Lucker the Necrophagous (1986 Review)

Writer/ Director: Johan Vandewoestijne

Cast: Nick Van Suyt, Helga Vandevelde, Let Jotts

Synapse Films / NOT RATED / 68 min / NTSC Region 1 / Dolby Digital Stereo / Widescreen (1.85:1) / Purchase from DiabolikDVD.com

Seen any good corpse fucking movies lately? Me neither. There aren’t enough of them in my opinion. I mean really, for a fan of sick cinema can it get any better than a dead body shagging? It’s a theme that can only be explored by indie movie makers. I don’t see any Hollywood suits green-lighting a movie about raping a rotting piece of ass. Jörg Buttgereit did it in ’87 with Nekromantik (and later a sequel) but a year earlier, Belgian filmmaker Johan Vandewoestijne would cross the lines of all decency with his long thought lost shocker, Lucker.

Nick Van Suyt plays John Lucker, a convicted murderer and rapist who escapes from a criminal mental institution after the workers mistakenly think he is drugged up to the point of unconsciousness. He awakens and kills a few people and finally jumps in a car of a woman whom he also kills and steals her vehicle. Before dumping her, he gets his rocks off by raping her dead body in a mostly off-screen scene where you see a shot of the outside of the car rocking back and forth. Classy.

Months later we find Lucker trying to find the one victim who got away before he was arrested and sent to the institution. His plan is to find her and finish what he started but along the way he may as well kill a few others, right? One of the unlucky is a hooker who he straps to the bed, kills and allows to decompose for 4 weeks until she is a slimy corpse that all of the skin has rotted off of. In this, the most graphic scene in the movie by far, he gropes the body before stripping down and fucks it. Of course there is the show down with the victim he was looking for, the end.

This is one of the most grimy, starkly violent and unflinchingly shocking movies I’ve ever seen. It’s not “good” in the technical sense. 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.

When I first watched this, I wondered why I had never heard of it. I read a lot of literature about the genre and have never even heard a peep about it. After doing a little reading it seems that the movie company actually destroyed the original movie materials and the only release of it was on VHS, and that was a cut to shit copy. So 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?

Greg Baty

Greg is a lifelong genre film fan who digs boobs, blood and beer. He also enjoys old school punk rock, comic books and spending time with his beautiful wife Ellen and his cats Sydney and Alabama. Greg is the webmaster, Editor in Chief and Head Writer for Cinesploitation.

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