Mondo Macabro have just released a DVD of Living Doll, a little-seen film from 1990 that is extremely powerful and worth a view from all horror fans interested in a film that is truly perturbing.
Mark Jax stars as Howard, a morgue worker with not too much socialization experience who exchanges looks with Christine (played by Katie Orgill), a young girl who works at a flower shop. After a feud with her abusive boyfriend, Christine ends up dying and getting sent to the morgue that Howard works at, where her lifeless body undergoes an autopsy (shown in all its gory glory). Seeing the girl he likes dead proves to be too much for Howard, and he begins imagining her as still alive and clean of any medical incision-induced scars. Howard then takes it upon himself to bring Christine’s corpse home, and from there, some of the most bizarre scenes in the history of cinema unfold as Howard talks to, watches TV with, dresses up, and eventually marries (through an airing of a wedding on television) Christine, who, by the end of the film, is in a state of complete putrefaction.
What makes Living Doll different from all the necrophilia-themed horror films is that instead of simply fucking the corpse, Howard instead has an actual loving relationship with it (he even remains abstinent with the corpse until they are married, but even then, when he’s about to make love to it, he is interrupted, so necrophilia is only alluded to and not actually carried out in this film). Somehow, Living Doll manages to pull off an actual believable sense of love that Howard has for the dead body of Christine—he treats her like a queen, is excited to be around her, and thinks about her constantly. It’s sickening, but strangely (and I emphasize “strangely”) romantic.
There is a certain beautiful scene in the movie in which Howard first realizes that Christine is dead. He unzips the body bag to check out what the latest arrival to the morgue is, and realizes it’s the girl he has had his eyes on for a while, lying lifeless and naked. The expression on Howard’s face shows a lustful adoration for her gorgeous young body—after all, this is the girl that he’s had an interest in becoming romantically entangled with lying in front of him completely nude. He wants to feel and act lustfully towards her, but he realizes that she is no longer living. Of course, he later snaps and goes through a series of hallucinations that allow him to think that Christine still is, in fact, alive, but this initial realization of her demise is particularly memorable, as it shows Howard confronting (and not exactly dealing with in a successful manner), probably for the first time in his life, the death of someone he cares about (rather than some random dead body of a person that he knows nothing about, like he is usually sent while working in the morgue).
The acting in Living Doll is surprisingly well done. Mark Jax does a perfect job of depicting the socially stunted Howard, while Katie Orgill carries out most of her lines cheesily as Christine (though most of her dialogue is spoken in an almost trance-like tone of voice during hallucinatory sequences, so the cheesy aspect really doesn’t detract from the film as a whole at all). Gary Martin also does a superb acting job as Howard’s best friend/co-worker, successfully depicting the character as a sometimes-asshole-but-is-usually-there-for-his-friend kind of guy.
Living Doll’s special effects are brilliant, to say the least. The viewer is subjected to seeing the many states of Christine’s decomposition (from the blue-skinned stage of rot right down to the exposed bone, practically fleshless, and maggot-infested state), all executed realistically with extreme attention to detail by Paul Catling (who also did the effects for a little movie called Hellraiser).
Above all else, Living Doll is original and horrifying, and that’s the reason it works. Had the filmmakers chosen to take it down the Necromantik rip-off route, it definitely wouldn’t be as disturbing as it truly is. Thankfully, the filmmakers chose instead to put an original spin on corpse love that is as eerie as it is memorable, and we are left with a film that is truly unlike any other. Horror fans looking for a film that will really get under their skin don’t need not look any further than Living Doll.
-Spooky Steve
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- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
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- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
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