"Cadaver eyes upon me see...nothing." If only The Coop knew then how his tongue-in-cheek paen to necrophilia, I Love the Dead(Rolling Stone magazine called the track "predictable"!), off of the number one 1973 Billion Dollar Babies album, would parallel a strange, rarely-seen horror movie produced for the price of a completely restored 1965 Chevy Malibu(roughly 42 grand, if you're keeping score at home) featuring one of the regulars from The Carol Burnett Show(think about that for a second) tackling the same taboo subject that very same year.Though the one-sheet for LaCerte's directorial debut(and swan song, consequently) warns against viewing by the "emotionally immature", this guy sure got a kick out of it.If the production wasn't mostly hindered by sub-soap opera level dramatics, bow-legged plotholes, over-reliance on montages, and an unintentionally riotous score with obligatory Shirley Bassey-esque/007-ish titular track about necrophilia, it might have been that much more effective in delivering the ghoulish goods as an early, understandably less graphic precursor to Buttgereit's Nekromantik 2:Return of the Loving Dead nineteen years later.For the morally bankrupt perverts that groove on graverobbing to the extremest of examples, Deadly will seem a bit subdued and tame, but it still manages more than it's fair share of uncomfortable moments and maybe even a shock or two if you've let your guard down long enough.I can remember passing by the big non-clamshell Video Gems vhs on the shelves just about every time I rented from Video World in Kingston back in the day, thinking it just didn't look promising enough to drop almost four clams for a rental on.Only when the outlet finally turned its toes up did I snag it up during a clearance sale, and I still only screened the damned thing once or twice until Something Weird came along and released a dvd-r of an unrestored source print years later.Forwards!
My wife!My best friend!!My formaldehyde!!!
In the back row at the funeral of a bearded, James Brolin-esque motherfucker, we first see Lindsey(Mary Wilcox), all decked out in her finest mourning-wear, but after refusing an escort up to the casket for last respects, and once the service has ended, she finds herself staring at the stiff with love in her eyes, before leaning down to lasciviously kiss his dead lips(!).Cue:Creepy sepia-toned childhood flashback sequence with Lindsey as a youngster spending quality "Courtship of Eddie's Father"-time with daddy to strains of the aforementioned title track.We next see the blonde grown up again and grooving away at an outta sight get-together playing quarters and exchanging flirtatious repartee with Wade(Christopher Stone), before slipping away to mix amphetamines and that brown liquor upstairs, and ending up mattress-wrasslin' with ol' Wade in the process.Negative vibes soon turn the sensual session into a rapetastic struggle and Lindsey is forced to fingernail the beejeezus outta Wade's facepiece when he forgets exactly what "No!" means.She clutches at a teddy bear, a gift from her father as evidenced by more beige flashback footage, weeping uncontrollably.Meanwhile, Fred the mortician(Timothy Scott) solicits himself a male pay-per-screw for a measly twenty-five bucks and takes him back to his office after hearing the trick doesn't live nearby and has no immediate family(serial killer shit if I've ever heard it!).Lindsey's circling promising obits in the paper and pulling repeat offenses at another funeral, but when she leans in for some live-on-dead action, the corpse's nose crumbles like fresh coffee cake at her touch(!), being the product of some nifty mortician's wax(!!), causing her to rush out into the arms of the dead man's brother, Alex(Lyle Waggoner), who remarks about what a good work they had done on his bro's rotten car crash-grill.Back at Fred's, he's convinces his piece of action to get stripped and strapped to his work table, where he fills the terrified screamer with formaldehyde and opens his neck with a scalpel to position the exit needle, effectively embalming him alive.
"Nooo!Don't slice open the ketchup pack hidden in the camera's blind spot!"
When Fred recognizes Lindsey at a later funeral, he asks her to begin to dig her acute necrophilia with his private group, inviting her to join in anytime.Wade's second chance with his blonde interest ends awkwardly, while Fred embalms a female hooker this time when Lindsey, wracked with desire, decides to take him up on his invite, only to get freaked out by a gaggle of swingers in their birthday suits grooving off a cadaver that's been partially autopsied.At this point, Lindsey tries to put her stiff-fucking ways behind her in exchange for conventional love, as provided by Alex through a hokey wordless romantic montage that ends with the couple newly engaged.Lindsey still finds herself staring down hearses and unable to perform in the sack with Alex, and when Fred calls to tell her he's got her a new deceased love doll to play with, Wade follows her to the mortician's office, Barnaby Jones-style, earning himself an embalming tool-shank in the labonza.When next we see him, he's been hoisted dead in the middle of the cult of nude corpse-fiddlers, who ritually strip his body, and groove off of it in double exposure as Lindesy abruptly wakes up.On their honeymoon with Alex, she's again unable to break him off a piece, and later he finds her dancing around her father's grave, reciting nursery rhymes and vowing to be a good girl, while decked out pigtails(!).She pleads with him to go visit his mother, which he agrees to, but doubles back and follows her instead, headed to the familiar mortuary.Inside he discovers his bride straddling a corpse while her necro-pals chant and hold candles, earning himself a hearty stabbing from the secretive Fred.We then see Fred telling her that he's brought her husband home and prepared him to be hers always and forever.Don't like where this is going, one bit.After some tranquilizers lead to a flashback about her father's death, she happily climbs under the covers with a dead, embalmed Alex; this time, ready for some serious action.Yeah, bleeech.
Rubbin' sticks n' stones together, makin' sparks ignite and the thought of lovin' you is gettin' sooo excitin'...
Wilcox, who's body bangs like Moe Howard's haircut, also appeared in genre flicks like Beast of the Yellow Night and The Psychic Killer.Waggoner who played several characters as a regular on Carol Burnett(it still blows my mind that the producers of tonight's review got him to be in this), enjoyed a long career on television, most notably on shows like The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island.You'll remember the late Christopher Stone as Dee Wallace's infidelitous husband in The Howling(1981), also co-starring with her in Cujo(1983).She was married to him for fifteen years in real life until he died of a heart attack in 1995.Code Red/Shriek Show has since released the most definitive disc of tonight's review to date, so if you're interested in checking it out, that's the one to hunt for.On the scale, Deadly merits two Wops, an interesting oddity from the "Me" decade that you'll probably flip a coin over seeing on some monotonous Wednesday evening.I'm guessing there's at least a small handful of brawds out there who'd love to see me dead, though post-croak sex probably isn't on their minds afterwards.A charmer, I am.
"I hope somebody brought the ABBA 8-track, the quaaludes, and the beer steins to piss in..."
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