Touch of Death (1988)

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Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

Synopsis: Older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey), constantly having to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, has a novel way of acquiring the funds needed. Dating wealthy women from the Lonely Hearts adverts in newspapers, wooing them so they take out all their money in a form easy for him to horde, and then kill them. Things are not what they originally seem for Lester, however, when a copycat killer is reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report.

I didn't expect to be covering Touch of Death, one of the later Lucio Fulci films from after 1985 until the end of his career which were once more obscure. There are strange entries at this point in his filmography - Aenigma (1987) springs to mind, whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain (1990). Touch of Death itself, made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, is a strange movie to my surprise. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on.

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The tonal shifts are themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims. Most of the film is also, in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, even if a failed comparison, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a netherrealm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but his female victims are exaggerations or even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova having pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. Not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by American actor Brett Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but a man unable to keep hold of money and about to slip off the deep end.

He also gets realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further. It's clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. The illegal horse gambling group, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man, who exist in their own world wary of the police. Horse racing commentary is constantly in the soundtrack, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

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That it's played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, that victim losing an eye but still standing, that it becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction.  

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here doesn't off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before, is prevalent here too. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. The kind of twist you'd want from Italian genre cinema.

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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Quirky/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

A dark horse just in terms of Lucio Fulci's stranger films. Does Touch of Death actually work though? That depends on the viewer, the content and presentation erratic and likely to get varying reactions. For me, there's a lot to like. Fulci is at least going with the premise to its extreme and its memorable as a result.

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