Necrophilia meets mass murder in one of the sickest early-seventies exploiters (no mean feat!), which nearly succeeds despite bad acting and amateurish filmmaking. It’s great fun seeing 1970s TV mainstay Lyle Waggoner (of WONDER WOMAN) headlining this vile no-budgeter; all the other actors are barely known (aside from Christopher Stone, the late husband of Dee Wallace), and with good reason. Ditto writer-director Jaque La Certe (1928–1988) and LOVE ME DEADLY itself, which bears a 1972 copyright and played the grindhouse circuit. Beyond that, however, it’s a real curio whose particulars remain obscure.
Lindsay is an attractive blonde with a perverse secret: she likes to have sex with male corpses. This she does by attending funerals, where she smooches the corpses and, assisted by the unholy ministrations of a mortician pal, violates them. The reason? It has something to do with her late father, who was killed years earlier (we don’t find out precisely how until the end). Another ritual Lindsay practices is dressing up in little girl clothes and frolicking by her father’s grave. Lindsay’s boyfriend, meanwhile, is upset by her passionless lovemaking, unaware that she’s been cheating on him with quite a few dead dudes.
But there’s another, even more perverse individual on the loose: a deranged mortician who’s part of a cult that gathers each night to collectively strip naked and devour the flesh from corpses. Their latest victim just happens to be Lindsay’s mortician buddy, and she witnesses his defilement.
It’s great fun seeing 1970s TV mainstay Lyle Waggoner (of WONDER WOMAN) headlining this vile no-budgeter;
Lindsay, attempting to escape the mortician, weds her BF but is unable to consummate the marriage. One day he follows her to a funeral home, and comes to suspect that something is seriously wrong with his sweetie. He’s all too right, of course…
Problems? Let’s see: this film is ridiculous, poorly paced, horribly acted and plain crude. It also contains far too many of those obnoxious pastoral montages popular in seventies cinema. And what’s up with the absolutely horrendous song that plays over the opening credits? (Sample lyrics: “Our love will fade and die, yes it will die, and so will I…Darling go now, for I know now that if you stay too long I’ll luuuuh-huv you deeeeeeeeeeadly”).
Lindsay’s boyfriend, meanwhile, is upset by her passionless lovemaking, unaware that she’s been cheating on him with quite a few dead dudes.
Yet director Jaque La Certe isn’t entirely untalented. His skill with visual storytelling is evident throughout, this being a rare movie you can watch with the sound turned down (in fact it would probably work better that way). It also contains some truly repellent bits, albeit not the ones you might expect.
Yes, the depictions of necrophilia that have given LOVE ME DEADLY the scant notoriety it’s received are plenty vile, but the ugliest scenes are those of the cult member supporting players going about their dirty work. This is particularly true of a corpse we see ripped apart to the strains of György Ligeti’s “Requiem” (a.k.a. the monolith chant from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), and the film’s most disgusting bit, in which a naked man is slowly tortured to death on a mortician’s slab. So you can call LOVE ME DEADLY a bad film (which it is), but you can’t say it’s not affecting.
Vital Statistics
LOVE ME DEADLY
United Talent Productions
Director: Jaque La Certe
Producer: Buck Edwards
Screenplay: Jaque La Certe
Cinematography: David Aaron
Editing: Leo Shreve
Cast: Mary Wilcox, Lyle Waggoner, Christopher Stone, Timothy Scott, Michael Pardue, Dassa Cates, Terri Anne Duvalis, Louis Joeffred, Bruce Adams, Barbara Fisher, Edith Sills, Irving Rosen, “Toby Halicki” (H.B. Halicki), I. William Quinn