Customer Reviews

Lucker The Necrophagous: Director's Cut

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If your reading this then you must already know something about this somewhat notorious film, does it live up to the hype? yes it does. First this movie is one of the lost grey market films of the late 1980's and if you were like me, traded blurry bootleg copies of this one for years because nothing was ever available, bad sound and picture and often with strange sub-titles on the bottom in some unknown europeon language. Story goes the original masters were destroyed and it was thought that this title was probably dust to the ages. Thanks to Don May and the wonderful group at Synapse Films, ( The absolute gold standard of gritty exploitive cult cinema!) and my personal reason to keep living, we have another fine addition to our growing DVD library. This is not Synapse's usual flawless release due to the state of the original source material, but is leaps and bounds ahead of what we used to get under the counter at those old comic book conventions, this is as good as this film ever looked. This is in a new " Directors Cut " made in cooperation with the original director who also sadly recently died. If you are a fan of titles like Necromantik and Aftermath and never heard of this, you will appreciate it's sickness , buy it and help support this film team in bringing hard to find or unreleased grindhouse cult cinema to the masses in lovingly restored package editions, Bravo!

As another reviewer mentions,the scene with Lucker humping the 4 weeks of rotting corspe of his latest victim,a hooker(which he also licks the slime off of)is the most notable scene,one star for this alone.The rest of the feature itself was pretty good with the creepy atmosphere,too bad for the visuals and audio(especially the sound effects)because they most certainly really ruin the experience.They title the special features as the Horrific Special Features(the're not foolin)as they were left only with shabby video material to work with in the the transfer to DVD(all the original materials were destroyed).I would have given a 4 star rating had it not been for the bleeding picture(I'm not talking about the blood)and annoying sound effects that gave me an earache and yes I really need to mention the sound effects again as they are the worst I have ever come across.I also felt more justified in my 1 star rating just to bring the rating down a bit and let people know exactly what their getting in buying this. That is a fuzzy VHS copy with horrible audio.Perhaps I would not have been as dissapointed if they sold this for 1/3rd of what I paid and had better sound effects. The corspe sex was really a sick good time.It's a shame the source materials for DVD transfer were so lousy.

John Lucker is a serial killer who is in a coma in the local nut house. One afternoon he wakes up and after killing a doctor or 2, leaves the asylum to catch up with a survivor from his original killing. After killing some prostitute he takes over to his apartment for a week, he leaves her dead body just lying in the bed. At around this time we get to see the infamous and sick necrophilia scene, it is ten times sicker and more off-putting than anything Buttgereit ever filmed. You know in Lucker's case, the rotting body is also filled with worms and maggots and some disgusting pus that the sicko rapist licks from his hands. The gore effects are well-done and the music is occasionally pretty good, but the problem is with the uneven pacing with a couple of dull scenes. In one particular sequence where the killer just walks on endlessly through the streets where the scene could have been edited to become shorter, it just goes on and on. It wasn't well made at all. The direction was all over the place, the writing was almost non-existent, etc. But it has a dirty, smarmy charm that sticks with you after viewing it. Van Suyt doesn't utter a word until the last act, only grunts of psychotic pleasure. He is up there with Frank Zito (Maniac) as one of the most disgusting villains of all-time and he does a pretty good job of acting like a creep. Synapse Films and Vandewoestijne pieced this "Director's Cut" of the movie from bits and pieces found here and there. The quality is far from pristine, but with a movie like this would you want it any other way? Fans of sick exploitation will probably want to check it out, but those with a weak stomach may wanna give it a miss. Myself I thought it was a competent low budget movie with some really good gore effects.

Finally the much sought after, bootleg gem hits DVD in the U.S. with an official release through Synapse and I couldn't be happier! The remastered film quality is fantastic (better than the bootleg tape I own), the sound is a hundred times better and Vandewoestijne's final vision of Lucker The Necrophagous is indeed far more effective than what's been floating around for years on the gray market.

Improved picture quality, sound and edit are all great things but some of you are probably wondering whether Lucker is going to be a smart purchase and that's really where my review for this film is going to shake some of you. Personally, I love films like Lucker, as well as necrophilia cinema in general, so this film was a major score for me but there's very few out there that can even tolerate nudity in horror cinema let alone rotting corpse lovin'. If the thought of watching somebody lick their hands after stroking slimy, putrid corpse 'tang makes you queasy, I'd recommend passing on this film.

Lucker The Necrophagous is a gritty, no-holds-barred bit of shock cinema and that's about it; it's no cult classic but it is undoubtedly the Holy Grail for some. Synapse should be commended for releasing such a ballsy flick.

Lucker is one nasty little film, it's not very long or incredibly complex, but it's nasty nonetheless and for that I love it. Don't be a dullard and purchase this without knowing what you're getting into first, this isn't a party flick nor is it one of those classic "Must Have" films that make everybody's favorite films lists. If you're a fan of films like Buttgereit's Nekromantik, Cerda's Aftermath or D'Amato's Buio Omega, you're going to probably dig this as I did.

This movie is nothing compared to Aftermath and Nekromantik. It is very cheap. The acting is so lame that I was laughing. Sound effects are terrible. The plot is dumb. Don't waste your money.

P.S. But it is better than Avatar anyway=))

It took years of knowing this title existed for me to see it on a really low grade vhs copy in a friend's basement theater in or around 1993. Can't say the dvd release really helped the quality of the source material... but it's hard to complain about quality when the movie in question's main payoff scene is a badly edited "corpse humping".