Love Me Deadly (1973)
Pity poor Lindsay Finch (Mary Wilcox), a toothsome - and toothy! - young newlywed who cannot consummate her marriage to handsome hubby Alex (Lyle Waggoner). In fact, she cannot enjoy sex with any living man. But Lindsey is not a lesbian...she seeks her sexual thrills in funeral parlors, kissing the cold, unyielding lips of bodies stiff with rigor mortis. Imagine her surprise during one such outing when her caresses cause the reconstructed nose of an accident victim to crumble away. Or when she discovers a secret society, led by morticians, that shares her desire for cold flesh, and, worse, whose members kill to procure new cadavers to sate their lust.
Welcome to Love Me Deadly, a unique film that dealt with the subject of necrophilia 25 years before Jorg Buttgereit sickened the world with Nekromantik (1988). Unlike prior features that dared to suggest necrophilism, such as Riccardo Freda's L'Orribile Segreto del Dottore Hitchcock (1962) or Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour (1966), the act is not sublimated through role-playing or hidden from camera range.
What distinguishes Love Me Deadly from other films of its era is not its depictions of violence and perversion, but the decision to ground this twisted tale in sunny, suburban Southern California. Though a mortuary provides the setting for most of the film's unwholesome frissons, domestic scenes of Lindsay's courtship with her husband-to-be unfold in a sunlit park, a sidewalk café, a storefront art gallery with frame samples hung behind the counter, and other banal locales frequented by extras decked out in seventies' era fashion atrocities. Scenes set in a cemetery, typically rendered at night in most horror films, occur in daylight. In fact, one could make the case that Love Me Deadly is a love story with horrific elements. Mais, quelle horreur!
Reminiscent of Sam Fuller's Naked Kiss in its juxtaposition of soapy melodramatics and jarring shock scenes, Love Me Deadly teases audience expectations by cutting from Lindsay's romantic tribulations to lurid scenes of the death cult's gruesome rituals. In its most extreme, wince-inducing scene, we are forced to witness the fate of a young gay pick-up (I. William Quinn from Lee Frost films) who is forcibly strapped naked to a metal embalming table by the head of the necrophile cult (character actor Timothy Scott, from Lonesome Dove and many other television westerns). After thrusting the huge needles of an embalming pump into the screaming hustler's arm and neck, the cultist proceeds to replace blood with formaldehyde as the dying youth pleads for mercy. What would be merely campy in a film with less conviction packs a visceral wallop that may leave even jaded viewers weak-kneed and queasy.
What distinguishes Love Me Deadly from other films of its era is not its depictions of violence and perversion, but the decision to ground this twisted tale in sunny, suburban Southern California. Though a mortuary provides the setting for most of the film's unwholesome frissons, domestic scenes of Lindsay's courtship with her husband-to-be unfold in a sunlit park, a sidewalk café, a storefront art gallery with frame samples hung behind the counter, and other banal locales frequented by extras decked out in seventies' era fashion atrocities. Scenes set in a cemetery, typically rendered at night in most horror films, occur in daylight. In fact, one could make the case that Love Me Deadly is a love story with horrific elements. Mais, quelle horreur!
Reminiscent of Sam Fuller's Naked Kiss in its juxtaposition of soapy melodramatics and jarring shock scenes, Love Me Deadly teases audience expectations by cutting from Lindsay's romantic tribulations to lurid scenes of the death cult's gruesome rituals. In its most extreme, wince-inducing scene, we are forced to witness the fate of a young gay pick-up (I. William Quinn from Lee Frost films) who is forcibly strapped naked to a metal embalming table by the head of the necrophile cult (character actor Timothy Scott, from Lonesome Dove and many other television westerns). After thrusting the huge needles of an embalming pump into the screaming hustler's arm and neck, the cultist proceeds to replace blood with formaldehyde as the dying youth pleads for mercy. What would be merely campy in a film with less conviction packs a visceral wallop that may leave even jaded viewers weak-kneed and queasy.
Jacques LaCerte
Love Me Deadly is the first and only film by its director, the late Jacques LaCerte, who also makes a cameo as a corpse in the film's opening scene. A former drama teacher from Ingleside's Morningside High School, LaCerte was demonstrably an accomplished director of actors. Unfortunately, his inexperience in filmmaking is evident, as many scenes are statically lensed in medium shot and suffer a flat, made-for-television look. Nevertheless, the production values for a film that reportedly cost $42,500 are impressive; and the cast, composed of professionals (Wilcox, Waggoner, Scott, Quinn, and Christopher Stone as an ill-fated suitor), crew members, and financiers, is uniformly good. Waggoner portrayed the hapless husband of a necrophile while appearing as a regular on television's "The Carol Burnett Show," a fascinating if inexplicable career move. Wilcox, the troubled bride with a tragic past, appeared as a hooker the following year in the pimpsploitation feature Willie Dynamite.
The Shriek Show/Media Blasters DVD of Love Me Deadly, as of this writing still available, was struck from original 35mm film elements and is a marked improvement over the faded, pan-and-scanned Video Gems VHS release from 1985. In addition to trailers for Love Me Deadly and other titles offered through Shriek Show, the DVD features a witty commentary track between the late Buck Edwards, the film's producer (and onscreen cult member), and film scribe Greg Goodsell in which Edwards professes ignorance about the film's prior availability on VHS. In stating that Love Me Deadly only played theatrically in ten or twelve venues for several weeks, Edwards also seem to be unaware of the film's successful run throughout the southern drive-in circuit, which is where I first caught up with it back in 1973. A singular viewing experience that teeters precariously between grisly horror and the type of melodrama once derided as "women's pictures," Love Me Deadly is characterized in the commentary track by Goodsell as a Ross Hunter film gone awry. If that description piques your interest, make a date with Lindsay. She's to die for.
The Shriek Show/Media Blasters DVD of Love Me Deadly, as of this writing still available, was struck from original 35mm film elements and is a marked improvement over the faded, pan-and-scanned Video Gems VHS release from 1985. In addition to trailers for Love Me Deadly and other titles offered through Shriek Show, the DVD features a witty commentary track between the late Buck Edwards, the film's producer (and onscreen cult member), and film scribe Greg Goodsell in which Edwards professes ignorance about the film's prior availability on VHS. In stating that Love Me Deadly only played theatrically in ten or twelve venues for several weeks, Edwards also seem to be unaware of the film's successful run throughout the southern drive-in circuit, which is where I first caught up with it back in 1973. A singular viewing experience that teeters precariously between grisly horror and the type of melodrama once derided as "women's pictures," Love Me Deadly is characterized in the commentary track by Goodsell as a Ross Hunter film gone awry. If that description piques your interest, make a date with Lindsay. She's to die for.
[This review originally appeared, in different form, in ecco, the world of bizarre video, Volume One, Number One.]