Love Me Deadly

This great, sadly neglected piece of 70's sleaze is much better than the later, more well-known NEKROMANTIK.For me, the most disturbing scene was not the corpse sex, but the blood draining sequence. This must have turned heads back in '72. Recommended.

Lindsay, a pretty blonde in black complete with veil sits in one of the back rows for a funeral service. She remains after all others have left, and goes up to caress and kiss the dead man, though without quite making contact. The opening credits appear over sepia-tinted scenes of a young blonde girl playing with her loving father.

Lindsay has a party, and a blonde male friend of hers follows her upstairs, but she fights him off. She continues visiting funeral parlors. At one, she bumps into the deceased's brother, an art gallery owner, and they take a mutual liking to each other. He reminds her a little of her father, and innocent sepia-tinted scenes of her with her father are interspersed throughout the film.

Another man cruises by a gay film theater, and picks up a young hustler. He takes him back to his office, saying it's a veterinarian's office, but after he straps the young man down, it's clearly an embalming room.

Lindsay is approached by the cruiser at one of the funerals, and he tells her about necrophilia. She tries to throw herself more deeply into her relationships with her blonde friend and the gallery owner, but she can't handle much more than an arm around the waist or a quick kiss.

She tries joining a group of necrophiliacs at the funeral parlor, but the group activity scares her off. The group does dress in black robes, and use red candles, but they don't seem to be devil worshipers as some others have said.

Her relationship with the gallery owner deepens, but she still can't handle a physical relationship. She also has a couple other secrets no one except her maid knows.

The movie moves fairly slowly, but I found it pretty involving. It is quite sad. I was surprised to see H.B. Halicki (Gone in 60 Seconds, The Junkman) was one of the associate producers! There's also a good musical score. Over the opening credits, the theme song "Love Me Deadly" is sung, and the musical theme is repeated instrumental in different variations throughout.

This is the precursor to modern art-horror hybrids like KISSED or NEKROMANTIK. A frigid woman who likes funerals and is turned on only by dead bodies enters into a sexless marriage with CAROL BURNETT SHOW stud Lyle Waggoner and secretly joins a cult of necrophiliacs in a local morgue. For a film that had so much perverse and ghoulish potential, this film only partially entertains. There's a particularly shocking scene early in the film of a guy being embalmed alive but the film gets bogged down in the drama of marital problems in the second hour. While the serious approach to such outrageous material is greatly appreciated, a little more ghoulish horror would've been nice.

To be honest, when one reads the synopsis of this film one expects the worst. Surprisingly, this is an engaging and frank study both of necrophilia and of a daughter's inability to let go of the past.

Helped along by a very professional sounding theme tune (sung by Kit Fuller), and a lively score echoing films of much more mainstream cinema, this is a shocking film that will make you think for a long time afterwards. Unfortunately, the good acting and imaginative story is let down by some chronically bad editing - particularly when we are suddenly introduced to the character of Alex - but this aside, you should find much more to enjoy about this movie than you will find to dislike about it.

"Love Me Deadly" is to necrophilia what "Max Mon Amour" is to bestiality: one of the last taboos to be tackled in an grown-up fashion, but which can be appreciated by an audience without needing to visit a seedy sex-shop; where story comes first, and titillation is far down the line.

"Love Me Deadly" follows a young woman in Los Angeles who attends the funerals of men she does not know in order to sneak kisses with the dead. She is soon spotted by a kindred spirit--a man who shares her same necrophiliac tendencies--and it turns out he has his own Satanic group he wants her to join.

This early '70s effort is marketed as a horror film, and in some ways it is, but "Love Me Deadly" plays more like an oppressive chamber drama, drenched in gaudy colors, cheap-looking sets, and peppered with necrophilia sequences. Given the audacious subject matter here, one would think the film would edge into total exploitation, but it manages to keep its wits about it.

Necrophilia aside, the film's main horror angle is the funerary worker/leader of a Satanic necrophiliac cult which he wants the female protagonist to join. This plot element seems hackneyed and the actual nature of this "cult" is not entirely made clear (especially its alleged Satanic motivations, which are never really elucidated), and the film suffers slightly because of this. Mary Charlotte Wilcox portrays the leading character nicely, and the script attempts to unravel her sexual proclivities, tracing them back to a childhood trauma; at times the film reminded me of its contemporary, "The Witch Who Came out of the Sea," in that it deals with similar themes regarding childhood trauma, though it goes about them completely differently. Like many films of this ilk, "Love Me Deadly" also suffers from poor editing and dubbing, which is fairly common for grindhouse pictures of this type.

All in all, "Love Me Deadly" is a mildly entertaining horror film that is not nearly as disturbing as one might expect. The subject matter, though perverse, is handled well, and the lead character evokes sympathy on some levels despite her unusual attractions. It is an obvious precursor to the more extreme necrophilia-themed films that would follow, such as "Nekromantik," as well as the more introspective, quiet ones, like "Kissed." Not a terrible film overall, though it is certainly not for everyone. 6/10.