Weird Wednesdays: Love Me Deadly

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Love Me Deadly is a baffling enigma of a film. In our age of boundless information, the internet contains precious little on this 1972 oddity, director Jacques Lacerte’s sole credit. The only immediately recognizable name associated with the film is original Gone in 60 Seconds director/star H.B. “Toby” Halicki, listed here as a producer and featured as a driver. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for the conspiratorial among us to think that he may have been moonlighting as the mysterious Lacerte, not wanting to be too directly associated with the subject matter at hand–that subject being one of cinema’s great taboos: NECROPHILIA.
In the case of Love Me Deadly, that word probably carries more weight than the film delivers–but it delivers in other ways that no movie has, before or since. We follow young, pretty Lindsay Finch (Mary Charlotte Wilcox), a wealthy heiress who has an interest in the prurient: dressing up for the funerals of men she never knew, only to kiss them directly on the lips once the grieving friends and family have cleared out. She regularly holds parties, but shows no interest in the many handsome potential suitors who regularly attend them. She’s a daddy’s girl through and through, and suffers from trauma that is hard to shake. Her father (who would make for a killer Neil Diamond body double) died when she was very young and she’s never gotten over it, regularly dressing in pigtails to visit his resting place. His death clearly comes with some secrets that Lindsay isn’t able to process, knowledge that Jacques Lacerte insists on saving for the final act.

Luckily for Lindsay and her very specific brand of trauma, she lives in Los Angeles, where life is cheap and sleazy. Local mortician Fred McSweeney (Timothy Scott) notices her proclivities for the perverse and feels something of a kinship. It just so happens that Fred regularly welcomes a collective of like-minded sickos to his mortuary after hours to get naked, worship Satan, and love the dead (as was the style in the ‘70s), and he extends an invitation to Lindsay to join them. Fred also likes to expedite permanent entry into the mortuary for some, as demonstrated when he picks up a street hustler under the guise of getting a little action, promptly straps him to a table, and pumps him full of formaldehyde. Hardly the finest in queer representation for the era, but at least it’s original!
Lindsay has a friend who is more interested in her than she is in him: handsome, young Wade (the great Christopher Stone), a ladies man complete with a blonde haircut that wouldn’t be out of place on a classic depiction of Cupid. He makes his pass at her early on, but even upon failure, retains their friendship, unaware that his pulse is simply too active for her liking. 

During one of her regular visits to the mortuary, Lindsay unexpectedly runs into the brother of one of the recently deceased, an art gallery owner by the name of Alex Martin (Lyle Waggoner). She recognizes Alex’s striking similarity to Neil Diamond (it’s the hair, really) and hatches a plan with Wade to visit his gallery–a visit that ends with Lindsay and Alex taking off together while Wade kisses on a complete stranger, proof of just how different the dating scene was in the days before the internet. Lindsay and Alex quickly fall in love in perfect ‘70s montage style, complete with a love theme (more on the music later) and shortly find themselves married. Alex, however, is dismayed at Linday’s unwillingness to consummate the marriage. In surprising fashion for an era where even the most heroic male movie characters tended to be brutish rapists, Alex immediately respects her wishes to be left alone, waiting for her to come around (which she promises she eventually will), while he sleeps in another room.
Lindsay starts receiving letters that aren’t particularly subtle about their perverse intent, postmarked to the funeral home and signed by Fred directly (admittedly, my first thought was “ooh, she won the grand prize at Pallbearer’s Clearing House!”) with an invitation to their next session of stripping nude with the dead. One late night, as Wade sees Lindsay zoom past on the way to a clandestine meeting at the funeral home, he gives chase. He is unfortunately met by a cultist who guts him on the spot, followed by the rest of the cult stringing him up to have their way with him. This scene is followed by Lindsay waking up from a nightmare in a way that makes it appear this moment never really happened…but Wade never appears again, so it must have occurred in one form or another.
Late in the movie, we’re introduced to Miss Pritchard (Dassa Cates), Lindsay’s lifelong housemaid who has somehow remained completely out of sight until it was convenient for plot purposes (the apparent excuse being that she only has two days a week to do her job). Miss Pritchard tells Alex all about Lindsay’s childhood trauma and how she used to drive Lindsay to her father’s grave every day. She directs Alex to the gravesite, where he discovers Lindsay frolicking, leading her to have a complete meltdown. Eventually, Alex and Lindsay have a meeting of the minds to try and make sense of their unconventional marriage, and with 20 minutes remaining in the runtime, the movie finally develops some conflict. Will Alex discover Lindsay’s love for the dead? Will he uncover the secrets of the cult? Is it possible for them to have a happily ever after while both of their hearts are still pumping blood?
For fans of bizarre, undefinable retro weirdness, Love Me Deadly is unmissable. Despite the thematically revolting subject matter, the movie itself is careful not to cross a line into the truly disgusting, resulting in a weird tonal mix of goofy relationship drama and cult thriller. It’s not incompetently made, although the romance scenes would fit perfectly alongside an episode of The Brady Bunch, a style that could not be more thematically discordant.

What really sells the film, right from the opening moments, is a great musical score by Phil Moody that lives and breathes alongside the rest of the movie–almost a character in itself. The opening credits montage features a title song sung by an artist named Kit Fuller, who gives it all the gusto of a classic James Bond theme; the love theme, “You’re Something Special,” is equally of note. It is hardly surprising that the score is so invasive–the film’s producer, Buck Edwards, admitted on the Blu-Ray’s audio commentary that it seemed necessary (alongside extra dubbing) to cover up what he felt was truly terrible dialogue.

Edwards’ choices are the rare kind of studio interference that help to elevate a tough sell of a concept, one filled with questionable choices that could easily misfire. Love Me Deadly is silly, hokey, confusing, and utterly captivating, oftentimes all at once. The melodrama is engaging, the horror elements (which are far fewer than the marketing implies) are effective, and the ending is perfect. Movies with this many disparate elements don’t always make for a cohesive experience, but by being a character study (not dissimilar to the far more dramatic Kissed), it stands apart from more grisly shockers with similar themes like Bruno Mattei’s Beyond the Darkness and Jorg Buttgereit’s infamous Nekromantik series. While hardly for the most delicate of sensibilities, this is a Weird Wednesday movie, and by god, it’s too weird not to love.

Kudos to our pals at Weird Wednesday for digging up (no pun intended) this oddity and projecting it in 35mm, one of the most well-worn prints I’ve seen in a very long time. Practically dyed pink, it’s scratchy and aged in a way that feels like a time machine, sending the audience back to a nasty old grindhouse theater where you never know what you’ll see on the screen next. Love Me Deadly is a bizarre gem that feels like it shouldn’t exist, but it does–and if you missed this exquisitely classic presentation, it’s luckily not too hard to track down a much cleaner print of the film. I think you should, because Love Me Deadly is a singular experience that I’m happy to keep alive just a little bit longer. 

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