Touch Of Death (1988)

Touch Of Death (1988)

Brett Halsey, famous for providing his own wardrobe in Worst Fulci Movie Ever candidate Demonia, turns up again on a work visa in Italy, this time playing a cannibalistic compulsive gambler who always seems to get hooked up with deformed women. There's no word on whether he again brought his own disguise kit to the set to give the part of Lester Parson that little something extra, but he did come equipped with a fairly sizable chest that stretched out the polo shirts he seemed fond of wearing.

This may or may not have been one of those grubby Italian TV movies that Lucio migrated to doing back in the late eighties (hey, a lot of us did stuff in the late eighties that we aren't proud of - I never missed an episode of The Hogan Family), but I never cared enough to find out. I just played it off like this was shown only on late night Italian TV for jobless degenerates, at least until people like me spent like $25 on the import DVD version of it.

I'm assuming it has TV origins since the DVD presents this thing full frame with a washed out, dingy print and the opening credits of this made me wonder if this wasn't one of Lucio's home movies or something since they were plain white titles over a black background. Nothing like hooking the viewer right from the get go I always say.

I don't think there's any reason to rehash all the other really awful Fulci movies we've already interred around here and I'm not going to wring my hands trying to figure out if this is a little bit worse than Sodoma's Ghost or a teensy bit better than Aenigma, but though the movie is really awful, I don't think it could truly be the Worst Fulci Movie Ever, simply because there isn't nearly enough trademark Fulci foolishness to earn it that coveted title.

In fact, I spent most of the movie waiting for Fulci's typically nonsensically supernatural explanation for things to kick in, or at the very least for a fog machine to get cranking. Instead, we are left with a fairly conventional serial killer tale, though it still is confusing and poorly executed enough to betray its real origins.

Lester Parson is, as we learn from the get go, a cannibal who likes to watch videos of the women he is eating while he is getting ready for dinner. He also has this mangy cat (Lucio went with an orange tabby this time around, apparently having had a falling out with the star of his failed The Black Cat) that he always gives a helping of chopped whore to and he even has a bunch of pigs he keeps somewhere in his house (maybe it's an adjoining barn - you know how fancy these Italian villas are) that he feeds all the leftovers to.

After setting up this rather inauspicious beginning of watching Lester eat a big steak, Lucio blows like half his budget when Lester goes back to his butcher room and starts chainsawing the woman up that he has just eaten part of. There's close up shots of the chainsaw going through arms, legs and across the neck and you're left wondering how much better off Italy would be if they would show reruns of something wholesome like The Hogan Family late at night. (Not reruns of Valerie though since she's one of those left-wing "I'm not going to be on your show because of a contract dispute" types.)

Lester isn't just your regular old cannibal though. He actually has a sensible reason for eating rich women. See, he needs their money to fund his love for the horses! Now, I'm not talking about the kind of love for the horses that someone like Hercules might have. I mean this guy likes to play the ponies!

He's always betting thousands of dollars on these horse races and he's always losing them. In fact, he's so pathetic that his own bookie makes fun of him for his lack of talent in prognosticating the winners saying that he didn't think Lester could win a horse race even if it was fixed. Ouch! If you're being ridiculed by your own bookie, I can understand where you're going to have issues that make it difficult to relate in socially acceptable ways to others. In any event, Lester needs to find women because he keeps thinking that he's going to win big and also because he gets hungry.

Another cool personality trait that Lester exhibits is that he likes to talk to himself. This may not seem so unusual for someone that has all the earmarks of a guy who's nucking futs, but he talks to himself via a tape recorder! He'll push play on his tape machine, start talking and wait for his own pre-recorded voice to answer him. This clearly is semi-Fulci territory in that it is completely ridiculous, but I'm sure all the people out there who like movies where Brett Halsey is romancing women with hairlips are going to say that he was only imagining his voice on the tape and that it was all in his head. That's fine, but none of the rest of what we see makes any sense then.

Each time Lester does away with some ugly skank, he settles in to watch the news later only to see that some similar murder has been committed, but the killer hasn't disposed of the body. We've watched in graphic detail how Lester gets rid of the bodies, so it can't be him, can it? Well of course it can't be him! It's literally his shadow! Ugh! The scene at the end of the movie where he's whining to his own shadow about how it ruined everything is a fine example of non-existent special effects combined with the insipid plotting you were secretly hoping to see in this one (you were also secretly hoping to see hairlips, right?). So why are we seeing him dispose of the bodies if he isn't really doing it?

Here's another example of the botched up mess we're dealing with. Toward the end of things, Lester gets a phone call from the person that is setting him up to take the fall for all these killings (though since he knows he did the killings, he's really just outraged that this guy is copying him and planting evidence that points to Lester) and it's obvious that it's his own voice, but since this guy is only a little crazier than the audience, Lester goes off to find this mysterious stranger and confront him about all these problems he's causing Lester.

So where does he go to find this guy? The racetrack of course! How does Lester know he's at the racetrack? I have no idea! He just hangs up the phone and drives over to the racetrack and breaks into some room and finds a piece of paper crumpled up with his name and phone number on it! Or maybe he only imagined that he did, because would it make any sense if he actually did all this himself since he wouldn't be at home to take the call if he was really at the racetrack calling himself at home? Of course not! And would it really make any sense for me to have spent money on buying this DVD? Of course not! So, it must have all been in my imagination and really never happened, right?

Well, let's pretend that I really did buy this DVD and keep the party going! Besides, I know all of you are anxiously awaiting the down and dirty info on the lady that looks like Popper from Blues Traveler who gets all nasty with Lester. A lot of times when people complain about a gal having a beard or mustache, they're just exaggerating for effect. Sure, there might be a little bit of a five o'clock shadow disfiguring her otherwise lovely four chins, but in the dark, cheek to cheek that could just be your own, right? Well this one chick Lester hooks up with has very visible sideburns and mustache. She even has two hairy moles on her chest! You almost can sympathize with Lester when he beats her head to pulp with a wooden club and then puts her in his oven and melts her face off.

Now, I don't want you to take this the wrong way or anything, but I do have to confess to laughing a little bit during this movie. Please don't take this as some kind of endorsement, because I can't emphasize enough the generic stupidity and threadbare look displayed throughout this movie, but there I was chuckling at Lester's plight.

Brett Halsey is pretty much the whole picture here and I'll give him some points since he seems to be in on the joke throughout things. His best moments aren't when he's killing broads or losing a high stakes poker game. They come whenever he's trying to romance these nasty looking pigs that he hooks up with. Whenever they aren't looking at him, he's cringing at their beards, wincing at their hairlips, and gagging at how close those hairy moles are to his face when he's being intimate with them. Sure, he's a cold-blooded maniac, but it all isn't chainsaws, ovens, and running vagrants over repeatedly with his Mercedes. There's some hard work involved here as well.

Lester's laughable attempts to disguise himself are also something to take note of. He watches the news a lot and they keep saying how they're closing in on the killer (he's been given the catchy name of "The Maniac" by the press) and they have a description of him, so Lester gets contacts, shaves his beard, gets a new pair of glasses, then dyes his hair this barf-colored blonde and finally is found out by his hairlipped girlfriend who saw the news before he came over and recognized him from the police composite sketch on TV.

Lester and I had pretty much the same reaction when we saw that composite. It looked pretty much nothing like Lester. In fact, it didn't even look like a human being so much as some facial features haphazardly put together. Hairlip comes back with the classic "oh, it's you alright" and shoots him a couple of times, leading to the now famous argument with the killer shadow.

A horrible, horrible effort from a guy that once upon a time brought a little style to pointless gore and only solidifies his reputation as "dude who made the worst horror movies of the late eighties." In movies like this, you can't even tell that Fulci ever had any talent to begin with, let alone that he actually lost whatever he had. Doesn't someone from his family care enough about his memory to buy the rights back to these bearded ladies and forever prevent them from being seen in public and held up to ridicule?