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Love Me Deadly (1972)
By lngway2go | June 4, 2008
(aka Secrets of the Death Room)
Writer and Director: Jacque Lacerte
Producer: Buck Edwards
Starring: Mary Wilcox, Lyle Waggoner, Christopher Stone, Timothy Scott.
The sleeve of Shriek Show’s release of this obscure 70’s exploitation film includes blurbs about the shocking nature of Love Me Deadly, and while it has it moments, this is no Nerkomantik (1987); a film that genuinely shocks and appalls on a number of levels. If your stomach can’t quite take the excess of Nekromantik, Love Me Deadly is a nice little starter in necrophilia.
Love Me Deadly wastes no time in letting you know what it’s about. A woman sits at the back of a funeral parlor as she observes the proceedings of the sermon. She stays behind while everyone leaves, making her way to the open casket where she proceeds to practice the art of French kissing on the unresponsive cadaver. Strangely though, she is seen by a funeral employee, perhaps this is normal course of action in a funeral parlor because nothing is said.
If that sparked your interest, it could be quickly destroyed by a woman crooner blabbering on about how she’ll “Love you deadly”, all the while footage of a father and daughter relationship is deployed for our benefit as the opening credits roll. We now know there’s an odd father daughter relationship buried somewhere in the plot, and it quickly becomes apparent it’s our job to figure out how that comes into play.
Lindsay (Mary Wilcox), the corpse loving woman, refuses Wade (Christopher Stone) a bit of action at a party she is hosting, so she gives him the three finger nail scratch mark on the cheek when he gets a little too fresh with her. She is left in an odd state as she remembers her relationship with her father, talk about obsessed! Lindsay is obviously a very troubled woman, and so when she starts scouring the newspapers for funerals we are not overly surprised.
While Lindsay attends a funeral, she gets seriously turned off as she moves in for another smooching session with a cadaver only to have it’s nose inconveniently fall off. Her disgust is totally understandable though. She briefly meets the dead man’s brother Alex (Lyle Waggoner) as she runs from the building, and it’s not the last time they’ll meet.
Just as Lindsay is getting the cold nose, the man that witnessed Lindsay’s rendezvous with the corpse at the beginning of the movie is out picking up a male prostitute, taking him to his place of work for something a little kinky. But Fred Sweeney’s (Timothy Scott) idea of kink is a little different than the prostitutes. Fred tricks the prostitute into getting naked and on to a metal operating table. He then suddenly straps him down, and proceeds to hook him up to embalming equipment in what is probably one of the films more graphic moments.
When Lindsay is later seen, you guessed it, at a funeral parlor by Fred, he decides to confront her, following her as she exits the funeral parlor. He gets in her car while she makes her excuses as to why she’s not going to the funeral itself, but Fred isn’t completely stupid. He tells her he knows what she is into, and that he is part of a group of necrophiliacs that would be more than interested in taking her into their fold. It’s Lindsay’s lucky day, and he’s sure to get her information so he can send her an invitation.
When Lindsay receives a letter from Fred she calls Wade up for a little date, but when it ends on her rejection of him once more you can’t help but feel she just used him as foreplay when she makes her excused and leaves for the necro gathering. Once at the ‘party’ though she freaks out and runs off. Fred catches up with her and offers to organize something that is a little bit more intimate in order to get her on the right path.
Wade tries to phone Lindsay when he gets home and receives no reply, so goes around to ‘check’ on her. He is there to welcome her when she comes in the door, confronting her when she returns, she breaks down and begs for his help but not telling him with what. He stays over and the next day she takes him to an art gallery that Alex owns. All the relationships are odd in this film. While Alex hits on Lindsay, Wade is off hitting on other women. They end up going out on a double date and all is hunky dorey, this is the 70’s after all.
Fred sets up an exclusive love fest for Lindsay and a cold blooded male, but when Wade sees Lindsay out late at night he decides to follow her, little does he know what he’ll find. He follows her into a funeral parlor and needless to say, he gets caught and the group find other uses for Wade.
The time arc in Love Me Deadly is a little hard to comprehend. There’s no real inclination as to when or how soon events are talking place. Everything could pretty much take the span of a week, and it wouldn’t really matter. It really doesn’t work in the films favor, everything feels like it happens too fast. Still, Lindsay doesn’t mourn the loss of Wade at all. Alex and Lindsay are soon a real item, and then it isn’t long before they are married! So is her marriage enough to save her from her forbidden urges? Hell no, are you insane?!
Wade isn’t the only man that seems to be having issues when it comes to bedding Lindsay, and if Love Me Dead isn’t an advocate for pre-marital sex I don’t know what is. Lindsay only seems to be interested in the dead, anything else is really out of the question, the only time she seems to get aroused is when she is alone with a dead body. It wouldn’t be shocking if she suddenly shouted, “I love dead people”, but alas we’ve still away to go.
Lindsay is an odd bird. She flirts and talks in erotic tones to her husband to smooth things over after he catches her acting strangely on her fathers grave, all the while she is forcing him to sleep in a separate bedroom for reasons we don’t even understand, except that she seem to have some fond memories of her father. Whereas Alex, is just a moron, he doesn’t seem to be too bothered by anything until he finds a letter about her gatherings and ultimately finds her straddling a corpse in all her glory. By this time though, it’s a bit late for divorce court.
Love Me Deadly is actually a pretty fun movie. It’s not very explicit, but it has a very European edge to it. For an exploitation movie, there seems to be an awful lot more male flesh on display than there is female, which is a rarity in the field! The European flavor is also given weight by a soundtrack that at times wouldn’t be amiss in one of the more sleazy Italian giallos of the 70’s, but I’m doing my best to forget the differing theme song, really.
Shriek Show’s assessment of Love Me Deadly being “equal parts sick soap opera and exploitation shocker” are not far off at all. It has a serious soap opera feel to it, especially in the romantic aspects of the film, the moments where we are digging around in the couch for a lost remote. Even the ‘attractive’ cast might make you think you are in soap world, but I dare you show any soap that has its lead straddling and snogging on a corpse!
As for a necrophilia film though, it really isn’t half bad. The necrophilia scenes aren’t that explicit at all, for those whose stomachs are quickly turned. If tasteful could be labeled at a film of this ilk, I guess we could use that label. It’s a little strange that this film isn’t more talked about, but I guess necrophilia isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
Surprisingly, this is Jacque Lacerte only movie, which is a shame. It would have been very interesting to see what else he could have produced, but this is the way with many exploitation film makers of this era, who continually got screwed over by bad distribution deals which left them often penniless and disillusioned. Love Me Deadly is not a work of art, for sure, but far better than I know I was expecting.
Topics: American Horror, Exploitation, Necrophilia |