Director/Screenplay/Producer – Terry Bourke, Photography – Ray Henman, Music – Bob Young, Special Effects – Reece Robinson, Art Direction – Bob Hill. Production Company – Ryntare Productions.
Chard Hayward (Graham Mason), Louise Howitt (Jenny Nolan), Deborah Coulls (Marie Coleby), Roger Ward (Officer Collings), Les Foxcroft (Billy Shepherd), James Elliott (Patrolman Dunbar)
Graham Mason is gardener to the celebrated actress Marie Coleby at her home on the Rocky Beach shoreline. He lusts after her but she treats him dismissively. One day, he snaps, overcome with rage at her taunts, and forces her head into the fish tank, killing her. As he disposes of the body, Marie’s sister Jenny Nolan arrives at the house. Graham pretends everything is normal and says that Marie is away. As night comes, he tries to force his way in to attack Jenny.
Australian director Terry Bourke (1940-2002) made only a handful of films, none of which are particularly well known. These have included the likes of the spy thriller Noon Sunday (1975), the sex film Plugg (1975), the missing child film Little Boy Lost (1978), and a couple of films beyond that. The most well-known of Bourke’s films have been his horror films, which include Night of Fear (1972), a remarkable film that was originally made for Australian tv but banned, the historical horror Inn of the Damned (1975) and lastly Lady, Stay Dead.
Lady, Stay Dead was one of the films made during the great era of Ozploitation. It received some derogatory reviews back in the day calling it sleazy and sordid. My interest was piqued by its mention in the documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008) where the actress tells how her head was held under in the fish tank while Bourke ignored her pleas that she was drowning. All of which makes Lady, Stay Dead an object of fascination after being able to finally get a copy to be able to watch.
When it came out, Lady, Stay Dead was slapped with a Slasher Film label but that was more due to proximity of the timing to the newly arrived genre. What it belongs to is more the 1970s Psycho Film, a period when screen psychos were depicted as sweaty, sadistic and depraved. The same period also included the likes of The Fiend (1971), I Dismember Mama (1972), The Last House on the Left (1972), The Mad Bomber (1972), Daddy’s Deadly Darling/Pigs (1973), Wicked, Wicked (1973), The Love Butcher (1975), The Killer Inside Me (1976) and The Driller Killer (1979), among others. These everyday killers were infinitely more disturbed than the masked ones that emerged during the slasher fad.
Undeniably, Lady, Stay Dead is a sleazy and sordid little film. Terry Bourke travels well beyond the pale (and certainly pushes the envelope far more than any slasher contemporaries did). It is the sort of film that makes you as a male member of the audience (for whom the film is clearly pitched) want to take figurative equivalent of a moral shower afterwards.
Chard Hayward is portrayed as the 1970s equivalent of a socially ill-adept nerd – he works a labouring job, is bearded and wears hornrim glasses and denim overalls with straps covering a hairy body beneath, while his manner is hesitant and socially awkward. We know nothing about him as a character, except several intimations he makes that he has killed before. We are initially introduced to Deborah Coulls as an epitome of unattainable privilege – she seems to be an entertainment polymath who operates as a singer, model and an actress. The contrast between the two is not dissimilar to the divide between Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver (1976) but where the social lines are far more firmly drawn up – she won’t even let him enter the house. There are surprising similarities between Lady, Stay Dead and Peter Weir’s The Plumber (1978), an Australian arthouse work released around the same time where an unruly handyman invades Judy Morris’s apartment.
In the film’s most sordid scene, Chard Hayward watches as Deborah Coulls goes down to the beach, hidden in the sand while peeping at her with a pair of binoculars and jerking off. As he does so, we get a montage of various women in a state of full frontal undress tied up and being whipped. There is the uncomfortable sense that we are being given a naked glimpse into someone’s sexual fantasies being worked out on screen. Later there is the scene where Chard Hayward enters the house, tries to express his feelings and then forces himself onto Deborah and rapes her. After she calls him a “sick animal” and other names, he becomes so enraged that he grabs her, turns her bodily upside down and dunks her head into the fish tank, apparently not realising that he is drowning her. For all that this is the film’s most notorious scene, the way it plays out comes out as more absurd than it is shocking or outrageous.
It becomes apparent that Terry Bourke and crew obtained the use of a beachside house (at Palm Beach just north of Sydney) and turned this into the film’s sole location. All of the action takes place in and around the house and the beach below. The film’s plot is a fairly simple one. The first section consists of Chard Hayward attacking and killing Deborah Coulls and is over and done with in the first thirty minutes. There is some aftermath as we see Hayward dealing with the neighbour (Les Foxcroft) and his dog, but Louise Howitt as Deborah’s sister enters not long after and thereafter the film focuses on his attack on her.
Lady, Stay Dead then becomes a film about Hayward initially befriending Louise Howitt, before things turn nasty and he has her at siege inside the house as he tries to break in. The film culminates with cops arriving on the scene and they being held at siege as Hayward wields a shotgun and keeps trying to force his way into this house. This section is a more regular, almost a Home Invasion piece, and lacks the sordidness of the earlier scenes.
Trailer here