An attractive, single and rich socialite, Lindsay Finch, is keeping all those eligible men in their groovy get-ups at arm’s length (including a young, now sadly deceased Chris Stone, still a few years away from setting his eyes on and marrying that ultra cutesy horror femme fave Dee Wallace during the making of The Howling), even when she’s usually the one throwing the swinging party in her elegant pad. And it isn’t because she’s waiting for Mr. Right to come along — oh, no. It’s because she’s got one whopper of a secret. She’s a necrophiliac.

Another one of these lurid, crazy obscurities I can’t imagine I would have ever known existed if it wasn’t for the wonderful, doin’-my-best-to-make-it-a-yearly-sojourn 12 hour annual Ex-Fest in Philly. As our heroine sinks deeper into the world of dead flesh worship, she ends up being sorta blackmailed (only ‘sorta’, cuz she really wants to anyway) by a funeral home director (who couldn’t help but notice all the services she quietly attends and how she hovers over the male corpses long after everyone’s left) to join a cabal who not only celebrate their necrophilia together, but even lure unsuspecting, usually gay hustler victims back to the funeral home to knock out, drug and slowly embalm to death.

Now I know absolutely nothing about the psychology or pathology of necrophilia but it seems awfully convenient to have it all centered around an infatuation with, and objectification of, dead daddy (after all, we all lose our daddies), but it does allow for some really effectively odd sequences, such as the very awkward one of our heroine caught dressed as a little girl prancing around daddy’s grave by the rich debonair man who is so in love with her he ended up marrying her, even though she can’t bring herself to ever have sex with him (played by original Wonder Woman’s General Steve Traynor himself, Lyle Waggoner). It must be said, though, that while Lindsay often romantically imagines it’s her sleeping father and not some random dead guy lying there in each coffin that she’s caressing, she never ACTUALLY has at it with his naked corpse on a slab as the misleading (though wonderfully sensationalistic) poster art claims.

It’s definitely a morbid oddity (as most movies having characters getting intimate with the dead are) with some nice unsettling touches such as Lindsay getting so caught up making out with a corpse in a coffin she mistakenly destroys the putty nose and has to hurry out. And the scene of our funeral home director methodically and emotionally plying his trade on a horribly screaming strapped down victim is strong, unsettling stuff.

I guess you have to somewhat admire the attempt at a thoughtful approach to Lindsay’s journey (even if I’m betting the psychology is all wonky), unfortunately, even with all the interesting and sensationalistic elements, it ends up wading too close to soap opera melodrama. It could have used a little more (okay, perhaps a lot more) of an H.G. Lewis sense of outrageousness. It would have been nice to learn, other than having sex with dead bodies, what that mysterious cabal of corpse worshippers were getting up to down there with all that chanting.

Perhaps the weakest film of the Ex-fest day, yet, even then, it was still more than worth the view.

Buck A Review