Love & Human Remains (1994)

Quirky, brilliant, twisted, dark, inventive, unnerving. This is a wonderful film, extremely well acted and smoothly directed. Moody and atmospheric, death stalks this mixed assortment of oddball lovers, both inside and out. Yet it is not a bleak tale of destruction, but a story of redemption, survival, and finally love. A great job by everybody involved. Top marks!

I bought this film from my local blockbuster for 99p an it's been sitting in my video bookcase for at least a year now. Then tonight I decided to see it, the film was quite different to what I had expected and I didn't find any humour in it all I saw was that it was a bleak look at people dealing with love relationships and sexual orientation and I didn't really see the psycho killer plot really having a point except to add tension to the end of the film. I felt that the person playing the lesbian woman did a great job. I was following her emotions and what happened around her. Some people would probably have seen some of the stuff that she does as funny but I could really put myself in her place, loving someone but them rejecting you at every turn no matter how hard you try. I thought it was a very moving film and dealt with all the different sexualities well. I was expecting something like Bound & Gagged : A love story, but this is a very different film. Not for bigots.

I first watched this movie in Istanbul Film Festival back in 1994. It was so good I took couple of friends with me and went to see it again the same week. The characters are very well played and the humor here and there is amazing. It sure is a very powerful gay movie. Some scenes make you feel you're watching an episode of Friends with much more sophisticated lines. I guess I'll put it in my VCR and watch it again tonight...

This is a lovely film. I always tell my friends that this is a gentle sex farce. It's not. I keep on forgetting that Love and Human Remains is a brooding, dark movie, full of smart lines, a great looking cast and a lot of intriguing ideas. There's also one of the more spurious serial killer plots of all time. Frankly, there's really only one suspect, and the whole serial-killing as metaphor for moral despair/AIDS is both trite and already dated. So frankly, forget the serial killer aspect of the plot. Watch this film instead for the great way it develops characters - the endearingly heartless gay waiter who's so bored he prefers waiting tables to acting. and the book reviewer who doesn't like leaving her room. There are some lovely scenes, and some cracking lines of quotable dialogue ("Hi Honey, I'm homo!") that make the film a lot more memorable and endearing than it appears. It does Canada no favours though.