Actualités

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,...

Taboo Tuesday is an exploration of some of the most outré sides of horror cinema.

In the previous entry, we speculated that one of horror’s most reviled offshoots may be poised to enter the mainstream, perhaps to the detriment of the genre’s role as an irritant to mainstream moral hypocrisy. The Walking Dead may well have paved the way for mass audiences to embrace the cannibal film, but it can’t possibly prepare one for the queasy thrill of necrophilia on film.

Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantic, perhaps the best-known and most widely-seen example of this micro-genre (there’s even a sequel), recently received the Blu-ray treatment after years out of print on DVD. It’s an odd choice given the film was originally shot on Super-8 (and benefits from the sheen of grittiness it adds) but also a testament to the film’s enduring power.

For this second,...

Make-up artist Bob Westmoreland was best known for his work on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He worked on make-up for the 1977 sci-fi classic, and appeared onscreen in a small role as a load dispatcher.

Westmoreland began working in films and television in the early 1970s, and provided make-up for such films as Hammer (1972), Love Me Deadly (1973), Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973), the tele-film Satan’s Triangle (1975), Friday Foster (1975), the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ravagers (1979), Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), The Island (1980) again appearing on screen in a small role, and Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

Westmoreland died of cardiac arrest in Kauai, Hawaii, on October 6, 2009, at age 74.

Written by Harris Lentz III...