Bored “Stiff” (A.K.A. “Necro Lover”)

Maybe I got overloaded on micro-budget horror back in October when I plumbed the depths of Amazon Prime’s offerings in the sub-genre for my customary “Halloween Month” reviews, maybe I’m just too damn busy at work to follow all of my interests (cinematic or otherwise) lately, or maybe trying to build up a solid backlog of content on my new(-ish) comics blog is eating up every spare moment I have for writing so I’m just not watching as many movies since I don’t have as much time to write about them — I dunno, but whatever the case may be, it had been a good few months since I’d watched a cheap-ass indie fright flick, and their absence from my existence was starting to be felt on, like, a goddamn cellular level. Something needed to be done.

So, yeah, last night I ended my impromptu fast and returned to combing through Amazon Prime for something weird (and weirdly-made) to watch, eventually landing on a 2010 Pittsburgh-lensed number called Necro Lover, originally released (to the extent that it even was — it went straight to DVD, and it’s not like that was heavily promoted) under the far less salacious title of Stiff. Certainly the premise sounded suitably amoral : depressed office drone Troy (played with no skill whatsoever by a guy named Bill Scott who’s — get this — trying too hard to look bored, which I never even conceived of as being possible) calls the suicide hotline one night and speaks with a “counselor” named Lori (speaking of lousy acting, Lulu Benton is flat-out terrible in this part, but she at least proves that calling this thing Stiff was apropos) who, picking up on his deep-seated unhappiness, decides that what she really needs to do is breach every single ethical standard of her ostensible profession and give this guy her personal phone number. Huh????

Fear not, though, dear reader : writer/co-director Jim Towns and his partner behind the camera, Mike McKown, have ensured that there is a method to her madness — she doesn’t want to “help” Troy at all, she wants to convince him to kill himself so that she can (yes, you’re reading this right) fuck his dead body. Ahhh, yes, now it all makes “sense” —

I’m not sure how to tip-toe around this, so I’ll just come right out and admit that I’m in no way averse to watching a film about necrophilia. Jacques Lacerte’s Love Me Deadly is one of my all-time favorite tasteless exploitation features, I found Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed bizarrely fascinating, Martin Weisz’s Grimm Love is a dark, haunting, and emotionally complex film that has stuck with me ever since I first saw it, Jorg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik and Nekromantix 2 are legit underground gross-out classics — and who are we kidding? As far as abnormal sexual compulsions go, corpse-humping is about as harmless as they come. After all, what the hell does the other person care what’s being done to them? It certainly says something really weird and disturbing about the person who’s “into” it, there’s no denying that, but at least necrophiles are good at picking out partners who don’t judge them. In fact, they don’t do anything at all.

So, yeah, if “sick and wrong” is your bag, this flick should, in theory, have plenty to offer. Unfortunately, all the good intentions in the world — even if those good intentions are in service of something most well-adjusted people would consider to be “bad” — don’t matter for shit if you have no idea what you’re doing, and all evidence on offer would suggest that no one involved with Stiff on any level had the first clue about how to make a movie.

I’ve already taken both lead actors to task, albeit briefly, but in truth I take no real pleasure in piling on either of them since they’re clearly not professionals and have each probably returned to call center or retail store work by now — if they ever even left it. Who I’m not going to let off so easily are Towns and McKown, who have constructed a slow and sloppy and utterly flat finished product out of what should have been at least an interesting premise.  Little gaps in logic like Lori living in a big, fancy house on a middle-class-at-best salary I can forgive, but predictability and lack of inspiration I can’t, and when it’s revealed that she became fixated on not letting sleeping corpses lie due to a traumatic childhood experience, and when Troy starts falling for her and re-discovering his will to live — well, that’s just indicative, to my mind, that these are two filmmakers who don’t have the guts to follow their own disturbing ideas to an equally-disturbing conclusion. In other words, what we’re looking at here is one big cop-out.

Fit me for a padded jacket now if you must, but I really did want to like Stiff. The raw ingredients for something that you’ll definitely remember, like it or not, at all here. Instead, what we get is the most eminently forgettable film about necrophilia ever made. I guess that pulverizing the combustible and shocking down into the staid and safe takes work, but then so does digging your own grave — I’m in no particular hurry to do it, though, and I know you’re not, either.

Although, hey, Lori would probably give you a hand with that.