Touch Me review
Cross species intercourse that will make your head explode.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Touch Me
Directed by Addison Heimann
Written by Addison Heimann
Starring Olivia Taylor Dudley, Lou Taylor Pucci, Jordan Gavaris, Marlene Forte, Paget Brewster and Ashley Lauren Nedd
Touch Me Review
Touch Me should be out on VOD by the time you read this. There has been some confusion about the release date. Some places have it listed as April 2nd. Others April 3rd. As we sit here on April 3rd…it doesn’t appear to have popped up in the places you get your Video on Demand. Amazon, Fandango at Home and Apple TV are all coming up empty. But I’m confident that the movie Touch Me exists…because I watched it for this review. Some late entries in the release date guessing game that has been Touch Me suggested an April 10th VOD release date. Maybe that will come true. Maybe it will pop onto one or all of those services by the time I post this. It’s a mystery.
Of course, the point of movie reviews isn’t to decipher an impossible code regarding when and where a movie will be released…it’s to tell you if that movie is worth watching when it does. Touch Me, despite the vanishing act, mostly is. Especially if you enjoy strange dark comedies with supernatural/sci-fi and gore elements.
Touch Me begins with a long monologue. Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is telling her therapist about a mostly great…but occasionally dangerous tryst she had with an alien. Tentacles and all. The scene sets the tone for Touch Me right away. Everything is delivered so matter-of-factly that you can’t help but be amused by the whole thing. We get a reprise of the scene near the end of the film that provides an equally perfect button on the story. In that scene…the therapist gets a chance to react to what she’s been hearing…and, ignoring the central emotional results of what she’s been told, unleashes a barrage of questions that could be seen as minor plot holes in the story if you wanted to think of them as such. It’s an effective darkly comedic moment of which Touch Me has several.
The story focuses on the pull that the alien, a very real character in Touch Me, has over the people around him. Spending most of the time in human form…Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) claims to be on a mission of peace. He wants to save the world from climate change…and have a lot of tentacle sex along the way. We immediately suspect that his motives aren’t quite as altruistic as the former…but are sure it involves a healthy dose of the latter. Brian’s touch offers a calming effect to whoever he is touching. It works like a drug…addicting the user on contact. Joey knows he’s dangerous…eventually even deadly…but addicts don’t exactly thing much beyond their next fix.
Complicating matters is Joey’s roommate Craig (Jordan Gavaris). The duo is invited to Brian’s home for the weekend…a place to relax and work on themselves. And have plenty of tentacle sex. Brian seduces Craig as he has so many others…which obviously isn’t met as happy news by Joey. What makes the entire situation entertaining is that despite knowing Brian is trouble…despite flat out knowing he’s killed people deemed “incompatible” with cross species intercourse…both Joey and Craig are so in need of a fix that they can’t bring themselves to simply walk away to safety. Instead, they bicker and ultimately doom themselves. Touch Me is a funny movie…and it gets its laughs in some incredibly dark ways.
Touch Me ramps up the ridiculousness the more we learn about Brian. His plans aren’t what he claimed…his cross species intercourse is dangerous on a head exploding level…and the people around him are desperate for just one more taste. Joey and Craig are broken people who finally feel whole around him…he just happens to be a monster. Sure, there’s something in there about toxic relationships and the people who choose to stay in them…but it isn’t Touch Me’s prime directive. The point of Touch Me is to be darkly entertaining while becoming increasingly weird. It succeeds at it.
Of course, this kind of story won’t be for everyone. There isn’t a lot of joy to be had here. We aren’t getting touched by the alien and his drug like toxins. We see things as they are. While there is a lot of entertainment to be had watching how Joey, Craig and others act within the story…the story itself isn’t exactly an uplifting one. Nor does it have to be. It just has to be available to watch eventually.
Scare Value
Fans of weird sci-fi and weird dark comedies and just plain weird will find a lot to enjoy in Touch Me. This is one of those oddballs that benefits from the entire cast understanding exactly what kind of movie they’re in. Everyone is on hand to heighten the strangeness and deliver some subtle but effective humor in increasingly bizarre situations. A cosmic horror story told from the ground level…with plenty of tentacle sex, or cross species intercourse, along the way.
3/5
