s Roseanne family cracked a joke at Poison Ivy‘s expense in the ninth season episode “The Truth Be Told.” As a sleazy butch TV exec tries to buy the rights to the Conners’ lottery story, she says, “There’s gotta be a reason here why we’re going onto cable, do you understand? Picture this. You get the news of the lottery win, and there comes your daughter and Drew Barrymore in the shower together…” Last year, Gilbert appeared on Barrymore’s talk show and they discussed their private rehearsals for the less chaste of their onscreen kisses.