Living Doll

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!

Here's a premise for ya: A morgue attendant, who's obsessed by a beautiful girl, soon finds her on the slab after a car crash, he takes her home where he creates a fantasy world in which she is alive and co-habiting with him, eventually leading to his total mental breakdown and destruction. Sounds intriguing doesn't it? WRONG! This film is a perfect example of a fair premise let down by totally uninspired film making. Instead of an interesting character development plot, what we are presented with is a film based almost entirely on a man coming in and out of his apartment, making excuses to people, and occasionally talking to or hiding a phony corpse. But at least the performances carry it through right? WRONG! Some of the most mind numbingly poor performances by any actors I have ever seen (just check out the girls meathead boyfriend) and not even in a laughable way, just in a truly 'couldn't care less if they all died' kinda way. It says a lot when one of the stronger performances is from Eartha Kitt! If you really need to complete guy falls in love with corpse film collection then do yourself a favour and fast forward most of the middle of the film, only the mildly deranged ending is worth the entry fee. Though it does have a great closing line. File under: mild curiosity.

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.

Living Doll was the last in an unrelated trilogy of British horror films made by legendary exploitation movie producer Dick Randall. Its bedfellows being Edmund Purdom's ode to Santa Claus abuse, Don't Open Till Christmas (1983/5) and Slaughter High (85) the only slasher movie in which a person is killed by drinking beer, it was also Randall's final work for the cinema (he died in 1996). Unfortunately Living Doll is the ugly duckling of this eccentric batch, but at least the lead actor didn't commit suicide this time around. Living Doll tells the tale of Howard, a medical student hopelessly obsessed with pretty lass Katie Orgill, but when the said girl appears dead on the slab, a grief stricken Howard takes her corpse back to his crummy bed-sit. While captured in the spirit of romance, he fails to notice his true love is quickly becoming a rotting corpse, at least he does until the movies weak denouncement. Like Slaughter High, Living Doll is a British film that goes to great lengths to convince its an American one, mainly by having a cardboard cut-out of the New York skyline as a prop and a days worth of shooting from the real deal. Presumably the film is meant to take place in the little known English quarter of New York! Living Doll falls inbetween being too lightweight to live up to its gristly potential, while being too adult to carry a `romantic horror comedy' tag. The lack-lustre script was apparently jazzed up by Randall but to little avail. To say that Randall's tried and tested exploitation movie approach locks horns with the films aspirations towards that droll mainstay of the British film industry, the romantic comedy is like saying that Four Weddings and a Funeral isn't Love Me Deadly. Whats left is diluted Randall sleaze with moments of bonesaw gore, rotting corpse effects and the casting of tabloid bust model Orgill who gives her worth by appearing as the world's most topless corpse. Amidst sly moments of humour, namely the (Sir) Cliff Richard connotations of the title (the end credits serves up a cover version) and a frankly bizarre cameo by Eartha Kitt. Still at a time when the words `Dodo' and `British Horror Movie' seem synonymous, it would be nice to say Living Doll is more of a heavy hitter. Unfortunately its not, and certainly fails to provide a decent epitaph to Randall's wild and outrageous thirty year career. Dust off your copies of The Wild World of Jayne Mansfield, Pieces, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks or The Bogeyman and the French Murders and remember him that way.

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."