(Spoiler alert: partially discloses plot)

This flick is not as bad as I might have thought. It actually has a somewhat interesting plot. The sound quality stinks though, turn it up high enough to hear the dialogue and the "music" (such as it is) is overwhelmingly loud and blasts you away.

Caddish rich-heir-from-Daddy husband, sexy wife (yum, great kisser) and her lover, his best friend. Wife and lover off the cad with blowfish-poison. Only he doesn't die, he is paralyzed like dead but still sees and hears everything but can't move a muscle ("Living Death"). He wakes up on the autopsy table and goes on a revengefest.

A medieval torture stretching rack features twice in this horror-genre flick. Daddy had a hobby, a fully equipped attic medieval dungeon that hubby, and implicitly his wife, use for fun and games. The movie starts with yon cad entertaining a lady friend up there with some erotic moderate stretching on a large angled rack (severe unpadded heavy iron manacles, ouch). Things go awry when his wife surprises them. Startled, he leans too hard on the lever and damages the rackee.

One gets an impression of the rack's dismembering strength but pictures of the mechanism are unpersuasive, just closeups of gears meshing and chains and ropes tightening. The rack figures again at the end of the movie in the vengeancefest, this time as a torture and execution means. No erotic BDSM this time, but pain and dismemberment. The scene suggests the horror of the real thing beyond erotica when it was used for torture and punishment, much less execution.

Anyway, I've seen worse horror-genre flicks. If you're a rack aficionado it's worth a look.

"Living Death" is a below-average, yet still somewhat interesting feature.

**SPOILERS**

After his father's death, Victor Harris, (Greg Bryk) rushes home to his wife Elizabeth, (Kristy Swanson) the good news about his rich inheritance payoff. At his birthday party, she decides that she's had enough of his behavior, and plots with her lover, Roman Arbogast, (Joshua Peace) also his lawyer, to kill him so that they can live off his money. Going through with their plans to do him in, he is successfully poisoned and declared dead by the authorities. In the midst of a round of legal battles over what to do with the body, they find out that the drugs that were used may not have been lethal and that he could still b alive. When he regains consciousness, he finds himself buried alive, and remembering what happened to him, sets out to avenge his death before they can find him and stop him.

The Good News: When it tries to, this one has some pretty good stuff to it. It's pretty much just about the few good moments in here that derive most of the film's watchability. The regeneration sequence, which occurs during the autopsy, is one of it's best scenes, as the surgeries done for the autopsy allow for some brutality in all the snapping limbs and torn-open details, and the creepiness of being awake during the procedure is played up and used nicely in here to good effect. Even better is that it leads to one of the better gore scenes around, as there's some nice kills and bloodshed unleashed in the massacre afterward. The opening to the film also works, as the introduction done with the walk-through of the creepy house up into the torture museum is pretty nice, leading to some really nice atmospheric shots, and the tense and creepy torture museum is capped off with a fantastic pay-off. The poisoning scene is pretty great, just with an extra inclusion of the description of the symptoms making it come off rather nicely. The general ease of the situation is merely an added bonus. The ending here is also really great, as the return to the torture museum makes it feel really uneasy, there's plenty of gore to pay-off the dryness of what came before, and with some really tense moments of stalking go before it, and overall is one of the best features of the film. These here are the film's big positive points.

The Bad News: This one here doesn't have a whole lot of flaws, but the ones that are here are pretty big. The main one in here is that, outside of the mentioned scenes earlier, there's nothing at all that keeps the interest level in the film. Far too often it's just deadly dull, as nothing happens, there's no atmosphere or tension or it's a collection of scenes that serve the plot for no purpose. There's simply no need to see the birthday party in here, as the dancing, drinking and poker game provide nothing of interest and are just a collection of scenes that offer up a bunch of time in the film for no real reason. The numerous liaisons between them don't amount to much, and the way that they go about this doesn't offer It's also undone by the fact that the drug isn't slipped until the forty minute mark, so there's a bunch of scenes that are before that which make the film so deathly dull since nothing happens until then which actually gets the plot moving, and once it does, it's another long period before he's up and revived, making for a long, long period of time before the film actually does anything that's worth watching. The fact that the ending to the film is also pretty off, mainly due to how rushed it is. There's a sense that it's over really quickly, and for no reason is there to be so rushed. It just ends really quickly, and there's a sense that it should've been milked more than what's given. That's one of the biggest flaws here, and combined with the dullness really saps the film of most of it's power.

The Final Verdict: With a few isolated scenes here and there that make it enjoyable and a couple of pretty big flaws, there's something here but not a whole lot. Give it a shot if you're interested or just think it's worth a look, but this one really won't mean much if it's skipped or outright ignored altogether.

Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language

The sales are on for the moment so it was time to go hunting. I noticed the cover of this movie. A torture scene in the style of SAW so I thought this is a torture porn flick. Two girls are on the cover under blood with let's say, both having more then melons. So you can guess, I bought it. Now that I have seen the movie I can't understand why I bought it. The cover NEVER appears in the movie. Should have known after all those years that covers with naked chicks on it or big boobies are teasers for trash. I should have remembered Gutterballs were it's advertised as a hardcore one.

Anyway. The movie starts of pretty well with a guy taking a girl to his house, after a while they arrive at the attic were a torture device stands. The girl gets tortured, suspense, and suddenly this guy's wife appears. End of the scene. Then we get to know the characters, he's a real asshole so his wife and a friend decide to kill him, he returns as a "living death" in the last 23 minutes, then the horror really get's going. The gore is intact and the red stuff flows. It's a shame that between the first 5 and the last 23 minutes nothing really happens. It could have been a really nice flick. I'm not a freak but with all the sex going on and the torture of the girl they could have shown some flesh, but they decided not do do it. Kristy Swanson, the main lead appeared in a lot of movies but never goes full monty. So if you are able to see this flick, watch it without expecting anything and enjoy the gore at the end.