Review of Touch of Death

This begins in so flat and ordinary way with the camera entering the grounds, house and then room of the Lester Parson character, seen to be cooking himself a, admittedly rather odd looking, steak and humming away to himself as if most self satisfied. Stephen Thrower, in his wonderful volume Beyond Terror, describes this as one of the director's worst films and certainly his most inept horror. I'm not so sure. Low budget certainly, distasteful even more certainly with a king of gleeful element of nastiness. All the women/victims seem to have some element of ugliness that is somehow seen as justification for the most terrible of physical attacks. It is not a comfortable watch but then should such a film be so anyway, perhaps we should ask. This particular jaw dropping late outing from Fulci is made further intriguing/annoying by what I glean (though Thrower ignores it) as some suggestion of things not even being as they seem to be. On the telephone at one point he is clarifying his name for someone who has misheard, 'No it is 'Parson', not quite a 'person' and later apropos seemingly of nothing, he notices he has no shadow. Very odd, horrible and hardly seamless but somewhat surreal and never uninteresting.