Touch of Death (1988)

Touch of Death (1988) ** (out of 4) Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) is about as evil as you can get. He spends his time looking for rich old women to fall into bed with and then takes pleasure when it comes time to brutally murder them.This later day Lucio Fulci picture is certainly a mixed bag. On one hand it's a low-budget version of Bluebeard but the budget is just so low that it gives the film an incredibly cheap and unprofessional look. The other side, and the positive one, this does contain some outrageous gore scenes and graphic violence that you can only find in a Fulci film. In fact, the majority of these gore scenes were later used in the director's A CAT IN THE BRAIN.There are some rather surprisingly good elements that can be found here including the black humor that the director brings to the picture. There are some really funny moments including one of the women who is a tad bit hairy and Halsey has to deal with her role hair getting into his mouth. Another funny bit deals with a woman whose legs keep popping out of the trunk that he's trying to stuff her in.The main reason to watch this movie is for the gore. The special effects aren't nearly as good as what we saw in earlier Fulci movies but there's no doubt that the majority of the budget went to them. We've got some pretty brutal stuff here including one woman who gets her head bashed in with a large stick. This here is one of the goriest and most violent moments from any of the director's films. There's also a chainsaw scene, which is just pure Fulci in the campiest way.TOUCH OF DEATH has some major problems as well. The story is pretty much non-existent because it's just a bunch of small scenes. We see him meeting a woman. We then see him killing the woman. There's really not too much that happens here so we're basically just sitting through a bunch of boring stuff waiting for the next death to happen. Halsey offers up a fine performance and you can also spot Al Cliver (ZOMBIE).

This is just dreadful. I regret every second of the 80 minutes I spent watching this dreck. I think it's supposed to be a comedy, but I don't remember laughing much, except at a few blatant inconsistencies and downright glaring errors.An unattractive middle-aged man called Lester meets up with rich unattractive middle-aged women via lonely hearts ads, and then murders them for the money he needs to feed his gambling addiction. That's the whole plot, and that's really all that happens. Along the way there is an attempt at intrigue when Lester starts to get phone calls from a mysterious stranger who taunts him about knowing his secret, but its so badly implemented, you may not realise what is actually supposed to be happening. The sequences in which Lester murders the rich widows are all quite brutal but also seemingly dressed up as comedies. One sequence has a woman bludgeoned with a wooden pole and then shoved into an oven. It's very cruelly depicted, but it is played out against blaring big-band waltz music, with Lester pulling faces and adopting comedy poses throughout. Another scene has the victim murdered while she constantly sings shrill opera songs...you have to see this to believe it! Actually - you don't have to see it at all, in fact I strongly recommend you avoid this flop. Fulci does not seem to know which hat he is wearing and there's no evidence of any of the flair seen in his earlier career. One sequence stood out to me as particularly wretched: the revelation when Lester suddenly realises that he has no shadow. Fulci seems unable to think up any visual representation of this phenomena on screen, so from this point on he just films the actor as normal, shadow and all!! And thus totally blows the whole angle. Either he had zero budget for effects, or he just didn't care enough to think up any way of showing it. Whatever it was, that should give you a taste of how lame this whole project is. I couldn't even understand most of the film, and there certainly wasn't anything on screen worth looking at half the time. Even the ending was as flat as a pancake. A real dud.

Lucio Fulci, a director not exactly renowned for his subtlety, ill-advisedly tries his hand at black humour in Touch of Death, a made for TV movie about Lester Parsons (Brett Halsey), a psycho who seduces and murders rich widows in order to pay his gambling debts.Starting off with a wonderfully gory scene in which the lethal lothario disposes of his latest victim via chainsaw, mincing machine and hungry hogs, Touch of Death starts promisingly enough, but Fulci soon loses control of proceedings, introducing a weird sub-plot involving a mysterious copycat killer and some heavy handed 'comedic' scenes. There are several more graphic murders which, in true Fulci fashion, are extremely violent and gruesome, but even the high level of bloodletting doesn't stop this from being one of Fulci's poorer efforts.As I have found with many of his other movies, a comprehensible storyline is not exactly high on the agenda when Lucio is behind the camera. This film has many peculiarities which left me more than little perplexed: why didn't Lester dispose all of his victims using the dismemberment method seen at the beginning? Why are all of his victims either hairy or disfigured? What the hell is that ending all about?Fulci is considered by many to be one of the 'greats' of horror cinema; I don't understand his popularity, finding the majority of the films of his that I have seen so far to be generally lacking both decent narratives and technical proficiency. Touch of Death certainly does nothing to change my opinion.

For an 80 minute TV flick from Italy you could do a lot worse I'm sure. It's got a made for TV look. I'm guessing it was videotaped rather than filmed since it was made for TV. That is the main downfall in what is otherwise a pretty decent horror flick.We have some top notch splatter here. Very disgusting and vile. Nothing pleasant whatsoever. But it never really takes itself seriously since it's a black comedy. Portions of the score are good and then portions are atrocious making this TV cheapie seem even cheaper.Fulci does what he can with the budget and provides some interesting camera work and makes us laugh at some nasty stuff (interesting since Fulci didn't do too many straight up black comedies). As with many Fulci films, the ending leaves one with a feeling of 'WTF?' Which is exactly what we should expect from this king of horror.Not a great film by any means but if you're a Fulci fan, pick it up.