Love Me Deadly (1973)
Shriek Show / Anamorphic Widescreen (1.85:1) / color / 1 disc / 95 minutes

It would be hard to make a film as lurid as LOVE ME DEADLY, but what’s stranger is that this nasty little tale of necrophilia was made back in 1973 with a cast of known celebrities.

When it doesn’t veer into depressing Lifetime movie territory, LOVE ME DEADLY is a film more disturbing than recent waves of so-called “torture porn” in the tradition of SAW, HOSTEL, and TURISTAS etc. There’s only one real scene of violence, a brutal “live embalming” of a naked man that plays out with all the style of a snuff film. The rest of the film shamefully nicks away at the subconscious until we’ve bled to death emotionally.

Directed and written by high school drama instructor Jacques Lacerte (It’s the only work to his credit, he died in 1988), LOVE ME DEADLY, aka, SECRETS OF THE DEATH ROOM, stars icy blonde Mary Wilcox (THE BEAST OF THE YELLOW NIGHT) as Lindsay Finch, a woman with a scarred past who can only experience sexual gratification with the dead. Carol Burnett Show regular Lyle Waggoner stars opposite Wilcox as her loyal-but-frustrated husband Alex.

Lindsay’s problem resembles something out of a Chuck Palahniuk novel — she attends funerals for people she doesn’t know. The films opens with her attending a memorial service dressed for mourning. She waits until everyone leaves, then molests the corpse. In the shadows, mortician Fred McSweeney (Played with creepy precision by chronic TV actor Timothy Scott), observes Lindsay and perhaps even understands her problem. Things become clearer after we watch McSweeney pick up a male prostitute, take him back to the mortuary and pump him full of embalming fluid.

Meanwhile Lindsay is struggling to have relationships with the living. She repeatedly spurns a male interest, but eventually begins a friendship with and ultimately marries Alex, the brother of a dead man she meets during one of her funeral home visits. When the mortician McSweeney repeatedly spots her attending funerals, he deduces her obsession with necrophilia, and invites her to join his “club” of others who love the dead. As you may have guessed, things don’t end well when her husband, unable to consummate the union thanks to her mental hang-ups, follows her to the mortuary one evening and discovers her true passion.

Underneath the main story-line, we are afforded flashbacks of a childhood trauma involving Lindsay’s father that eventually explains the root of her obsession. It doesn’t take a lot to deduce how the film will end, but it’s a sad excursion into misery all the same.

LOVE ME DEADLY breaks any and all templates for horror or sleaze. It vacillates between exploitive necrophilic themes and stylized 1970s romance complete with long park walks, waterfalls and cook-outs. Yes, it’s jarring. Yes, it’s a little distracting. Similarly, the film’s music swings between grating funeral dirges and inappropriate summery rom-com motifs. It’s almost as if the film had two different directors.

And while the picture begins explosively with the unsettling live embalming, things get pretty dull for the next half hour or so, nearly treading into soap opera territory. But honestly, you need the breaks to digest the incredibly grisly and frank portrayals of necrophilia. This is one of the few films in my collection that genuinely disturbs me — the last time I felt this dirty I was watching Wes Craven’s LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.

The players in LOVE ME DEADLY perform admirably, in particular Wilcox with her portrayal of Lindsay as a frigid, almost selfish wife with childlike tendencies. I actually believe Waggoner when his Alex character tells her, “We’re children, playing a game,” after his repeated attempts to salvage their wrecked marriage. Scott’s characterization of McSweeney is shamefully lurid, especially in wake of the oft-mentioned embalming scene.

Shriek Show and Code Red did an admirable job pulling this long-lost film together. This uncut, anamorphic transfer is the definitive version to own. The disc features an alternate audio track with commentary from producer Buck Edwards, the film’s original trailers and a selection of trailers form Shriek Show’s recent releases.

I gave this one 2.5 stars for its ability to generate discomfort. My advice is to watch this one once, take a hot shower and try to think happy thoughts, then file this one away somewhere at the back of your collection.

Here’s a teaser for LOVE ME DEADLY: