Lindsay is a girl haunted by childhood trauma. As a child, in fact, while clumsily playing with a gun she unintentionally caused the death of her father. As the years went by, the memory of that tragic event ended up affecting her private life to the extent that she created a fetishistic obsession with death and corpses, morbidly observed and 'desired' during the various funerals of strangers she never fails to attend. Her perverse passion goes so far as to seek physical contact with the corpses themselves, and in this she is helped by her acquaintance with a strange priest of a sect devoted to necrophilic orgies with corpses taken from morgues...
'Love me deadly' is a 1971 film (not released until 1973), and it shows today. In spite of the thematic boldness tackled, the director's intention cannot be said to be to visually shock, devoting himself rather to narrating a descent into necrophilic perversion in a rather linear and composed manner. The film, which boasts the participation of Mary Wilcox, at the time headlining Playboy, has the merit of juxtaposing the sphere of morbidity with the more purely erotic, thus becoming a precursor, however obscure and not easily available, to a genre whose visual and narrative potential was at the time still largely to be explored. In this sense the work pays its dues, accusing drops in tension especially in the pace of the story and in a certain underlying simplism. Still, it is a film to be viewed with a philological spirit.
Review by venus in furs
