Lucio Fulci's Touch of Death (1988) Review

Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. Santa was kind to me this year bringing me not just a new harmonica and some slippers, but a freeview TV box from my brother and partner a DVD from my mother and father that I will review here later. Today however I am not going to review any of these, nor am I going to review the wonderful Fulci book, Beyond Terror.Instead, In true Bloody Italiana style, I am going to open the post Xmas reviews not with Killer Nun , which despite watching last night has already been admirably covered here by Sarah and also I believe reviewed for The Film School Dropout blog, but instead today I will however talk a little about Lucio Fulci's late career nasty entitled Touch Of Death known also as When Alice Broke the Mirror, or Quando Alice ruppe lo specchio.

Touch Of Death introduces us to Lester Parsons who despite being a gambling addict and a loser, as we are duly informed by his bookmaker, manages to fund his expensive habit by trawling through the lonely hearts columns looking for suitably wealthy widows to seduce and kill. However despite the seemingly endless stream of victims Lester does not get a break. Whether it is cards at which he is quite a bit frankly rubbish or horses in which he could not "win a one horse race which is fixed" Lester Parsons, it seems, spends money as quickly as he can kill and aquire it.

Just as Lester is unlucky in gambling he is not especially lucky at serial killing, with his bookmaker's analysis of him as being a loser having a wider resonance than the bookie could ever realise.

The film opens with Lester cooking what appears to be a nice fat juicy piece of steak while merrily pottering about to a piece of elevator style musak. But we quickly learn that this is no ordinary steak for we are quickly introduced to the basement where we find the body of a woman with steak size piece missing from her thigh. This is how Lester who clearly gambles too much eats, for he is clearly not a man who can afford groceries. Indeed, in order to feed his pets, which include some pigs and a cat he chainsaws the woman on slab into pieces in an extremely effective gore scene that is replayed in the delightful Nightmare Concert and when not killing spends his time going through the horseracing programme selecting losers, looking at a painting of his dead wife and scanning lonely hearts. He also has conversations with a voice he believes to be on a cassette tape which is in truth just in his head. He also watches videos of his victims.



Daily Lester watches the TV news which reports the latest news reports of his antics as he struggles to stay ahead of the police by changing his appearance in order to defy capture.

In this outing Fulci dispenses with any mystery or surprise instead invites us into the daily humdrum life of a serial killer who, when not doing his killing, could be not unlike millions of unsuccessful gamblers, leading the hudrum of day in day out life. So far so good.

But the film has a nasty undercurrent that I feel should be commented upon. Here dear Lucio has constructed a black comedy around this simple narrative and I find this both distasteful and not a little unsettling. The film is deeply mysoginist and will offend most liberal tastes including my own, no matter how open minded I claim to be about genre cinema, there is something spiteful about the juxtaposed gore and humour. It is not that neither the humour or gore actually work, both are effective and the comedy clearly shows an eye for comic timing forged by director whose early career included many comedies.



Viewers who are familiar with Tobe Hooper's excellent Texas Chainsaw Massacre will recall a scene where a woman is held in front of the family while a grandfather attempts to bash her head in with a hammer. The viewer will recall here that this scene was too played for laughs. It is unsettling then when we look back on that scene we find ourselves feeling a little dirty as we are manipulated into sharing the family's mirth instead of empathising with the potential victim.

If you share the above view of Chainsaw Massacre then imagine that feeling magnified or multiplied many times over then you will understand how this film plays, not just as a single scene but pretty much start to finish.



It is also telling that among the victimns of Lester, who incidentally is played straight and portrayed admirably by Brett Halsey who later shows up in Fulci's delightful Demonia, all are portrayed as imperfect women with the camera dwelling on hairy moles or in one case a pair of lady sideburns that would shame any male 1970's lead. This may well be to illustrate the killers point of view as he sees these woman as inperfect as opposed to how we are led to believe he viewed his late wife but it just serves to amplify the general mysoginy of the movie.

Make no mistakes about it, Touch Of Death is a nasty film, but critics who always seem to try to find the failings in Fulci's later work should not overlook the chameleon like approach to filmmaking by genre filmmakers. Here Fulci does not attempt to remake The Beyond about which genre critics can pontificate about its artistic merit but instead places us in the shoes of a serial killer as he moves from the intense and brutal to the almost banal from moment to moment and scene to scene. In that sense alone it is what a film version of American Psycho or a true crime book should be. It is what the Ed Gein story could be if reduced to the daily life of its protagonist. On this Level Touch Of Death works well.

If there is one major criticism I could level at our mass news media it is that it tends to present news in a sensationalist style, as pure infotainment. We are treated to portrayals of mass murderers as monsters or as beasts. I understand why they feel the need to do this. But lets be honest here you could be sitting one day on a train, in a bar or even shopping next to a serial killer and the chances are he will probably more resemble Lester Parsons than the Goat of Mendis. So as grim as the entire Touch Of Death experience was, dishonesty was not one of its failings.

DVD: Media Blasters
Running Time: 82 mins
Extras: Rare interview with Lucio Fulci, interview with Zora Kerova, trailers, interview with Fulci historian Paolo Albiero and a photo gallery.