Touch of Death

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.

"Touch of Death" is the story of Lester Pearson, a down on his luck gambler whom starts seducing wealthy women with various deformities, then killing them off for a prie fixe lunch of human flesh and cash for his horse racing betting debts.

Fulci has an oft tenuous grasp on his plots, but this has to be the most ridiculously over the top entry in the canon. Though the gore is the usual splatter spectacle (the best of which effects wise is probably the scene where the blackmailing vagrant is run over with Lester's car), it's housed in too goofy of a context to be scary.

After several of the least politically correct murder scenes in film (a bearded lady meets death in a microwave, an inexplicably opera singing widow who solos in her sleep is interrupted by being strangled)and some darkly comic body disposal (complete with silly cartoonish theme music), Lester realizes he has a larger problem than lady killing. An imitator is leaving incriminating evidence at the scene of his crimes that points to Lester. Before long, his picture, modus operandi and DNA genetic code (?!) are being broadcast on the nightly news. Will his latest target ("Cannibal Ferox"'s Zora Kerova) find out before it's too late?

The final twist makes no logical sense and shoestring budget shows, but "Touch Of Death" is a mindless guilty pleasure of Fulci poking fun at himself that will entertain his devoted fans.

I was actually very pleasantly surprised. I didn't go into this expecting much as i've never been a huge Fulci fan, but I do enjoy him, and as far as Fulci this probably had tighter editing and a more straightforward storyline than anything else I've seen by him. The 'twist' was obvious the entire time but it didn't make the film any less enjoyable and there were no plot holes- maybe a first for him? This film was less surreal than most and mainly focused on dark comedy and a simple crime tale, not much in the way of sets or cinematography, but it did what it set out to do, and with less stumbling than I've come to expect from the 'godfather of gore'. All in all a worthy watch if you can get your hands on the BluRay edition.

Lucio Fulci is one of the leading names in gore-soaked horror cinema, and Touch of Death certainly does that reputation proud! Fulci's films started to get worse as his career progressed (with the exception of the hilarious Cat in the Brain in 1990), and as this film was released in 1988; you can count on it not being as good as his previous output. In fact, with films like Don't Torture a Duckling and The Beyond in mind; Touch of Death is one of Fulci's weaker efforts, but even so - there's plenty here to delight the man's fans. The film is clearly meant to be something of comedy, but the comedy is more of the absurd, over the top variety than one that will have you in stitches. Fulci's use of music helps to instill the absurdity of the film, which sees lonely widower/gigolo Lester Parson taking women home and putting them to use. He likes to mutilate them in horrible ways, such as beating them with a stick and chopping them up with a chainsaw; and just to add to the proceedings, he eats them too. Fulci also installs a subplot about the investigation into the murders, and the murderer's descent into madness.

This film is something a prelude to Cat in the Brain, and it's obvious that Fulci had Touch of Death in mind when he made his self-starring vehicle, as many of the gore scenes from that film are taken from this one. The scenes of gore are really quite nasty, but their impact is lessened by the comic tone. The first scene of gore sees our 'hero' going to work with a chainsaw (surely horror cinema's finest weapon), and then putting the remains of his victim into a meat grinder. Then we are treated to a beating scene (which features some of Fulci's trademark eye violence), a nasty sequence involving a car, a corpse having it's feet cut off and several other scenes along the same line. The film is really dirty; with the poor cinematography adding brilliantly to the overall unclean feel of the movie. The acting is typically low level, but the actors portray their (mostly silly) characters with gusto, and the result is a film that people will like more it's fun value than its credibility. Being a Fulci fan, I am more susceptible to this sort of trash; and I cant really say that non-Fulci fans will get much of a kick out of it.

A moody, middle-aged gigolo (Brett Halsey) kills off women after he gets bored with dating them and uses their body parts for trophies and for consumption.

Though many fans are divided, generally "Touch of Death" is regarded as a better latter era Fulci film. The overdone black humor touches, "unconvincing" gore effects and baffling ending does turn off some fans. While it is true that some of the film is hard to follow because we are unsure how much is madness and how much is reality, this really is a solid effort from Fulci. And for me, the gore may be unconvincing but still unsettling.

Where does this fit in his overall canon? Not top three, probably not top five, but I would still have to say it is firmly on the top half of Fulci's works. Certainly superior to "Cat in the Brain", which has gotten much more exposure over the years.