Touch of Death
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- Release Date: November 1988
- Directed by: Lucio Fulci
- Written by: Lucio Fulci
- Runtime: 1 hour 25 minutes
Touch of Death was Lucio Fulci's second direct-to-video horror film, made as part of the same line that Sodoma's Ghost was a part of. Unlike that film where Fulci wrote the script and initially had no intention of directing it, Touch of Death was a project that he wrote with the intention of making it himself. Being a low-budget feature and filming right after the completion of Sodoma's Ghost, it's natural to assume that this would be another cheap, uneven experience in his sickness-era filmography. However, I found myself to be pleasantly surprised with this one!
The movie focuses on a man named Lester who is massively in debt due to gambling on horse races. He begins seducing wealthy widows, killing them in various ways and taking whatever money he can to pay off loan sharks. Lester is quite the change of pace when it comes to the protagonists of a Fulci film. He's a deranged man who butchers women, eats part of them and feeds the rest to his cat and pigs, all while appearing and acting like a mild-mannered widower in everyday life. As the movie goes on, his sanity seems to degrade further and further as the police's investigation closes in on him. There are scenes where he talks to himself via a tape recorder, as well as others where he hallucinates talking to his own shadow. While he's nowhere near as creepy as someone like Joe Spinell in Maniac, he feels like a character who is in a similar vein. You're clearly not supposed to be rooting for him, but you can't help but be engaged as he descends further and further into madness.
The movie's effects are also pretty solid for such a low-budget production. Nearly every death scene features Fulci's trademark excesses, such as skin peeling off or eyeballs popping out. There's a gnarly scene where Lester puts a woman's head in an oven and turns it on, and while it does use some dissolve cuts throughout, the effect of her head melting open is almost on par with something like the opening of The Beyond. While none of the gore scenes are quite as effective as the ones in his older films due to the cheaper production and cinematography, the makeup work remains strong. He clearly knew what his strong spot was when it came to horror, and really made an effort to pull off the best death scenes he could with such a meager budget.
There was also a lot more comedy in this than I typically expect from a Fulci horror film. Each widow that Lester kills is homely in some way; some have large moles, one has facial hair, and another has a visible lip scar. Whenever he has to kiss them and be romantic, he grimaces every single time, and the women never notice because their eyes are closed. Another comedic highlight is a scene where Lester is unable to fully fit a body in the trunk of his car, so he simply pulls a tool out of the trunk and lobs its feet off without hesitation. Probably the dumbest one of all is a scene where a cop is completely oblivious to the fact that a woman in the seat next to Lester is a dressed-up corpse, complete with goofy music running in the background. I didn't go into this movie expecting a sort-of horror comedy, so many of these moments got me to laugh out loud just for how dumb they were. Having directed numerous comedy films in his early career, it was fun to see Fulci bringing his sense of humor into a horror production so many years later.
Compared to how uneven Sodoma's Ghost was, Touch of Death feels like a much more solid and confident film. Despite his sicknesses and being limited by the confines of a direct-to-video budget, Fulci managed to make a film that features a much stronger story, a more interesting main character, and many more gore effects that would please any fan of the genre. You can tell that this was a production that he actually cared about, unlike Sodoma's Ghost where he was essentially collecting a paycheck. It may not be on par with the classics, but it's well worth watching for some cheap thrills and laughs.