Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jacques LaCerte, Story – Robert Cleere & Roger Wall, Producer – Buck Edwards, Photography – David Aaron, Music – Phil Moody, Art Direction – Steve Peterson. Production Company – Cinema National Corporation United Talent Productions, Ltd..
Cast
Mary Wilcox (Lindsay Finch), Lyle Waggoner (Alex Martin), Christopher Stone (Wade Farrow), Timothy Scott (Fred McSweeney), Michael Pardue (Lindsay’s Father), I. William Quinn (Billy Jo), Barbara Fisher (Dolores)
Plot
California heiress Lindsay Finch has necrophile tendencies. She likes to frequent funerals and afterwards sneak in to kiss the corpse. Her activities are noticed by Fred McSweeney, one of the funeral home owners, and he invites her to join his cult of fetishists. McSweeney lures prostitutes to his mortuary, kills them and drains their blood after which he and his group enjoy themselves with the corpse. Lindsay then meets and is romanced by art gallery owner Alex Martin. He proposes to her and they marry. However, her attraction to corpses and lack of interest in regular sex starts to cause problems in the marriage.
Love Me Deadly was the one and only film directed by Jacques LaCerte, who the rest of the time was an English and Drama teacher in California. The film did not see wide release during its day and remained an obscurity up until its dvd release in 2018. This is quite possibly due to its themes of Necrophilia and taboo sex. Or maybe it was the people thought it was too much of a film noir sounding title and confused it with something like Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
We are introduced to Mary Wilcox frequenting funerals and then trying to sneak in afterwards and kiss the corpses as they lie in repose. Certainly, the film is quite chaste when it comes to these scenes and never goes so far as to show Mary Wilcox doing too much more than kissing the dead unlike say the similar Kissed (1996). It is also a film that is surprisingly upfront about gay sexuality for its era, showing Timothy Scott picking up a gay hustler (I. William Quinn) at one point and taking him back to the mortuary for sex.
The film is shot in a fairly naturalistic way for the 1970s period. You initially don’t think there is anything odd about Mary Wilcox – she could just be a grieving relative kissing a loved one goodbye. On the other hand, when Timothy Scott gets the gay hustler back to the mortuary, things get weird on us – where he persuades the other man to strip naked on the slab table and then binds him, attaches a trocar syringe and then starts pumping out his blood.
Love Me Deadly soon becomes quite a remarkable little film. There are perverse glimpses of the cult engaged in rituals of drinking the blood of victims. One of the criticisms you could make is that we get very few details of who the cult are – this was not long after Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and screens were filled with sinister cultists in red robes engaged in devil worship (although there is no hint of that here). There is quite a bit of time given over to the romance between Mary Wilcox and Lye Waggoner, which becomes lead-in to the grim but perfectly logical conclusion.
Trailer here