BY TODD GARBARINI
If
you’re one of the many moviegoers who are unfamiliar with the Jacques Lacerte
thriller Love Me Deadly, you’re not
alone. A product of early 1970s low-budget motion picture production, this film
is the sole title directed by Mr. Lacerte who passed away in 1988. Lensed in
1971 and released in San Francisco right around the same time as Gerard
Damiano’s wildly popular and controversial couples-flick Deep Throat in June 1972 just before the Watergate burglary, the
film played in roughly ten markets, including rained-out drive-ins, before it nearly
disappeared from view. However, there are subsequent movie posters for the film
that have the audacity to mention William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and give the impression that spiritual
possession is somehow to blame for the unsavory goings-on. It’s not.
Love Me Deadly was originally titled Kiss Me Deadly, however Mickey Spillane had
the rights to that title, hence the name change. What is billed as a story of
demonic diabolical deeds is rather a heartbreakingly tragic tale of a young
woman who cannot seem to connect with men…who are alive. The film never really
seems to get a grip on how it wants to play out the subject matter at hand but
you get the feeling that the director is attempting to pass the film off as
some sort of dissertation on necrophilia which, in my humble opinion, is one of
the most incomprehensible, disgusting, and desperate of all sexual proclivities
and one that I can only hope is
relegated to the cinema. I interpreted the film from a much different
perspective, so each viewer might see something differently due to the film’s
inability to construct a single tone.
The
opening credits play over images of a happy young girl, Lindsay Finch, playing
with her father who dotes on her, pushes her on a swing, and comforts her when
she falls. As an adult, Lindsay (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) is a looker who tries
her best to make friends with attractive men. She leads on Wade Farrow (the
late Christopher Stone of 1981’s The
Howling and 1983’s Cujo, sans his
trademark ‘stache) only to rebuff him when he makes sexual advances. Like Harold
and his pal Maude, Lindsay looks through the newspapers and attends afternoon
wakes of complete strangers although her reasons for doing so are far more
disturbing: she attempts amorous contact with the recently deceased. While
about town, she hones in on men who bear a resemblance to her father whom we
can safely assume has passed. Meanwhile Fred (Timothy Scott), a funeral
director of Morningside Mortuary (the name anticipates 1979’s Phantasm), catches her and persuades her
to join him after hours in necrophilic activities with similarly afflicted
gonzos who don black mass-like capes in a ritual prior to becoming intimate
with corpses, the victims of Fred’s nocturnal cruisings along the Sunset Strip
in search of johns and prostitutes.
Lindsay
takes a liking to Alex Martin (Lyle Waggoner) whom she sees as a father figure.
They court and marry soon afterwards, although their bedroom habits suffer
greatly as she’s unable to allow Alex to make love to her. He’s patient and
even sleeps in another room yet becomes suspicious of his wife’s behavior when
he follows her to the funeral parlor and sees her enter the premises. When he
asks her about it later on, she denies going there at all. A brief conversation
with the housekeeper who practically raised her leads Alex to the cemetery in
the film’s most heartbreaking scene wherein Lindsay is dressed in pigtails,
playing around her father’s grave like a child. Anyone who has seen enough
horror films knows how the film will end so while it’s not a shocker, it’s actually
tragically sad given how her father died and the guilt that Lindsay feels. This
is the biggest issue that I have with the film. While the ads promise one
thing, what you get is something much different. The biggest evidence of this
is in the inclusion of elegiac songs sung by Kit Fuller that play over the kinderscene that opens the film and the romantic
silliness between she and Alex. This is, a sequence that seems to have been borrowed
from the overlong romantic interlude that plagues Clint Eastwood’s otherwise
crackerjack Play Misty for Me (1971),
with Roberta Flack crooning on that film’s soundtrack for nearly five minutes. The
original movie poster even claims that Lindsay is 18, however she’s clearly in
her early to mid-twenties.
The
film has been released on Blu-ray by Code Red and it comes with some nice
extras. Code Red has done an exemplary job of releasing this film transferred
in 2K from one of the few surviving film elements which, in this case, just
happens to be the original camera negative (for a change!) and the results are
gorgeous. The image is bright, colorful and sharp. The liner notes on the back
tout this new transfer, mentioning that the “other label†had previously
released the film from an edited 35mm print. My guess is that they are
referring to the Synergy Entertainment DVD from July 2010.
Audio Commentary – moderated by Greg Goodall and
featuring producer Buck Edwards,
the latter of whom sadly died in November 2007, this commentary is the same one
that appeared on the Code Red DVD from May 2008. While informative, it’s a little bit of a letdown. Mr. Goodall states
that Ms. Wilcox never made any other films after this, however a quick look up
on the IMDB.com would have proven him wrong. She appeared in Gilbert Moses’s Willie Dynamite (1974), Menahem Golan’s Lepke (1975), Ray Danton’s Psychic Killer (1975), James Frawley’s The Big Bus (1976), and Eric Till’s Improper Channels (1981) before leaving
show business entirely to become an Anglican priest in Canada in the 1990s. The
other issue I have is that there are long moments of silence where neither
party is talking. For a commentary featuring two personalities, I’ve always felt
that there is always more than enough to talk about and that there should never
be dead air. At any given moment, at least one of the parties should be
speaking. There are many interesting tidbits to be had, however.
Play This in Maria’s B-Movie Mayhem
Mode – Maria Kanellis, who looks like she
could be the daughter of former 1970s and 1980s porn star Kelly Nichols, was
the Playboy Magazine April 2008 cover girl and is also a wrestler and she
appears here to perform her ghoulish schtick, introducing the film and making
cracks about the nature of the film.
There
are two trailers for the film and one of them mentions Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in tandem with Love Me Deadly, a sacrosanct if ever
there was one!
The
cover art also features a reversible artwork sleeve.
According
to the Internet Movie Database, the film had later been re-released in 1973
under the title of Secrets of Death Room
on a double feature with November
Children (1972), which was also called Nightmare of Death. Something tells me that neither of these title
changes made the end result any better!
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