DEADLY LOVE
Directed by Michael S. O'Rourke. 1987. United States.
DEADLY LOVE is a tale of star-crossed lovers, bad wigs, and overweight men in their 30s pretending to be college kids. It’s not your typical slasher film. No, it’s more than that. It’s complex, you see, full of twists and turns, snap zooms and nonsensical cutaways, and stark, artsy juxtapositions like blood clouding bathwater cut against a romantic silhouetted moment at dawn. Yes, sir, this is art, goddamn it. But then again, so is gluing macaroni to a piece of construction paper, so...
The test of patience - I’m sorry, the movie - begins in 1965. We are introduced to Annie, a young(ish) blonde babe awaiting the arrival of her motorcycle-riding beau, Buddy. They are meeting in the dead of night because Annie’s father disapproves of her taste in men, which is not at all understandable here. After all, Buddy seems like a pretty great guy, respectful and considerate. I’m not sure what Dad’s problem is. I am, however, fairly certain I know what Clint’s problem is. He’s the creepy caretaker on the farm, currently carving Annie’s name into his palm with a knife. Between the two of them, it’s no wonder Annie wants to skip town with Buddy.
They almost manage it, too, but alas, Dad and shotgun-toting Clint catch her on the way out. The night ends not with a romantic getaway but with Clint unloading the gun into Buddy’s back. Clint buries the body, ditches the motorcycle, and we fast forward an undisclosed number of years to a disheveled Annie now living alone on the farm. She’s spent the past God knows how many years sitting outside, listening to her and Buddy’s favorite record, and frequently trying to communicate with his spirit through a magic mirror spell in her handy dandy Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge. That does appear to work, believe it or not, as Annie is visited in the night by a man dressed in biker gear carrying a rose.
Annie’s only outside contact is Skip, the local delivery boy. He rescues her from the annoyances of the local gang of layabouts. He even offers to spend time with her, not because he’s a sleazeball, but because, like Buddy, he’s just a nice guy. But living without Buddy is just too much for Annie, so one night she draws a nice, warm bath, picks up a razor, and shuffles off this mortal coil.
Is this depressing enough for you guys, yet?
The deed to the property falls into the hands of Annie’s poodle-haired niece, Hillie. For some goddamn reason, she decides she wants to live on the farm (and by “farm”, I mean there’s a barn; it’s as much of a farm as Higgins Haven). Skip visits her, just in time to save Hillie from the lecherous claws of one of the old bullies that tormented her aunt. The two strike up an immediate attraction, and she invites him over later for a beer and some heavy petting. But Skip isn’t the only one coming over later. The bullies are on their way, and so is a mysterious figure in biker gear.
So I just made this whole slog sound way more entertaining than it actually is. At 90 minutes, this movie feels interminable. Countless minutes spent watching recycled footage, endless meandering stretches of people looking at things and slowly crossing rooms, and having boring and mundane conversations on couches, porches, and in driveways. The tedium never lets up. The bullies don’t even show up at the farm until the one-hour mark, and they’re bumped off so quickly by our helmet-clad assailant that they might as well not have shown up at all. And worse, the rapey bully, the King Sleaze himself, is just lightly choked a bit until his neck snaps. He doesn’t even get a showstopper exit. Is that the best they could do?
The answer to that question is “yes”.
DEADLY LOVE wraps itself up in a ridiculous pretzel of an ending that brings the whole thing full circle. Of course, the man in the biker gear couldn’t be Buddy; it had to be a flesh-and-blood villain. But wait, there’s a double twist ending that does indeed give us an undead Buddy. And then there’s a triple twist ending that turns the whole movie into a completely different genre of trash. Wow, it took 86 minutes to do something interesting. Good on ya, DEADLY LOVE. You waited until I couldn’t give less of a shit.
My VHS rip of this movie came with a trailer for the Jeff Speakman and Bill Bordy action extravaganza, SIDE ROADS. I’ve seen that movie. It’s over two hours long, and it sucks. But there is more action, nudity, and excitement in that two-minute trailer than in the entirety of DEADLY LOVE. This is a celluloid sleep aid, the kind of movie you brag about seeing, not because you’re proud of yourself, but because you’re desperate to find someone who can relate to just how dead you are inside.