Tobe Hooper's career in horror has had its ups and downs. For every bonafide classic on his resume like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Poltergeist," there's a bomb like "Invaders from Mars" or "The Mangler" to counteract it. I haven't seen much of Tobe's more recent work, and the comments here on IMDb for "Mortuary" didn't exactly fill me with confidence at first. But what the hell, this DVD was cheap ($5.99 for a "Horror Collection" disc, with three other movies in addition to "Mortuary") so I figured "Ehhh, what the hell, let's give the old boy a shot." "Mortuary" wasn't as bad as I feared but wasn't exactly a masterpiece either. The story is standard stuff -- a recently widowed Mom (Denise Crosby of "Star Trek: TNG" and "Pet Sematery" fame - good Lord, time has not been kind to her) and her two kids move to a new town where Mom (who's fresh out of Mortician's School) plans to re-open the long-abandoned funeral parlor. The teenage son reminded me of a low-rent Barry Watson from "7th Heaven," while his pre-teen sister is, quite frankly, the most annoying Horror Movie Little Girl since Danielle Harris' mute Jamie Lloyd in "Halloween 5." Right off the bat, I found myself hoping that something horrible would happen to her. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not. Anyway, the house they settle into is a creaky, run down dump overlooking the graveyard, the septic tank overflows on a regular basis, and Mom's downstairs embalming area has weird black mold growing all over the walls. The kids are less than thrilled with their new living situation, of course, but none of this seems to phase Mom, who anxiously gets to work on her first batch of "clients" (she keeps her mortician's textbooks propped up on the corpse's chests as she works!) while the teenage son meets some kids at the local diner who tell him the legend of "Billy," a deformed kid who used to live in the house he now occupies. Seems that "Billy" bashed his parents' brains in after a lifetime of abuse and supposedly lives hidden from the world in one of the graveyard tombs outside the funeral home. Nice, huh? Eventually a couple of standard horror-movie stupid teenager characters have a late night run-in with "Billy," who infects them with some sort of zombie virus that causes them to reappear later, coughing up nasty black stuff on people. Needless to say, things go immediately downhill for everybody from here on. Oh, and did I mention that there's some sort of Lovecraftian demi-god monster with lots of teeth and tentacles living in a pit under the house? So, um, yeah, there's a lot going on here. For the last half of this film, I swear it felt like Hooper just gave up and hit the "TOTALLY RANDOM" button.
Fortunately, "Mortuary" is one of those movies that moves along quickly enough that you don't really have time to think about how ridiculous it is until it's over. By the time Crosby's character gets infected, becomes a zombie, and starts chasing her kids through a series of passages and tunnels under the funeral home (which look like they were borrowed from "The Goonies"), you may start to wonder if "Mortuary" was intended to be a zombie film, a creature film, or a disease film. It seems to me that Hooper simply mixed clichés from all three genres into one very loud, fast moving, silly soup. The CGI used to create the "monster" under the house is some of the cheapest I've seen outside of an Asylum film, and the abrupt ending reeks of "We have no idea how to end this, so we're just gonna throw one last shock at you rather than give you a satisfactory conclusion." I honestly didn't think much of this movie at first glance, but when I compared it to 2 other films that were on the same DVD ("Bloody Mary" and "Wages of Sin") that I watched afterwards, "Mortuary's" stock shot up a few extra points because the other two were WAY worse.
OK, so "Mortuary" wasn't a classic, but it at least kept me entertained to a certain degree. I'd say it's not a bad flick if you can get it cheap (like I did) or if it turns up on SyFy Channel sometime but you're not missing out on a hidden gem if you decide to skip it.
Fortunately, "Mortuary" is one of those movies that moves along quickly enough that you don't really have time to think about how ridiculous it is until it's over. By the time Crosby's character gets infected, becomes a zombie, and starts chasing her kids through a series of passages and tunnels under the funeral home (which look like they were borrowed from "The Goonies"), you may start to wonder if "Mortuary" was intended to be a zombie film, a creature film, or a disease film. It seems to me that Hooper simply mixed clichés from all three genres into one very loud, fast moving, silly soup. The CGI used to create the "monster" under the house is some of the cheapest I've seen outside of an Asylum film, and the abrupt ending reeks of "We have no idea how to end this, so we're just gonna throw one last shock at you rather than give you a satisfactory conclusion." I honestly didn't think much of this movie at first glance, but when I compared it to 2 other films that were on the same DVD ("Bloody Mary" and "Wages of Sin") that I watched afterwards, "Mortuary's" stock shot up a few extra points because the other two were WAY worse.
OK, so "Mortuary" wasn't a classic, but it at least kept me entertained to a certain degree. I'd say it's not a bad flick if you can get it cheap (like I did) or if it turns up on SyFy Channel sometime but you're not missing out on a hidden gem if you decide to skip it.