Living Doll (1990)

Okay let me get this out of the way first thing. I know I come down hard on certain movies but to be fair I do try to find the good in just abot every movie I review. Well not this time! This movie deserves everything it gets! Why? Stick with me.Medical student Howard (Mark Jax) is one sick puppy. In fact he would make a good workmate with Bob from NEKROMANTIC. Howard is in love with Christine (Kate Orgill) who works in the flower shop of the hospital but he is too shy to even give her a flower. Christine also has an abusive boyfriend and you just know that Howard will do something about that . . . eventually; but I am getting ahead of myself.One night a cadaver comes into the morgue and it turns out to be . . . wait for it . . . Christine! He does not buy the boyfriend's story about Christine's drunk driving causing an accident. Well this pushes Bob, who was thirty cents short of a quarter to begin with, right over the edge. He steals her body from the grave and makes her his roommate; he buys her clothes, cooks her meals and so on. In his own sick mind she responds warmly but in real life she is slowly rotting into one very gross looking paperweight. It isn't long before she is talking to him and suggesting he do . . . well . . . certain things.So does he go on a killing spree? NO! It takes over an HOUR of screen time before he gets revenge for Christine's death. Does he bother to get even with his mean landlady (Eartha Kitt, who must have been starving at the time) or his sleazebag boss? NO! This is the sorriest example of a terror movie I have seen in many moons! Howard's boss dies but it's fron natural causes! No, that was not meant to be a sapoiler. This whole darn movie is a spoiler in itself!If you want an example of a scary movie involving corpses see Jorg Buttgereit's NEKROMANTIC. This British import will leave a bad taste in your mouth, sort of like rotten meat.

Sort of a disappointment here from the usually stellar Mondo Macabro, who made an excellent DVD of a movie that is just sort of OK. LIVING DOLL is an updating of the story ideas realized so vividly in the 1972 Eurohorror classic HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE with Spanish horror star Paul Naschy, amongst other sources. Man who works in morgue encounters hot babe, falls in love from afar or other position of being unable to fulfill his longings, he witnesses a cruel brutalization by someone who should be caring for her, she dies tragically & turns up as the next case on his slab the following morning. Oops.Mark Jax plays the twenty-something slacker who takes his obsession with the gorgeous female in question too far by probing into her apartment and (apparently) hallucinates or imagines finding a note that says she suffers from a rare neurological condition which may render her inert and deathlike in appearance. So like Naschy's Gotho the Hunchie, he digs her up, takes her home and props her up on his couch with a blanket to keep her warm. Meanwhile she's really dead and the body starts to decompose while Jax imagines himself having conversations with the girl, and they start having a relationship of sorts.Much of the film "works", including the pretend NYC environments which give the film a claustrophobic look where walls, ceilings and the trappings of life always seem to be filling in the background. Living in NYC is very compartmentalized in that one spends their day going from one box to another, riding on or in boxes shuttling one to additional boxes, and eventually you go back to your own box which is only yours because someone allows you to mess it up. I liked the Eartha Kitt landlady role, the part of the slacker buddy who gets sidelined by Jax' strange new girlfriend, and the decaying body scenes were appropriately revolting. But for me the best moment in the movie was when he gets pulled over by the cops (driving his Trans Am, yeah right?) after digging his beloved's corpse up. The policeman lets him go with a stern comment about needing to have his headlight fixed. There was abundant nudity, some nice slashes of ultra-violence, and a macabre air to the film that was at odds with the 1990's production values, which are actually rather high for such a project. This movie was very well made.The problem is that the story never really gets involving: We watch Jax on his slow descent into madness but are never really anything more than witnesses to a bizarre obsession. HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE is over the top, energetic and frenzied in it's blasts of graphic gore, sexuality and macabre touches, some of which seem alluded to by individual moments seen in LIVING DOLL. But the lead character is so blasé, unconcerned and unable to deal with the crisis that develops that his predicament is always held at arm's length. Jax plays his role as if he were in CLERKS, and merely demented instead of the deranged psychopath that the movie calls for. The film also seems preoccupied with the need to be respectable even while being revolting, a very British trait and again at odds with what could have been a really sleazy, sensationalistic descent into the gutters of a NYC hospital morgue. Instead we get a taste of trendy slacker life in NYC ala 1991 & what really is just another weird, dysfunctional emotional entanglement between two mismatched lovers. The dead body could have been a blow-up doll and the film would have generated just as much intrigue, perhaps more.So yeah, for once I am in total agreement with the consensus: LIVING DOLL might be an interesting rental diversion to check out but it certainly isn't one that I'll be watching again anytime soon, which is sort of the whole idea behind lower budgeted 1990's horror movies in the first place. This one was meant to be on the racks of rental shops & you'll not be doing any harm to yourself by renting it once and then having it returned there for the next victim. It is a commodity rather than a statement, and HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE deserves the same kind of restorative treatment when anyone feels like getting around to it.5/10: "Myehh."

Infamous schlock producer Dick Randall's last film (or last released film, anyway) turns out to be a surprisingly good and grim little horror yarn.Medical student Howard falls in love with the girl who sells flowers at the hospital where he works. She barely knows he exists. Then one day a body is brought into the morgue and Howard has to assist in the autopsy. Only too late does he realize it's the lovely Christine herself laid out on the cold slab. How this shock affects his already delicate mental balance and what he does to deal with this terrible state of affairs makes this a highly diverting outing for fans of the macabre Mark Jax is great as the disturbed Howard. He never once camps it up and plays even the most ridiculous moments straight. The SFX and make up on the mouldering corpse are excellent,. The plot takes plenty of surprising turns and the final sick twist raised a smile or two.Great news that this will soon be out on DVD – and in an extras packed special edition.If you like big studio, star-filled extravaganzas, then this is not for you. But if you're looking for something out of the ordinary, you'll not be disappointed.

Ten years ago somebody told me to watch this movie. They explained to me that it consisted of a lonely man finding out that the girl he was obsessed with had died. He then decides to keep her rotting corpse at his flat. I could not wait to watch it as I assumed from that brief synopsis there was so much potential for a really interesting movie. Unfortunately all I saw was an interesting idea far from utilize it's potential. Unlike Randall's earlier movie "Slaughter High" I feel this film wanted to be more than it was but fell well short of the mark. On the upside the pure subject matter may keep you interested for the whole movie and the grossness of the decaying corpse is funny, however these are not enough to win over most fans of the horror genre and it is unlikely to win many casual viewers. So the choice is yours. Rent it, but don't expect too much.