Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature dares you to describe it. Here’s a shot: It’s a darkly comical B-movie fantasia on “Bride of Frankenstein” as directed by a Sapphic theater collective discovering “Pink Narcissus” during a workshop taught by the maverick Canadian director Guy Maddin. Translation: It’s too much yet not enough.
Glowicki stars as the Gravedigger, a corpse-pale, lovesick burial attendant who regenerates her drowned lover’s sister in the hope that the lady monster with a finger like a mega-size breadstick will become her undead bride.
Stylistically, Glowicki and the film’s other star Ben Petrie, with whom she wrote the screenplay, seem eager to walk in the heels of Charles Ludlam and other scrappy Stonewall-era avant-gardists who were enamored, archly, with doomed romance and the queer gargoyle.
But if the filmmakers were aiming for smart, literary-minded camp — as the dime store drag, the script’s Mary Shelley-ness and the overblown performances suggest they were — their too-frenzied effort veered off course.
Still, God bless Glowicki for pushing ahead as a genre leading lady who isn’t scared to tackle oddball characters in nutty films, as she did in her own “Tito” and in the recent “Booger” and the new “Honey Bunch.”
Oh, and the film comes with a gimmick, available at select theaters: Audiences get a scratch-and-sniff “Stink-O-Vision” card with 10 scents that are matched to moments in the film, as John Waters did 45 years ago with Odorama and “Polyester.” Ghost Puke was utterly nauseating. But there would be a rush at Lush if they combined Milkshake and Banana into a body wash.
Dead Lover Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
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