Isn't it funny to think that just 10 years ago, you had to watch movies on clunky plastic bricks stuffed with yards of magnetic tape? I sometimes marvel at the glory of the Digital Versatile Disc, and the transformative utility it affords the film obsessive. The concomitant rise of DVDs and the internet have brought forth great bounties for movie nerds—studios are releasing everything in their catalogs, including stuff that never qualified for VHS. It's kind of great. But it's also kind of bittersweet.

Take Pretty Poison, a heretofore lost film from 1968 starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld as a murderous couple of teenagers in small-town New England. I've been reading about this movie for 15 years and never been able to find a bootleg copy, at even the most arcane cult video shops. The vision I'd developed was of a visionary, subversive black comedy, an inversion not only of old-fashioned American values, but of the nouvelle vague sensibilities creeping into Hollywood in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde and the twilight of the studio system. Basically, after years of reading articles, seeing stills, and filling in the gaps with my imagination, I had cast Pretty Poison as a perfect film, combining elements of Bonnie and Clyde; Badlands; Hi, Mom!; and Heathers.

Now that it's out on DVD, I see that it's kind of just an unusual, low-budget, late-'60s, studio-made exploitation curio about amoral youth. Perkins plays a mentally disturbed semireformed teenage arsonist whose fresh start in a new town is interrupted when he gets the hots for high-school cheerleader Weld. He tells her he's a CIA spook on a mission. They have sex. They accidentally kill his boss. He hides in the woods. Next thing you know, she shoots her hectoring mother five times in the chest and the trouble really begins. Sex and violence are never far removed, in art as in life: When Weld kills her mom—who's about to give her daughter a plate of pancakes with a side helping of guilt—she does so gleefully, with a tongue pressed seductively to her top lip, and a naughty smile. Weld fires off several shots, then falls back onto the bed and tells Perkins, "I feel like we're married now. Like really married... What do people do as soon as they're married?"

And of course, this being a late-'60s movie, he can't follow through. A few minutes later, he's arrested as a "rotten, dirty, crazy, murdering BASTARD!"

In reality, Pretty Poison turns out to be notable for its mild subversion of sexual mystique—the all-American high-school femme fatale goes all the way with Perkins to set him up as a patsy; she also clearly loves doing it—and its light environmental consciousness. Also notable are Weld's adorably crooked teeth. It's a weird little slice of kinky Americana, well worth checking out.

Still, I think it might have been better when it was a lost treasure.