I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Movies So Bad They Make You Say "What In The Blazes Did I Just Watch?" 




La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) (1982) France

Deciding to give Netflix another shot of knowing what I'd 'like' it picked this. I'm not letting them pick any more. The premise was supposed to be a dead girl, disturbed by a combination of an earthquake and toxic waste comes back to life to move among the living. Now let me tell you why that's a total piece of crap. Briefly, because this movie had absolutely nothing to it. Oh, except the beginning - there's an extremely erotic scene of a vampire woman feeding off another topless woman... until it backs up and shows you that is the American production company that bought this horrid thing. Nice way to suck people in, pun intended.

What really slays me (pun again intended) is that this was widely praised by the French as one of Jean Rollin's best films. I guess - if you like no plot, no zombie fun, staring at a blonde woman with absolutely no expression or emotion for 90 minutes, and enduring a movie that doesn't know where it wants to go or how to end. They talk about subtle, sublime, complicated, emotional, great shots. They were obviously watching another movie. Want something more exciting and only about 3 1/2 minutes long? Watch Rob Zombie's music video 'Living Dead Girl'. You'll get more out of it. This is the basics of this incredibly boring piece of fluff:

Get used to this expression - it's the only one I've got.

Three ne'er do wells are sneaking toxic waste into the crypt below the castle of a wealthy woman who died years earlier. Apparently only she and her daughter, dead for two years, are entombed there - the crypt is huge but there are only two coffins (immaculate without a speck of dust). While the driver keeps a look-out two roll a barrel of the stuff into the crypt. Now here is where it gets really stupid - and we haven't even seen five minutes yet. After depositing the stuff they decide hey, the dead woman and daughter were rich, time for a little grave robbing. Now these two have been dead years, but they look like they've been dead for, oh, NEVER. And for some reason they're barefoot. I dunno if that's a French custom and I really don't care. The mother's is opened first and the guy stuffs his pockets. The other opens the daughter's and stares at her 'beauty' (she's blonde, young, eh that's about it) but with the UGLIEST feet I have ever seen - I mean her toes looked like long claws <shudder>. Here's the climactic events that cause her to 'rise' - there's a itty bitty tremor that moves a few rocks (but manages to knock one down and out, yeah right) and one drum tips over and a little glug glug goes over the ground - nowhere NEAR the daughter. But she opens her eyes - and gouges out the eyes of the guy who disturbed her. Ah, here we go, cool. She doesn't have to kill the other one, a little glug got on his face and killed him (uh huh). She does kill the driver though, again with those long fingernails, this time in his neck. And wanders out into the woods. The end.

I keep getting bloody but I insist on wearing white.

You wish. She wanders back to her 'home' the castle, and it is conveniently open since they are attempting to sell it. She gets in but avoids the people wandering around. Later when the realtor and her boyfriend come back to get busy, she kills them (and eats for the first time) or at least the French way of showing her 'eat'... she buries her face in fake wounds while they add munching sounds to the soundtrack - oh yeah, that was real. She bloodies herself up pretty good and decides to walk around naked - uh, if you're going to do that publicly, you might want to make sure the carpet matches the drapes if you get my drift. Anyway, to push this thing to the end, her childhood friend Helene calls the house for whatever reason and Katherine (the dead girl - forgot to mention that, oops) pushes the phone on the floor but then opens a music box she and her friend Helene had loved to play. For some reason, this causes Helene to rush to the house, finding the bloody mess and her 'dead' friend. She decides to 'clean up' and take care of Katherine - she was more nuts that the dead girl. If this was the subtlety and beauty they kept gooping about, it's not working. It's just two women covering up murder. Now the French are not shy about nudity, but it was still pretty funny that when Helene was dragging the boyfriend down to the crypt, he managed to keep his, uh, privates tucked between his legs. That HAD to have been painful.

I don't want sex, I want you to eat me... uh, wait.

Enter a boorish American couple that somehow get involved - but first Helene thinks to 'feed' Katherine herself, or give her dead birds, but eventually snares other women to bring to the castle. Eventually the stupid Americans (in French films Americans are always loud, rude and stupid) insist on coming into the castle and are killed. Katherine, finally finding her voice (but still very little emotion or expression) decides the killings must stop and tries to drown herself - so Helene drags her out. Katherine has one thing left to do - they had promised that if one died, the other would too, so she makes a big deal of ripping out Helene's throat and arm (again it's her mushing her face into fake wounds while chomping sounds are added to the soundtrack) and the movie ends with her screams of... boredom? Stupidity? Wanting to be dead and not being able to? Maybe it was because she knew her movie career was probably over.