In Frank Zappa’s 1974 song “Cheepnis”, he sings of the poodle-shaped monster “Frunobulax,” and his adoration for the 1956 B-movie It Conquered The World where one could see the 2×4 being used to prod the titular It towards its unsuspecting on-screen victims. “Can y’all see?”, the song’s narrator asks, “The little strings on the Giant Spider? The Zipper From The Black Lagoon? The vents by the tanks where the bubbles go up? And the flaps on the side of the moon?” The song is a celebration of reveling in the trashiness of some of these films, seeing the literal seams, and reveling in their handcrafted ineptitude. In the case of the 1950s films Zappa is singing about, these were entirely un-ironic mistakes, and for the acute viewer taking these in at the cinema or, even more likely, on late-night television, these elements, like battle scars, illustrate how these janky yet entertaining bits of cultural ephemera came to be.
I was thinking about how much Zappa would have loved Grace Glowicki’s film Dead Lover, which is far more ironic and self-aware, yet no less joyfully reveling in the morass of shlock. Borrowing liberally from the likes of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the sketch show Kids in the Hall, and the kind of videos one used to make during high school that felt daring, this Midnight fare is either going to speak to you thanks to its aggressively cheap aesthetic and overwrought acting, or it’s going to be the worst thing you’ve seen in years.
‘Dead Lover’ Takes the Frankenstein Concept and Goes Way Further

Image Via Universal

Taken on its own terms, it’s easy to see the joy that Glowicki and her small ensemble bring to the fore. Ostensibly, this is the typical story of a gravedigger (played by the director) who has a permanent funk from her professionally necessary fondling of the dead. Her loneliness finds her lurking around funerals looking for some form of human connection. While locals gossip about her filthy personal appearance and scent, others are drawn toward the forbidden fumes emanating from her body. When she connects with the grieving brother of a recently departed beauty (Ben Petrie, Glowicki’s partner both on and off screen), he becomes her lover, and the two engage in copious amounts of awkward coital engagement. Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, finish off this troupe of disparate characters, providing Monty Python-esque gender-bending and pantomime-style performances.
Realizing his incapacity to functionally reproduce, the lover sets off on a journey for medical intervention. Arriving back home cured and ready to seed his new obsession, tragedy strikes, and only a ringed finger is left to be returned to the object of his affection. From here, it gets even more strange and bawdy, and the mining of the unbound Promethean tales from Shelly takes a turn far wilder than even she could have imagined (or, likely, stomached). There are squished-up lizards and drag-like swashbucklers, canoodling nuns, and snail-like trails from intimate secretions. It’s a boiling brew of blood, lust, lasciviousness, revenge, and ridiculousness.
Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein Fans Will Be Amused by Glowicki’s Movie

Image via 20th Century Studios

Visually, it all feels unabashedly theatrical – the black box aesthetic with the sparse setting matching the running-in-place inanity of a fringe stage production. Rhayne Vermette’s purposely oblique photography captures the visual chaos with appropriate angularity, the 1.37:1 ratio of the 16mm grainy footage making it feel all the more like something stumbled on late-night television like one of Zappa’s beloved bits of trash.

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Glowicki has been keen to point out her inspiration to the likes of Mel Brooks, whose Young Frankenstein exemplifies some of the horniness Dead Lover brings to the story of revivification. In this telling, however, the Cheapnis is dialed up even further, the seams exposed and even the inappropriately contemporaneous dates on the gravestones pointing out that nothing is to be taken seriously save for the silliness itself. There aren’t jokes here per se, like in Brooks’ masterful love letter to the genre of his own youth, but there’s plenty to be amused by if you’re in on the joke.
‘Dead Lover’ Is Sure to Bring Midnight Fun to a Receptive Crowd

Image by Jovelle Tamayo via Sundance Institute

As a piece of genre Midnight mayhem, Dead Lover delivers. For hungry audiences at the likes of Montreal’s Fantasia or other genre fests around the world, there will be hoots and hollers from a hungry audience wanting every gloriously zany moment. For others less attuned to this kind of DIY nonsense, they will make it no more than a few minutes before abandoning the journey, appalled at its apparent ineptitude and screechy tone.
A construction almost as monstrous as the creature that gives it its title, it would be damning indeed to judge the film on its odorous nature from the very outset, and only those that can be drawn to the ill perfumes of this kind of film are to take it on its own terms. What’s clear, for those willing to writhe in its charms, is that Gorlecki and her committed troupe are having an absolute blast, reveling in the ridiculousness and wanting us to come along for the journey.
Like the Gravedigger herself, the film won’t be to everyone’s taste. But for those drawn to the bent, who crave some “Cheepnis” in a cinematic landscape of overproduced and overpriced madness, they just might fall in love with Dead Lover for all of its foul, fecund, and farcical facets.
Dead Lover had its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.