Touch of Death (1988) (Italy)

aka When Alice Broke the Looking Glass

⭐️⭐️1/2

Lester Parson is the type of middle-aged gigolo who targets women viewed as past their prime. That’s just fine for him because their money allows him to live comfortably and his habit of butchering them in brutal fashion allows him to collect macabre trophies and feast on their flesh. Yeah. He’s that kind of guy. He’s portrayed by Brett Halsey who is having a fucking blast playing around in a pitch-black comedy from the wonderfully sardonic Lucio Fulci. It makes the most of a script that seems to be stolen from H.G. Lewis and better suited for at least two decades earlier. But, the demented charm of the damn thing makes it as watchable as the more entertaining of the Godfather of Gore’s output. It’s also harnessing professional performances that would completely rub all charm off of any of the basement splatter Lewis threw out into the world. Anyways, Parson is introduced eating a hunk of human, sharing it with his cat, dismembering said human’s corpse with a chainsaw in his cellar, grinding down the meat and feeding bits to his pigs. He’s happy to comment that everyone gets their fair share. He longingly speaks to a portrait of his dead wife, bets on the horsies and talks to his radio about his concerns on being caught. Disturbingly, his radio speaks back to him and assures him not to worry. Uh oh. Al Cliver shows up as Lester’s scuzzy bookie and throws things off by not sporting the blonde mustache I’ve come to know and love. Supporting his gambling habit has Lester diving into a woman pool that’s less than aesthetically pleasing but there’s bills to be paid and bets to be made. So moles, deformities and facial hair will have to go ignored. Botched homicides, blackmailing vagrants, disagreeable corpses, vanishing mental stability and deepening debts complicate our lunatic lothario’s life. Fulci’s later output was never as well-received as his string of essential splatter flicks or his accomplished giallos from his earlier career but I have a soft spot for when the maestro just put up two middle fingers and let his demented humor take the wheel of a car careening towards his final days (unless your talking about Sodoma’s Ghost… that movie can go fuck itself). I’ll always defend that man’s output which is only ever an uphill battle when discussing the late eighties and early nineties batch of final flicks. This isn’t one of the prime examples, as it’s kind of a one-note joke but a goofy lead and cheap-jack over-the-top splat make it watchable. Plus, the fresh-faced Al Cliver variant is worth a look too.