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Love Me Deadly Blu-ray delivers great video and audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
A young socialite struggling to control her necrophiliac urges is torn between her affection for a kind businessman and the mortician who supplies her with bodies.
For more about Love Me Deadly and the Love Me Deadly Blu-ray release, see Love Me Deadly Blu-ray Review published by Brian Orndorf on August 6, 2018 where this Blu-ray release scored 4.0 out of 5.
Love can be a complicated thing, especially when it involves dead people. Necrophilia is not a common subject for a horror film, but there are a few
notable examples, including 1987's Nekromantik," but "Love Me Deadly" doesn't play the fetish for scares, instead offering a soap opera take on a
woman's relationship with the deceased, rooting the illness somewhere personal, avoiding pure shock value for something slightly softer. Director
Jacques Lacerte seems to be on mission to make a slightly more accessible tale of unimaginable trauma, but his restraint doesn't mesh well with the
feature's assortment of half-realized ideas and B-movie construction. "Love Me Deadly" isn't ghastly or enlightening, it's just slow and silly, working
itself into a lather as a way to display some level of emotional value for a picture that's essentially about a woman who turns to the touch of the dead
to deal with childhood issues. Now where's the fun in that?
Lindsay (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) is a young woman still reeling from the loss of her father, trying to get a handle on her longstanding grief while
remaining a social creature in early 1970s. She masks her pain with drugs and role-playing, but her interest is in the recently deceased, using the
obituaries to monitor funerals, playing the part of an old friend to get close to the corpses, feeling their silent comfort. Noticing the game is Fred
(Timothy Scott), a serial killer who delights in the creation of death, offering the bodies to his cult of necrophiliacs, who are more than happy to
bring Lindsay into their ranks, welcoming the blonde into a world where the pleasures of the flesh don't require consent. As Lindsay struggles with
her unsavory sexual appetites, she finds a suitor in Alex (Lyle Waggoner), a handsome art gallery owner who's very interested in the shy woman
but can't seem to crack her emotional boundaries, with their union tested by the illusion of her frigidity. As Alex searches for ways to engage his
love, keeping her away from creep Wade (Christopher Stone), Lindsay wrestles with her deep desires, which confuse her already tumultuous life.
The concept of a woman seeking out the recently deceased for sexual satisfactory is unpleasant, but there are ways to make such repulsion
interesting. Lacerte doesn't come up with many reasons to remain with "Love Me Deadly," but he's intermittently successful with strange
encounters, finding the first act the most persuasive in terms of finding ugliness and identifying threat. For Lindsay, early torment comes in the
form of Wade, a studly dim-wit who's not a fan of taking no for an answer, trying to rape the main character at one of her drug-laden parties,
forcing her to fend him off and experience revived anguish that's rooted in her disastrous childhood. Yes, there are daddy issues to work through,
with Lindsay finding a suitably warm-blooded replacement in Alex, adding confusion to her blurred headspace. Fred is a villain, and an effective
one, with "Love Me Deadly" tracking his efforts to pick up male and female prostitutes, strap them to an embalming table, and slowly replace their
blood with chemicals while they die. The first instance of this practice resembles something out of a "Creepshow" segment, and while crudely
violent, Fred's plan to keep his victims as fresh as possible is really the only passably nightmarish moment in the feature.
Lacerte dials down horrors to deal with Lindsay's pain and her relationship with Alex, a suave man who doesn't understand how his girlfriend could
profess her love to him and yet offer no consistent action in the bedroom. Perhaps another production would dig deeper into the chaos of Lindsay's
detachment, but this is a necrophilia movie, with the overall viewing experience more about the light caressing of cold flesh, with soft kisses slowly
evolving into intercourse involving "normal people, just with different passions." Sure. Lacerte also cranks up the mournful strings to give the effort
some approachability, making Lindsay's arc not about perversion, but need, with Wilcox's broad performance more at home on "As the World
Turns," while Waggoner also denies his professional reality, treating the material with as much sincerity as he can muster, infusing Alex with a
visible need to discover just what is up with his lady and her deep-seated issues concerning men and sex.
"Love Me Deadly" arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded image (1.78:1 aspect ratio) presentation, with packaging boasting a "Brand new 2K scan of
the original camera negatives of the uncut version (unlike the other label who has one 35MM edited print)." Me-ow, but at least there's quality here to
back up such a passive-aggressive warning, with detail strong throughout the viewing experience, isolating facial particulars and costuming, which
retain woolen and silky qualities, along with sheerness. Body views are also sharp, identifying the living and the dead with care. Colors are appealing,
enjoying fashion choices and deep skintones, while urban visits enjoy brighter signage. Greenery is dominant, with vivid cemetery grounds. Grain is
fine and filmic. Delineation is crisp. Source has its issues, including torn frames and scratches, while the original production wasn't exactly attentive to
quality, working with damaged footage, while a few scenes are simply out of focus. Judder is present as well.
The 2.0 DTS-HD MA sound mix handles the harshness of "Love Me Deadly" relatively well, delivering a louder but intelligible listening event that
preserves dialogue exchanges, which range from mumbled passes at intimacy to blood-curdling screams. Miraculously, distortion isn't a problem here.
Scoring maintains confidence and position, with agreeable instrumentation to maintain mood, while soundtrack selections are reasonably natural.
Sound effects are blunt but accessible.
"Maria's B Movie Mayhem" (2:53, SD) is a brief welcome featuring Maria Kanellis, who stands in front of a greenscreen and
shares IMDB trivia. Almost half the run time of this thing is devoted to the intro.
And Trailer #1 (1:50, SD) and Trailer #2 (:54, SD) are included.
"Love Me Deadly" isn't a comedy, but there's filmmaking here clumsy enough to elicit laughs. Long stretches of the endeavor play without dialogue,
turning the picture into a silent movie, possibly covering for bad audio, as full conversations carry on without any clue as to what the characters are
talking about. The music montage is strong with Lacerte, who returns to it on multiple occasions, adding as much filler as possible, including bizarre
side adventures for a few of the creeps trying to get their hands on Lindsay. Of course, this is a feature about necrophilia, so criticizing the effort for
lack of substance is a little odd, but "Love Me Deadly" initially seems to be going somewhere it never fully arrives at. As a cult oddity, there's plenty to
search for as the writing tries to normalize seduction of the dead, but there's not a consistent sense of sicko purpose, leaving the fear factor of the film
to wither and its perversion remains anticlimactic, at least for viewers.
Use the thumbs up and thumbs down icons to agree or disagree that the title is similar to Love Me Deadly. You can also suggest completely new similar titles to Love Me Deadly in the search box below.
U.S. label Code Red will release on Blu-ray Jacques Lacerte's horror thriller Love Me Deadly (1972), starring Mary Charlotte Wilcox, Lyle Waggoner, Christopher Stone, Timothy Scott, and H.B. Halicki. The upcoming release, which will be distributed by Kino Video, ...
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