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Howard (Mark Jax) is studying to be a doctor & is therefore doing
an internship at a hospital's morgue. Otherwise though he's a bit of a
loner, a weirdo even, but he is hopelessly in love with Kristine (Katie
Orgill), the flowergirl at the hospital. Thing is she hardly even takes
notice of him, & she has a boyfriend, Steve (Marcel Grant).
One day though, Kristine dies in a car-accident, & Howard finds her
in the morgue as one of his clients. & as if that wasn't
enough, he also has to be present at the autopsy ... Howard is
heartbroken, until he realizes that death is not necessarily the end, but
could be a new beginnin, so he digs her corpse up & takes it home,
& he starts having a relationship with the dead Kristine (who for him
is still alive), & all his other worries pale in comparison, that he
still owes his landlady (Eartha Kitt) rentmoney, that he is accused of
stealing in the morgue (which he did, but his best friend Jess [Gary
Martin] covers up for him), that he is almost fired, that he misses out on
his uniersity studies & is on the verge of being expelled ...
Even the fact that Kristine starts to slowly decompose, is covered in
maggots & occasionally rats come by for a bite doesn't really bother
him that much (as he still sees her as the woman she was when alive).
Eventually, in a private ceremony, Howard marries Kristine - exactly the
day the exterminator stops by (because of the rats who like to come to his
appartment), & he can only just hide her on the fire escape.
Eventually, even Howard realizes that having a corpse lieing around in
his appartment is a bit too risky in the long run, so he takes her with
him to the morgue (which is pretty much where you would expect a corpse),
where he's doing nightshifts anyway.
Soon, Kristine persuades Howard to bring Steve, her ex, to her (&
there is pretty much only one way a man enters the morgue, if you know
what I mean), so one day in Steve's appartment, Howard brutally attacks
& kills him, even though Steve is not quite as easy to kill as
expected. When Steve's corpse is brought to the morgueHoward gets his
reward from Kristine by passionately kissing her ... & it is only then
that he notices that she is not quite the woman he saw her to be but a
rotting corpse. In horror he runs away & seeks solace from a
prostitute (Heather Robbins) ... who also turns out to be not quite the
woman he thought her to be but a man called Bruce. In terror, Howard
slashes Gruce's throat, then returns to the morgue, where he loses himself
in delirious hallucinations, seeing Kristine & Steve dancing,
laughing at him.
Finally he shoots them, then turns his gun around, aiming at himself
and ...
Dick Randall, who over his long career as a filmproducer gave us some
wonderful memorable trash from around the world (including The Clones
of Bruce Lee, King of
Kong Island or French
Sex Murders) was never a man of subtleties, & I think he would
wholeheartedly have agreed to that, priding himself to always provide the
right fodder for the exploitation market. Living Doll though, his
last film - & his first produced for direct-to-video distribution -
is, beneath all its rotten corpses (well, actually just one rotten
corpse), a very subtle film, a deliberately slow moving cross of romance,
melodram, black comedy, horror & an empathetic portrait of your
friendly neighbourhood psychopath htat is, in its blend, unlike pretty
much everything else, & at the same time a highly entertaining film
(if you are not put off by the subject of necrophilia of course).
Naturally though, upon its release the film did not get the recognition
it would have deserved, because it was on one side produced by
exploitation producer Dick Randall, & on the other hand who would take
direct-to-video-films seriously anyways ? & then of course it's about
necrophilia ...
Not to be missed.
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