Really Dirty Beddings: Lucker The Necrophagus (1986)

Lucker The Necrophagous (Belgium, 1986)

Rating: *1/2
Starring: Nick Van Suyt, Helga Vandevelde, Let Jotts

I remember my very first Fangoria magazine; I was 13-years old and it's issue #252, with Michael Rooker's face in heavy and slimy alien mutant make-up gracing the front cover. Within those pages are DVD reviews and one of them happens to be of Lucker The Necrophagous (1986), and I recall the magazine being unfavorable about the film. I guess I should have taken that as a warning of what I'm getting myself into when I finally decided to see this grey market exploitation indie many, many years later, but the damn curious cat inside of me is egging to see just how much of a trainwreck this movie is.

And, boy, is it a trainwreck.

The story of Lucker The Necrophagous (1986) follows the titular serial-killer who likes to rape and murder women, though not necessarily on that order. The film opens with him heavily sedated in a mental institution after a suicide attempt, but his medication wears off too soon and Lucker is up killing orderlies, having his way on some of the bodies, and escaping into town to lay low. We eventually learn that it's been eight years since his reign of gross terror ended with his capture, a total of eight victims under his kill count. Should have been nine, though, and after hearing about this one gal, Cathy Jordan, surviving his rampage (and finding out where she lives through a damn phone book!), Lucker sets off to correct his mistake, taking a few lives along the way. (And, yes, the freak got his rocks off on a few of the resulting corpses)

Apparently, Lucker The Necrophagous (1986) is a film made to be purposely offensive as a way for the director, Johan Vandewoestijine, to get back at the Belgian Film Commission. The resulting production was rough, with Johan withholding the finer details of the movie from fiscal backers just to get the money to make it, only for the producer to destroy the negatives, leaving only bits and pieces of the film to work with for the final product. That would explain the choppiness of the story and the patchwork-editing quality of the movie itself, though that did little to null the extreme repulsiveness of its taboo subject matter, especially when an infamous "bed scene" was done leeringly long and filled with as much vomit-inducing gags you'd wish to could bleach away from your brain once the dirty deed is done. Past that, the story is basically a 68-minute short slasher (74 minutes for the Belgian VHS release) wherein we simply watch Lucker stab people to death with very little workable dialogue to go with, even more so by its climax when everything devolves into a cacophony of screams and grunts amidst the film's score, punctuated by a rather confusing ending. 

There's few in the way of substance here, but we do see some bit of style through the giallo-inspired candy-colored lighting and stylized photography. Gore and make-up effects are also a fair highlight, something a movie of this dirty of a plot would benefit from and did, but that's as far as the positives could go. Sad to say, Lucker The Necrophagous (1986), a button-pushing shlock made to test just how far one can go before feeling cold and dirty, is quite lousy as an entertaining horror piece, its overall quality just all sorts of bad. If all of this tickled your curiosity, then, a word of advise, prepare a barf bag...

Bodycount:

1 male stabbed in the eye with an icepick

1 female beaten to death against a steering wheel

1 female disemboweled with a knife

1 male bashed to death against a wall

1 female stabbed on the throat with a kitchen knife

1 female head seen (flashback)

1 male strangled, head beaten with a pipe

1 female knifed to death

1 female disemboweled with a knife

Total: 9