‘Love Me Deadly’: A Bizarre Exploitation Film About Love and Necrophilia [Celluloid Purgatory]
Welcome to Celluloid Purgatory, your friendly neighborhood video store (er, column), offering the finest in unseen, underseen, forgotten, and obscure films of yesterday and today. From the grindhouse to the drive-in to the movie your neighbor shot on VHS and beyond, store manager Preston Fassel hopes to offer you recommendations that will broaden your horizons even as they melt your mind.
The argument about high-versus-low art has existed for as long as there’s been art to criticize. While the case can be made that the debate truly began in earnest after printing technology allowed for the mass production of broad-appeal visual art, it’s easy to imagine a group of irascible Neanderthals slugging it out over the merits of various cave paintings. The same way we feel compelled to group ourselves according to the brands we embrace, the sports teams we support, and the political parties for whom we vote, there’s something intrinsic about identifying whether your artistic tastes are of high aesthetic value or “of the people.”
It’s a divide that took on deeply political connotations in the latter half of the American century: “highbrow” art assumed certain politically conservative connotations versus the freewheeling, uninhibited “lowbrow” media produced and consumed by cultural liberals. The Reagan age made a whole snobs-versus-slobs cinematic subgenre out of it. Of course, there’s a third perspective, popularized by New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg: that there is no distinction between high and low, that there’s just as much artistic merit to be found in Moonlight Sonata as Bark at the Moon. How does one qualify a piece of media, though, when it occupies both spheres at once? What to make of a movie that’s both a serious dramatic character study and a shamelessly exploitative cash grab? That’s the question posed by the inaugural rental in Celluloid Purgatory, 1973’s Love Me Deadly.
To get an idea of the tone of Love Me Deadly, imagine something approximating a romantic comedy from hell. Lindsay (Mary Charlotte Wilcox) is a beautiful, sheltered, California heiress who never seems quite at home at the many, many parties she throws. One gets the impression she’s there primarily to gain access to the pharmaceuticals that make her life of chronic anxiety more bearable. Or maybe she’s just putting on appearances for any prying eyes—rich, single socialites are expected to socialize, after all. Like a freaky Bruce Wayne, Lindsay’s shindigs provide the perfect cover for her true passion: ditching her chic 70s duds for Victorian mourning wear and cruising funerals, Fight Club style.
Rather than seeking emotional catharsis through shared grief, though, Linday’s motives are a little more… unwholesome. See, she especially likes to attend the funerals of middle-aged white men. And she really loves the funerals of middle-aged white men who look like her long-dead father. And she really, really loves to hang around after the funerals in hopes of scoring some extracurricular time with the deceased…
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. While her party-girl persona may work as a great cover for other society types, Lindsay’s frequent trips to a local church attract the attention of Fred McSweeny (Lonesome Dove’s Timothy Scott). Like Lindsay, Fred himself lives a double life: by day, he’s a respectable mortician. By night, he’s the High Priest of a clan of Satan-worshipping, necrophiliac nudists who avail themselves of the many, many bodies to which Freddie has access. Sensing that Lindsay is a kindred spirit, Fred decides to take her under his wing, playing the role of manic pixie dream demon.
Lindsay’s not quite sure how she feels about that, though. She’s recently made the acquaintance of Alex (Lyle Waggoner, I kid you not, from The Carol Burnett Show), a stately gentleman who checks a lot of boxes: he’s rich and polite; unlike every other man in her orbit, he understands the concept of consent; and, most importantly of all, he’s a dead ringer for Lindsay’s dead daddy. When Alex proposes—and makes it clear he’ll actually respect the virginal Linday’s desire not to consummate their relationship until she’s ready—she finds herself torn between two worlds. Will she give herself over to the dark desires of Fred’s clan? Or will she finally find a way to process her trauma and live a happy life?
Love Me Deadly is a deeply upsetting, deeply confused, and sometimes deeply confusing movie. Much of that can be chalked up to executive meddling: director/co-writer Jacques Lacerte was a stereotypical frustrated artiste, a high school drama teacher with aspirations of being the American Truffaut (as producer Buck Edwards recalls, it wasn’t an unusual sight for Lacerte to arrive onset in a turtleneck and beret). When the movie is focused on Lindsay’s tormented psyche, it’s fascinating stuff. Rather than double down on the Freudianism by making Lindsay’s relationship with her father abusive, we instead learn her torment comes from him having been an ideal nurturer and caregiver who died too young. Rather than symbolically recreating some formative trauma, Linday’s hangups instead arise from the crossed wires of society’s emphasis on a woman’s sexual value, crippling guilt, and her own desire to escape into an idealized past.
Her desire to marry Eros and Thanatos doesn’t come so much from thinking the dead are erotic as it does from her only being able to engage with her father as he exists in reality: as a corpse. It’s some daring psychological exploration made all the more fascinating by Lindsay’s dynamic with Alex. In a genre populated with nice guys, Alex is a genuinely nice guy. Another movie would’ve delivered a third-act reveal that he’s just another predator in a long line of men hungry to possess Linday’s money and beauty. Instead, we get the impression he’s lived long enough to learn that people grow at different rates, and he genuinely loves Lindsay enough to help her get over her anxieties at her own pace. That’s the sort of thoughtful three-dimensionality many modern horror movies are hard-pressed to deliver.
Horror is the operative word here, though. Love Me Deadly was coming out at the front end of the 70s exploitation boom. 1971 alone saw A Bay of Blood, Dr. Phibes, Daughters of Darkness, and I Drink Your Blood take American drive-ins by storm. Production company United Talented Productions and distributor Cinema National didn’t want a thoughtful character study, necrophilia be damned. So it was that Love Me Deadly was reverse-engineered into a more visceral horror film mid-production, with heavy shades of Rosemary’s Baby—the extent to which a Satanic organization played a role in the original script, if any, was enhanced on set, to the point Edwards found himself pressed into service as one of the cultists.
An early murder-by-embalming (prefiguring both Phantasm and See No Evil 2) was written in to up the body count, as was the demise of Lindsay’s frenemy/frequent sexual harasser Wade (because it wouldn’t be an exploitation movie without at least one lecherous pervert). The latter death forms a part of the movie’s disjointed narrative approach: Wade is sacrificed in a Satanic ritual that may just have been a dream, a dangling thread left unresolved because the decision to ice him was made on the spot. The result is rather like watching a version of 500 Days of Summer where Zooey Deschanel will occasionally excuse herself to go fuck a cadaver. It could work, but both on paper and in execution it’s just weird.
Compounding the movie’s tonal tug-of-war are some interesting production choices. There are montages set to peppy, British-invasion-style musical numbers which dilute both the arty and horror vibes in favor of a real rom-com feel, to the point it wouldn’t entirely feel out of place if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan strolled by in the background. That, itself, was the result of what was apparently poorly written and even more poorly delivered dialogue. Per Edwards, the dailies were so groan-worthy that the decision was made to splice together highlights from multiple scenes and overdub them so as not to strain the audience’s credulity.
On the other hand, the original score also includes a real banger of a Shirley Bassey-style torch song, Love Me Deadly. It opens the movie in a fantastically rendered sequence composed of scenes from Linday’s childhood that freeze-frame in sepia, representing her crystallized memories, and plays throughout as both a tragic and triumphant leitmotif; unfortunately, little to no information is available on performer Kit Fuller, who could’ve had a career performing numbers like this in New Hollywood features.
Despite its subject matter, Love Me Deadly wisely keeps its most unsavory elements in the periphery, making it slightly more accessible to the average horror fan than the description might let on. This isn’t Nekromantic and Lacerte was no Jörg Buttgereit. Whether a given individual enjoys it is entirely up to what they bring into the movie. It’s a Rorschach test of the viewer’s psyche, of whether you consider this enjoyable puerile trash, an unconventional art flick, or a little of both. Regardless, Love Me Deadly is a film that needs to be seen to be believed and indeed deserves to be seen, if for no other reason than its uniquely bifurcated tone. It’s not every day a film comes along that so precariously occupies the realms of art film, horror movie, and exploitation cash-in.
As of this article’s publish date, Love Me Deadly is streaming free on Tubi
Categorized:Editorials
