Necrophilia has not been a
central focus in many Hollywood movies, so the exceptions to the rule are noteworthy
no matter their quality or lack thereof. To its meager credit, the cheaply made
horror flick Love Me Deadly presents
its perverse bona fides right in the first scene, when tall blonde Lindsay
(Mary Charlotte Wilcox) leans down into her father’s coffin and starts
French-kissing Dead Old Dad’s unresponsive lips. What unfolds after that
startling scene is a turgid melodrama in which Lindsay struggles to hide her
fetish from an unsuspecting romantic suitor even as she’s invited to join a
coven of crazies who not only get off on defiling corpses but also kill people
to provide new playthings. In terms of story construction, Love Me Deadly isn’t terrible, inasmuch as it delivers the creepy
goods and moves forward in a logical manner. Every other aspect of the picture,
however, is substandard. The characterizations are paper-thin, the dialogue is
stilted, and the performances are as stiff as the many corpses featured in the
narrative. The fact that B-movie stalwart Christopher Stone delivers the most
credible acting in the picture speaks volumes, since Stone comes across as a
vacuous he-man in nearly any other context.
Leading lady Wilcox almost sells a
few moments of anguished shock, usually when her character is discovered doing
something horrible, but she mostly wobbles between overwrought histrionics and
zombified non-acting. Perhaps even weirder than the transgressive storyline is
the presence of wholesome-looking leading man Lyle Waggoner, best known for lightweight
work on TV’s The Carol Burnett Show
and Wonder Woman. Wearing a swinger’s
ensemble of leisure suits and scarves, he’s impossible to take seriously, even
though it’s jarring to see him in a milieu suffused with sex and violence. (At
one point, Waggoner’s character “charms” his lover by saying, “Anyone ever tell
you what a hot, passionate broad you are?”) Love
Me Deadly scores a few creep-factor points with scenes involving coven leader Fred
(Timothy Scott), who uses his funeral home as a
psychopathic playground, but the clumsiness of the storytelling and the
whiplash-inducing tonal shifts from chipper romantic scenes to ghastly death
tableaux mark Love Me Deadly as dead
on arrival.
Love Me Deadly: LAME
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