Living Doll

Infamous schlock producer Dick Randall's last film (or last released film, anyway) turns out to be a surprisingly good and grim little horror yarn.

Medical student Howard falls in love with the girl who sells flowers at the hospital where he works. She barely knows he exists. Then one day a body is brought into the morgue and Howard has to assist in the autopsy. Only too late does he realize it's the lovely Christine herself laid out on the cold slab. How this shock affects his already delicate mental balance and what he does to deal with this terrible state of affairs makes this a highly diverting outing for fans of the macabre Mark Jax is great as the disturbed Howard. He never once camps it up and plays even the most ridiculous moments straight. The SFX and make up on the mouldering corpse are excellent,. The plot takes plenty of surprising turns and the final sick twist raised a smile or two.

Great news that this will soon be out on DVD – and in an extras packed special edition.

If you like big studio, star-filled extravaganzas, then this is not for you. But if you're looking for something out of the ordinary, you'll not be disappointed.

Sort of a disappointment here from the usually stellar Mondo Macabro, who made an excellent DVD of a movie that is just sort of OK. LIVING DOLL is an updating of the story ideas realized so vividly in the 1972 Eurohorror classic HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE with Spanish horror star Paul Naschy, amongst other sources. Man who works in morgue encounters hot babe, falls in love from afar or other position of being unable to fulfill his longings, he witnesses a cruel brutalization by someone who should be caring for her, she dies tragically & turns up as the next case on his slab the following morning. Oops.

Mark Jax plays the twenty-something slacker who takes his obsession with the gorgeous female in question too far by probing into her apartment and (apparently) hallucinates or imagines finding a note that says she suffers from a rare neurological condition which may render her inert and deathlike in appearance. So like Naschy's Gotho the Hunchie, he digs her up, takes her home and props her up on his couch with a blanket to keep her warm. Meanwhile she's really dead and the body starts to decompose while Jax imagines himself having conversations with the girl, and they start having a relationship of sorts.

Much of the film "works", including the pretend NYC environments which give the film a claustrophobic look where walls, ceilings and the trappings of life always seem to be filling in the background. Living in NYC is very compartmentalized in that one spends their day going from one box to another, riding on or in boxes shuttling one to additional boxes, and eventually you go back to your own box which is only yours because someone allows you to mess it up. I liked the Eartha Kitt landlady role, the part of the slacker buddy who gets sidelined by Jax' strange new girlfriend, and the decaying body scenes were appropriately revolting. But for me the best moment in the movie was when he gets pulled over by the cops (driving his Trans Am, yeah right?) after digging his beloved's corpse up. The policeman lets him go with a stern comment about needing to have his headlight fixed. There was abundant nudity, some nice slashes of ultra-violence, and a macabre air to the film that was at odds with the 1990's production values, which are actually rather high for such a project. This movie was very well made.

The problem is that the story never really gets involving: We watch Jax on his slow descent into madness but are never really anything more than witnesses to a bizarre obsession. HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE is over the top, energetic and frenzied in it's blasts of graphic gore, sexuality and macabre touches, some of which seem alluded to by individual moments seen in LIVING DOLL. But the lead character is so blasé, unconcerned and unable to deal with the crisis that develops that his predicament is always held at arm's length. Jax plays his role as if he were in CLERKS, and merely demented instead of the deranged psychopath that the movie calls for. The film also seems preoccupied with the need to be respectable even while being revolting, a very British trait and again at odds with what could have been a really sleazy, sensationalistic descent into the gutters of a NYC hospital morgue. Instead we get a taste of trendy slacker life in NYC ala 1991 & what really is just another weird, dysfunctional emotional entanglement between two mismatched lovers. The dead body could have been a blow-up doll and the film would have generated just as much intrigue, perhaps more.

So yeah, for once I am in total agreement with the consensus: LIVING DOLL might be an interesting rental diversion to check out but it certainly isn't one that I'll be watching again anytime soon, which is sort of the whole idea behind lower budgeted 1990's horror movies in the first place. This one was meant to be on the racks of rental shops & you'll not be doing any harm to yourself by renting it once and then having it returned there for the next victim. It is a commodity rather than a statement, and HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE deserves the same kind of restorative treatment when anyone feels like getting around to it.

5/10: "Myehh."

Living Doll, the final film to be produced by exploitation legend Dick Randall, is reminiscent of Jörg Buttgereit's infamous shocker Nekromantik (1988), only it is less grim and doesn't go so far as to feature corpse sex. That's not to say that it would make a good date movie or is something that you would want to watch with your gran: it's about a very disturbed individual and contains some fairly revolting scenes.

Mark Jax plays medical student Howard, who secretly worships hospital florist Christine (page 3 stunner Katie Orgill). When Christine turns up on the slab in the hospital morgue, having died in a car crash, the already mentally fragile Howard is pushed over the edge, digging up the young woman's corpse and taking it back to his grubby apartment, where he imagines that she is still alive, dressing her up and holding conversations with her. As the days and weeks pass, Christine starts to decompose, which causes Howard problems with his landlady Mrs. Swartz (Eartha Kitt). And then Christine asks Howard to settle the score with her boyfriend Steve (Marcel Grant), whose carelessness behind the wheel caused her death.

Although not played for laughs, there is definitely some very dark humour in the film, and the resultant uneven tone does lessen its power to shock. That said, there are several moments that are still quite uncomfortable viewing - the autopsy of Christine, the pathologist making an incision to her neck and peeling back the skin; the murder of a transvestite, with a graphic throat slashing; and Howard kissing the putrefying remains of his beloved - most of which were cut from the UK VHS release by those lovely people at the BBFC.

Overall, the film is nowhere near as powerful or memorable as Nekromantik, but if you like your horror dark and twisted, then it's definitely worth a go.

6/10.

N. B. Set in New York, but mostly filmed in London.

Howard, a New York morgue attendant, falls in love with the beautiful Kristine but when she dies he digs up her corpse, takes it back it his grotty apartment and treats her as a "Living Doll". British director George Dugdale had previously made Slaughter High (1986), a film made in Britain but very poorly and unconvincingly set in the USA. He's done it again with Living Doll, there are some genuine exterior shots of New York but the majority of the movie was shot in Britain, using British actors who couldn't do an American accent if their lives depended upon it. I guess the makers were aiming for the lucrative American market but in doing so ended up with a film with terrible acting. Mark Jax, who plays Howard, is as flat as pancake, Eartha Kitt plays his landlady, one of the very few interesting characters. Glamour model Katie Orgill plays Kristine and spends much of her screen time naked. In addition to the bad acting the pace is slow and the microphone makes at least one appearance. The decomposing make up for Kristine is fairly decent. My UK VHS is cut by 13 seconds but I won't bother to upgrade to an uncut release. If you can stomach it watch Nekromantik instead!

Ten years ago somebody told me to watch this movie. They explained to me that it consisted of a lonely man finding out that the girl he was obsessed with had died. He then decides to keep her rotting corpse at his flat. I could not wait to watch it as I assumed from that brief synopsis there was so much potential for a really interesting movie. Unfortunately all I saw was an interesting idea far from utilize it's potential. Unlike Randall's earlier movie "Slaughter High" I feel this film wanted to be more than it was but fell well short of the mark. On the upside the pure subject matter may keep you interested for the whole movie and the grossness of the decaying corpse is funny, however these are not enough to win over most fans of the horror genre and it is unlikely to win many casual viewers. So the choice is yours. Rent it, but don't expect too much.