Love Me Deadly Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Love Me Deadly Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Brian Orndorf August 6, 2018

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 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

"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.

Love Me Deadly Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Love Me Deadly Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary features screenwriter Buck Edwards.

• "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 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

"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.