'Touch of Death' aka 'Quando Alice ruppe lo specchio' (1988)

Opening with a seemingly incongruent P.O.V shot travelling ominously into the fancy-schmancy abode of demoniacally deviant Lester Parson (Brett Halsey), arguably one of maestro, Lucio Fulci's more despicable, morally reprehensible and vividly imagined protagonists! We rapidly, and somewhat queasily, discover that twinkle-eyed, waltz-loving, chainsaw-dissecting, dapper-threaded Les has a perverse appreciation of cannibal cuisine, and is most definitely a hand's on chef, favouring only the freshest of fleshly ingredients!

Shot on Super 16 mm with a penurious budget of little more than a 100,000 Euros, Lucio Fulci's criminally underappreciated 'Touch of Death' aka 'Quando Alice ruppe lo specchio' (1988) while ostensibly being an obsidian-shaded comedy of serial killing errors is in fact a far more warped proposition!

The wicked-headed widower Parson is a foully degenerated wretch, whose morbid appetites for gruesomely purloined female flesh and his equally excessive gambling debt fatefully tips limb-lopping Les over the edge! Les's hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic break from reality is precisely when Fulci's cogent script adds a surprising, altogether surrealistic slant. The despicable lonely heart's killer now fantasising that his increasingly grotesque crimes are being precisely mimicked by another unseen, but no less invidious Les!

Touch of Death's psychotically schizoid narrative is more outrageous than anything Fulci's glossier peers (Martino/Argento) would ever have dared to create. The inimitable iconoclast, Lucio Fulci was not only a sensationally inventive, bravura film-making master, his frequently transgressive, taste-trashing, boundary-obliterating oeuvre unapologetically offered the horror fan maniacal visions hitherto unimaginable! Fulci's grand Guignol, audaciously sardonic take on the Bluebeard mythos is a genuinely disturbing assault on the senses! Brett Halsey's sleazily grotesque, Les Parson remains to this very day one of the more appallingly asinine lunatics to disport with such disgraceful aplomb across the silver scream!

Maestro, Lucio Fulci's ferocious splatter-fest 'Touch of Death' certainly doesn't paint a pretty picture, as both thematically, and aesthetically it's somewhat rough-edged, subtlety supplanted with sudden bursts of unexpurgated savagery. It is the grisly film's innate 'wrongness', the starkly concentrated ugliness that makes 'Touch of Death' such a surrealistically sick-headed, politically incorrect, morally miasmic, opinion-dividing nightmare!