Touch of Death (1988)

Absolutely Brilliant!

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Dutch are Deaf is Fulci's attempt at combining black comedy, slapstick and extreme gore into a bundle of low budget headscratching late eighties nonsense that raises loads of questions but doesn't bother answering any, just like Fulci's Sweet House of Horrors and basically any other film he made after 1987.This time, Brett Halsey of naked harpoon wielding ghost nun film Demonia and Demons 6 plays Lester Parson, whom we first see cooking himself a nice steak and watching a video of a less-aesthetically pleasing woman prancing around. Turns out the steak was once part of this woman's thigh and we get to see Lester graphically chainsaw the rest of her corpse and feed it to his cat and pigs. All this is done rather humorously, if you're Lucio Fulci.Lester's constantly in debt to gangster type/book keeper Al Cliver (from Demonia, Zombie Flesh Eaters, New Gladiators, The Beyond and House of Clocks – basically, he's Fulci's go to guy for supporting actors), and in order to get cash, he constantly tracks down, seduces and murders rich widows, all of whom are disfigured for reasons that are beyond my six or seven functioning brain cells. Maybe Lucio's trying to say something there, but who knows? To make things worse for Lester, he's now apparently got a copycat killer on his tail, who keeps killing people and leaving evidence at the scene, including his genetic code. "That's my DNA!" He shouts at one point. Do you know your genetic code? Things get dafter and dafter as this film goes on, and less gory too, until you're hit with Lester's wooing of Zora Kerova (of Anthropophagus and Cannibal bloody Ferox) and Lester trying to track down the other killer. Looking for a logical conclusion? Then, tough sh*t.I forgot to mention that Lester often talks to himself via a tape recorder.At least the film does have some sort of ending though, unlike other Fulci films of this era. It moves fairly quickly and is mercifully short, but if you've seen Cat in the Brain, you've seen all the gory bits. All you're missing is the Al Cliver footage and the wooing of Zora. Plus, the ending makes no sense and yet again I get the feeling that Fulci might be trying to subtly say something about something or other, but it's lost under the low budget, his vision, and my brain damage. It was worth a watch.Speaking of Brain Damage, I've decided to review as many of these late era Italian horrors. I've done a few already, but I've still to review: The Church, Red Monks, Ghosthouse, House of Clocks, Sweet House of Horrors, Demonia, Cat in the Brain, Nightmare Beach, Stagefright, Aenigma, House of Witchcraft, House of Lost Souls, Creatures from the Abyss, Troll 2, Graveyard Disturbance, and Demons 3: The Ogre. I've already reviewed Zombie 3, After Death, Maya, Dial Help, Demons 5, Demons 6, Witchouse, Spectres, Spider Labyrinth, Shocking Dark, Body Count and Cut and Run. Am I having a mid life crisis?

Quando Alice ruppe lo specchio is not Fulci s best. Its far from his "golden era" but its still a good movie, at least a funny and with some good gore elements. Lester is a psycho playboy who needs to seduce and kill rich women to steal their money and keeps his status quo. Also, he is a lost gambler, and he always lose money...so, ugly rich women is his salvation...always. Some good gore (mostly at the beginning of the movie), good funny moments (the mustached lady part is amazing), also some reminiscences to "American Psycho". Its a horror thriller with gore and black comedy. Off course, if you compare this to other Fulci movies (L Aldilla, Paura, etc) this will looks tame and crappy. But, you don't need to compare, and its a good Fulci movie. 7/10

Hailing from 1988, Touch Of Death is probably the most frustrating Fulci film I've seen to date, prompting me to join the chorus of horror fans who generalise that his films get worse as you get later into his career. Considering the plot synopsis, I was expecting some bloody bad-natured fun with this one, but for all its bizarre flourishes, it feels tedious even at a running time of just 80 minutes, and suffers from nauseatingly shabby production values and film-making craft (or lack thereof).El Story: A gambling addict widower wines and dines rich (and strange) women he finds via lonely hearts columns before offing them in gruesome fashion - sometimes eating them or feeding them to animals - and stealing their money to keep his debtors at bay. Sure, it's unlikely that just one man would be the host for so much screwed-up pathology all at once (addict, psycho/sociopath, cannibal), but this is Fulci!Touch is actually the cheapest and sparsest looking Fulci film I've seen. There's almost nobody in it, even in the background of shots out on the street, for instance. A newsreader who keeps appearing on the film's televisions to warn the non-existent cast about the maniac's latest doings operates out of the most pathetic TV studio on the planet. He never even gets to look at the camera because has to read all the headlines off misaligned sheets of paper.Some scenes just go on and on with the protagonist muttering to himself about what he's done or what he's about to do, but the acting is nowhere near good enough to sustain this kind of thing, so the main outcome is viewer boredom. The film also looks bland and ugly in general. I've read that it was intended to be an Italian telemovie (did it ever screen in that venue? With the amount of gore involved, it seems unlikely), and it does reek of crappy old telemovie production values.This is also Fulci's first foray into outright black humour, but he's just too graceless a director to make it work. Sometimes conspicuously cheerful or 'wacky' music is used to play against a gruesome scene, for instance while the hero/villain is carving up a dead body in his basement. The effect isn't really chilling or funny or ironic anything that you'd like it to be - it's mostly just hamfisted and crappy.There are of course some redeeming moments of gore (that you'll be waiting for while trying to stay awake), including the eventual murder by oven(!) of a woman who just won't quit life, even after her face has been totally bashed apart with a bloody great club, and a homeless guy who gets a car run back and forth over him about five times. The most outrageous element of Touch, however, is all the physical deformation on the widows courted by the crazy guy. Beards, hairy moles, messy harelips - it's not like he sought out women with these features, it's just the way all lonely hearts widows are, apparently. There are plenty of shots of Mr Crazy secretly grimacing while he's smooching up these women. The black humour of such garish misogyny might have some staying power or resonance if the film wasn't so poorly executed in general. In the end, Touch Of Death just seems like a really lazy, inarticulate mess.

Lucio Fulci was famous for his Italian splatter movies, mostly his undead films like Zombie or The Beyond. Here he directed a black comedy of sorts, but there's just one problem: its nauseating. I say this knowing that I like City of the Walking Dead (which is also gross but not like this). A compulsive gambler gets money for his habit by romancing ugly and deformed rich women then murdering them and stealing their cash. The film makes this plan look that easy. I guess the women were too ugly to go to a bank, so they always had their cash on person. After the upteenth murder I began to suspect what I've always heard about Fulci: he hated women. He must have. At any rate this film stinks, its not funny, and Fulci should have stayed with giallo and supernatural zombie movies. Avoid this film at all costs.