Lady, Stay Dead

Pretty singer/actress Marie Coleby has a charmed,affluent life in Sydney.She lives alone in a beach-side mansion with her dog and doting neighbour,old Billy Shepherd helps her out from time to time.The bearded Gordon Mason is her gardener.He is a psycho,who enjoys lying in bed with a mannequin and dreaming about torturing women on the beach.His obsession with Marie leads to rape and murder.A new resident enters the house of murder.Marie's older sister Jenny Nolan is looking for her..."Lady Stay Dead" is a sleazy psycho slasher comparable to "Maniac","Don't Go in the House","Never Pick Up a Stranger" or "American Nightmatre".There is plenty of sleaze and full-frontal nudity as well as some brutal violence.Chard Hayward is perfect as a appropriately perverted and crazed murderer.8 out of 10.I enjoyed this low-budget slice of sleaze.

This semi-obscure Aussie psycho thriller would probably be better known if it hadn't been overlooked by the Director of Public Prosecutions when compiling the UK Section 1 list of 'video nasties; it could easily have bumped the DPP39 up to a round 40, due to a harrowing scene in which the film's antagonist, gardener Gordon (Chard Hayward), rapes and kills pop star Marie (Deborah Coulls). No doubt Marie would have thought twice about upsetting Gordon if she had known how unbalanced he was: obsessed with his pretty boss, Gordon's hobbies include rolling around on his bed with a life size doll of the songstress. and spying on her at the beach whilst she exercises.

After doing away with Marie, Gordon proceeds to bump off her elderly neighbour Billy (who catches the gardener trying to dispose of the singer's body), and then terrorises Marie's sister Jenny (Louise Howitt), who had arranged to house-sit while Marie was on a location shoot. However, Jenny proves much tougher to kill, the woman fighting back a la Kevin McCallister.

Directed by Terry Bourke, the man responsible for kicking off the '70s Ozploitation craze with Night of Fear (1973), Lady Stay Dead is a tense, well acted slice of sleazy horror, with a suitably demented psycho (prior to killing, Gordon had been content with seducing and abusing local bored housewives), a likeable protagonist in Jenny (who is nothing like her obnoxious sibling), plenty of mean-spirited violence (a man is burnt alive and even a dog is killed), and a well-handled, action-packed finale, as brave security officer Clyde Collings (Roger Ward, who played Fifi in Mad Max) comes to Jenny's aid.

The final act does stretch plausibility just a tad, Collings stupidly (and fatally) turning his back on Gordon after a fight in a swimming pool, and the gardener being catapulted through a car wind-screen when hit by a motorcyclist, but on the whole this is a very effective chiller that might be held in higher regard by horror fans had it benefited from the same notoriety as numerous far less worthy titles.

They just don't make em like this anymore- Like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, HOUSE BY THE LAKE, MANIAC, THE FAN (81) etc this film delves right into a psychopaths fantasies and allows the actor to fully rip roar and indulge in the character without restraint. The plot pretty much revolves around a rich mean spirited high class diva who talks to everyone like scum, including her mentally deficit gardener who just happens to also be a obsessed psychopath who , when not being berated by her, spends his time jerking off in the sand thinking of tortured women and making love to a mannequin dressed like her as her music plays in the background. Eventually he acts upon his sick delusions and when her boyfriend is forced to leave their villa for a weekend the gardener enters her house then rapes and kills her. The rape scene and dialogue are pretty disturbing.(ie " never mind those limp yuppie guys- if you ever want it rough and hard, ask me and I'll give it to you whenever you want..") Then her concerned sister comes to the house to see how she is, unaware of the rape-happy madman still hiding there, What follows is a intriguing cat and mouse. The violence in this film is great and I did not find it boring at all. This is easily one of the best of the Australian horror/exploitation that came out that era. Unfairly ignored and loathed it stands up today as a gross horrifying and sometimes unintentionally funny home invasion film thats as good as anything else. track this down. If you like bleak films and twisted psychos you'll get a great fix from this.

It's a bit slow at first, but it gets going. What a camp film.

I noticed Roger Ward wearing what could only be a hair piece which looked like a doormat missing the welcome sign. When they put the woman in the fish tank to drown her, she didn't fight very hard and was rather unrealistic, but I guess that adds to its camp disposition! It's not the best film I have ever seen Roger Ward in - his performance in Mad Max will always be my favored. I would suggest you try and get a copy of LSD. It's one of those films you will have a soft spot for... in a peculiar kind of way. Typical of how 1970's films were shot in Australia

Lady Stay Dead is a mostly unexciting Aussie thriller where a perverted gardener graduates from raping women to killing them as he sets his sights on a pop star he does lawn work for. When she turns down his creepy advances, he kills her in a fit of rage, but doesn't expect that her sister is coming into town for a visit and will be staying at the scene of the crime

The film starts off slowly and in a very sleazy fashion, but if you can make it through the first 30 minutes, you'll be rewarded with a good amount of suspense during the 2nd half of the film as the murdered woman's sister has many close calls with the murderous gardener.

Things do fall apart a bit at the end where it seemed like they were just making up stuff to beef up the runtime, but there are a few moments of decent tension that make it worth one watch.