Mortuary (2005)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

I picked up Mortuary in a bargain bin because I like zombie movies, and I seen Tobe Hooper directed it ( Poltergeist - Texas Chain Saw Massacre ).I thought this may be a half way decent movie, how can you go wrong with zombies ? And than the snore fest started. This movie seemed to go from one slow moving scene, to the next, building up false suspense many times, and at the same time failing to create a good atmosphere.The first dead body of the movie I almost laughed at, looking more like an albino Klingon than a human.What follows this, you may ask ? How about the movie attempting to throw in a comically inept mortician routine? Not funny, or amusing. After about 75% of the movie is over with, stuff actually starts to happen! Maybe they save the good parts for last.Nope. The main villain is cast as some evil mutant, but some how is clumsily revealed as a misunderstood mutant, who for no reason, turns "good" . The other zombie monsters are alright, though due to continuity errors, seem to have the magical power to teleport. Over all, I rate this move as a time killer. There is a thin plot, but often times I forget it exists. The acting is all right, though some characters ( like the sheriff )seem miscast. The set design is decent, though I can tell it's very cheep. And the one thing that bugs me the most would be, some of the decisions the characters make are really stupid, the kind of stuff no one in real life would ever do.

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.

If a Lifetime Channel movie drugged a 1987 horror film and had sex with it, the offspring of that unholy union would look something like Mortuary.Leslie Doyle (Denise Crosby), her teenage son Jonathan (Dan Byrd) and her tweenage daughter Jaime (Stephanie Patton) have driven across the country to start a new life after the unnamed patriarch died. Leslie went back to school to become a mortician and has taken a job running the old funeral home in a small town. But things don't get off to a great start for the family. The funeral home, where Leslie will work and her family will live, is a disaster area. The septic tank has overflowed, the outside of the home looks like it's been ravaged by hobos and the inside of the home looks like it was abandoned sometime after 1935. Jonathan gets a job at the local diner and instantly develops a crush on the young waitress, but he also gets into a fight with some townie losers. Leslie has to deal with an unbelievably unctuous real estate agent and the local sheriff, who nervously asks Leslie to help him keep kids from messing around in the incredibly fake-looking graveyard near the funeral home. He's worried about "graveyard babies", you see. Jaime, well, she just sort of hangs around and looks cute until she gets scared by a monster in her closet.After we hear the requisite scary story about what happened to the people who used to run the funeral home and we see some odd activity by the fungus that's everywhere in the home, that's when the horror starts to kick in. But Mortuary doesn't just have the typical, hulking Leatherface/Jason-type killer. No, this movie also has zombies and a giant monster in a well. There's a lot of screaming and running around, people jump to an awful lot of conclusions and after the ending there's one of those depressingly unnecessary "it's not really over" epilogues.If you're a horror fan, the thing you should know about Mortuary is that there's very little horror in the first hour of this roughly 90 minute film. Outside of just a few moments, including a comically excessive initial reveal of the hulking Leatherface/Jason-type guy, this movie is virtually indistinguishable from one of those chick flicks on Lifetime. No, not the one where the woman's husband cheats on her. And not the other one, where she falls in love with a guy who turns out to be a dangerous lunatic. I mean the one where a family has to rebond with each other after a tragic death. That's what the first hour of Mortuary is like and, you know what? It's actually fairly decent. Denise Crosby is positively milftastic and I don't mean one of those phony milfs, where it's a woman in her late 30s who looks like she has a chef and a personal trainer. Crosby looks like a real mom who is still genuinely hot. Dan Byrd also manages to be completely non-annoying as Jonathan, the teenage boy stuck in a strange new town, and Stephanie Patton is cute but never grating as the darling little sister.But after that first hour, at the exact point in a real Lifetime movie where Leslie would shack up with a guy who turns out to be abusive or Jonathan would start doing drugs or Leslie would get sick, where something would happen to tear the family apart and they'd spend the 2nd half of the movie overcoming that obstacle…that's when the horror kicks in with Mortuary. And in the last half-hour of this film you'll see everything you'd expect to see in a horror movie, just on fast forward. It's like the movie suddenly needs to go to the bathroom really badly and rushes through it all to get to the end. But even though the horror stuff hurtles by in a speedy and superficial manner, it remains fairly sound. None of it is very gory and it's more over-the-top than viscerally scary, but it all more or less works. It's just been compressed, like it was thrown into a garbage compactor or a really, really fat guy sat on it.The truth about Mortuary is that it is a good piece of entertainment which doesn't seem to have an audience. Folks who want horror are going to be perplexed at the relative wholesomeness of the first hour. Folks who'd enjoy the first hour would probably never rent a movie named Mortuary in the first place and if they did, they'd be disappointed with the last half hour. I think this movie is an attempt to recall the days when horror films would start out like normal stories about normal things as though the audience didn't know and expect a bunch of terrible crap was going to happen. If you can remember that and would like to relive that sensation, this is the movie for you. If not, I'm not sure what sort of reaction you might have to this otherwise fine film.

Finally Tobe is back to his roots AND he is back to get even! I think this is a good movie 'cause if you like Tobe's earlier work you will love this. He is back where it all began for him, and he is doing gooood!I've got the same feeling for this movie as I got from seeing "Texas chainsaw..." and thats a long wait I think. Hopefully he will keep on doing movies like this one 'cause i wanna feel that again and again. The feeling that the 80's slasher/zombie genre is not dead and hopefully it will grow stronger.Hope more movies like this one is going to be made in the future. I'll watch them anyway (with a big smile on my lips :-) ).He's BAAAACK!!