one of my absolute favorites!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Running over the tramp was great. The character speaking to someone/or to self by way of tape recorder was interesting. Cinematography was great. Decent acting. Good music. The story was OK, not great. Better if they left out the comedy. The ending sucked. Very watchable.Running over the tramp was great. The character speaking to someone/or to self by way of tape recorder was interesting. Cinematography was great. Decent acting. Good music. The story was OK, not great. Better if they left out the comedy. The ending sucked. Very watchable.

Touch of Death (1988) ** (out of 4) Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) is about as evil as you can get. He spends his time looking for rich old women to fall into bed with and then takes pleasure when it comes time to brutally murder them.This later day Lucio Fulci picture is certainly a mixed bag. On one hand it's a low-budget version of Bluebeard but the budget is just so low that it gives the film an incredibly cheap and unprofessional look. The other side, and the positive one, this does contain some outrageous gore scenes and graphic violence that you can only find in a Fulci film. In fact, the majority of these gore scenes were later used in the director's A CAT IN THE BRAIN.There are some rather surprisingly good elements that can be found here including the black humor that the director brings to the picture. There are some really funny moments including one of the women who is a tad bit hairy and Halsey has to deal with her role hair getting into his mouth. Another funny bit deals with a woman whose legs keep popping out of the trunk that he's trying to stuff her in.The main reason to watch this movie is for the gore. The special effects aren't nearly as good as what we saw in earlier Fulci movies but there's no doubt that the majority of the budget went to them. We've got some pretty brutal stuff here including one woman who gets her head bashed in with a large stick. This here is one of the goriest and most violent moments from any of the director's films. There's also a chainsaw scene, which is just pure Fulci in the campiest way.TOUCH OF DEATH has some major problems as well. The story is pretty much non-existent because it's just a bunch of small scenes. We see him meeting a woman. We then see him killing the woman. There's really not too much that happens here so we're basically just sitting through a bunch of boring stuff waiting for the next death to happen. Halsey offers up a fine performance and you can also spot Al Cliver (ZOMBIE).

Dutch are Deaf is Fulci's attempt at combining black comedy, slapstick and extreme gore into a bundle of low budget headscratching late eighties nonsense that raises loads of questions but doesn't bother answering any, just like Fulci's Sweet House of Horrors and basically any other film he made after 1987.This time, Brett Halsey of naked harpoon wielding ghost nun film Demonia and Demons 6 plays Lester Parson, whom we first see cooking himself a nice steak and watching a video of a less-aesthetically pleasing woman prancing around. Turns out the steak was once part of this woman's thigh and we get to see Lester graphically chainsaw the rest of her corpse and feed it to his cat and pigs. All this is done rather humorously, if you're Lucio Fulci.Lester's constantly in debt to gangster type/book keeper Al Cliver (from Demonia, Zombie Flesh Eaters, New Gladiators, The Beyond and House of Clocks – basically, he's Fulci's go to guy for supporting actors), and in order to get cash, he constantly tracks down, seduces and murders rich widows, all of whom are disfigured for reasons that are beyond my six or seven functioning brain cells. Maybe Lucio's trying to say something there, but who knows? To make things worse for Lester, he's now apparently got a copycat killer on his tail, who keeps killing people and leaving evidence at the scene, including his genetic code. "That's my DNA!" He shouts at one point. Do you know your genetic code? Things get dafter and dafter as this film goes on, and less gory too, until you're hit with Lester's wooing of Zora Kerova (of Anthropophagus and Cannibal bloody Ferox) and Lester trying to track down the other killer. Looking for a logical conclusion? Then, tough sh*t.I forgot to mention that Lester often talks to himself via a tape recorder.At least the film does have some sort of ending though, unlike other Fulci films of this era. It moves fairly quickly and is mercifully short, but if you've seen Cat in the Brain, you've seen all the gory bits. All you're missing is the Al Cliver footage and the wooing of Zora. Plus, the ending makes no sense and yet again I get the feeling that Fulci might be trying to subtly say something about something or other, but it's lost under the low budget, his vision, and my brain damage. It was worth a watch.Speaking of Brain Damage, I've decided to review as many of these late era Italian horrors. I've done a few already, but I've still to review: The Church, Red Monks, Ghosthouse, House of Clocks, Sweet House of Horrors, Demonia, Cat in the Brain, Nightmare Beach, Stagefright, Aenigma, House of Witchcraft, House of Lost Souls, Creatures from the Abyss, Troll 2, Graveyard Disturbance, and Demons 3: The Ogre. I've already reviewed Zombie 3, After Death, Maya, Dial Help, Demons 5, Demons 6, Witchouse, Spectres, Spider Labyrinth, Shocking Dark, Body Count and Cut and Run. Am I having a mid life crisis?

Lucio Fulci, a director not exactly renowned for his subtlety, ill-advisedly tries his hand at black humour in Touch of Death, a made for TV movie about Lester Parsons (Brett Halsey), a psycho who seduces and murders rich widows in order to pay his gambling debts.Starting off with a wonderfully gory scene in which the lethal lothario disposes of his latest victim via chainsaw, mincing machine and hungry hogs, Touch of Death starts promisingly enough, but Fulci soon loses control of proceedings, introducing a weird sub-plot involving a mysterious copycat killer and some heavy handed 'comedic' scenes. There are several more graphic murders which, in true Fulci fashion, are extremely violent and gruesome, but even the high level of bloodletting doesn't stop this from being one of Fulci's poorer efforts.As I have found with many of his other movies, a comprehensible storyline is not exactly high on the agenda when Lucio is behind the camera. This film has many peculiarities which left me more than little perplexed: why didn't Lester dispose all of his victims using the dismemberment method seen at the beginning? Why are all of his victims either hairy or disfigured? What the hell is that ending all about?Fulci is considered by many to be one of the 'greats' of horror cinema; I don't understand his popularity, finding the majority of the films of his that I have seen so far to be generally lacking both decent narratives and technical proficiency. Touch of Death certainly does nothing to change my opinion.