Mortuary starts as recently widowed Leslie Doyle (Denise Crosby) & her two young children Jonathan (Dan Byrd) & Janie (Stephanie Patton) arrive at a small town in California where they hope to rebuild their lives having taken over the local mortuary. There Jonathan quickly gets a job at a local diner & as the bodies pile up Leslie is kept busy, however there are strange local legends surrounding the mortuary & the previous occupants. Then a black fungus starts to grow around the mortuary & infect the dead which brings them back to life as zombies, it also infects the living & turns them into killers who do the evil fungi's bidding...
This deeply unfunny & unscary horror comedy was directed by the one time great Tobe Hooper whose career has been a literal roller-coaster & uneven to say the least, from his first film the classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to his second the darkly grim & macabre Eaten Alive (1976) to the Salem's Lot (1979) film to The Funhouse (1981) to Poltergeist (1982) he had some cracking films to his credit & a good reputation in the horror genre. Then things began to fall apart, he went through a phase of making entertainingly bad films like Lifeforce (1985), the Invaders from Mars (1986) remake & The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) all of which I love but flopped both critically & commercially. Unfortunately since then Hooper has made nothing but bad film after bad film even going as low as to direct the lousy straight-to-video/DVD Sci-Fi Channel style creature feature Crocodile (2000) & then there's this, Mortuary. The script by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch (who also wrote the awful aforementioned Tobe Hooper directed Cocodile & his Toolbox Murders (2003) remake) really tries to be some sort of amusing teen comedy horror but fails spectacularly, I honestly don't think I even smiled let alone laughed at one single moment in Mortuary. All the gags really miss the mark for me, from supposedly funny scenes of zombies being sick on people to a seedy Mayor to a Sheriff with a stutter to a sarcastic café owner this is as funny as filling out tax returns. The horror side of things are no better, it's takes an absolute age for anything to happen & when it does it's nothing more than scenes of teenagers screaming & running from a few zombies. The script & plot are atrocious & nothing has any sort of explanation behind it. For instance we never find out what the fungus is, where it came from or why it suddenly appeared. We never find out why there's some guy living under the graveyard or what he motivations are or why no-one has ever seen him before. We never find out why salt kills the fungus or why at the end the film totally contradicts itself & has all the fungus survive even though we just saw it destroyed. We never find out what the fungus wants or why it controls people or what their purpose is. Basically Mortuary feels like lots of totally unconnected ideas thrown together without any sort of reason.
Director Hooper turns in a reasonable looking flick I'll give him that much but overall the film still sucks. The character's are awful, you will not care for any of them & by the end you will be rooting for the fungus & zombies. So what could save such a poorly conceived & written film like Mortuary? That's right, lots of blood, gore & zombie action. Unfortunately Hooper lets us down big time in this department too, there's a severed arm & zombie punches it's hand through someone's neck & that really is all the gore there is. For a film that goes on for over 90 minutes & is so bad that just isn't good enough. There's no nudity either in case you were wondering which you probably weren't. The film is competently made but there's no real atmosphere, it's not scary, there's no impending sense of doom or gloom & the whole thing feels very flat & not too dissimilar to a cheap TV flick.
Technically the film has reasonable production values, cinematography & special make-up effects although some of the CGI computer effects at the end are terrible. Filmed in Los Angeles. The acting isn't anything to get excited about & you know your in trouble when a little twelve year old girl gives the best performance.
Mortuary is a poor attempt at a horror comedy that is neither horrific or funny & the plot feels like it had no thought put into it at all, this is disappointing by anybodies standard but with the once great Tobe Hooper's name attached it's even worse. Funnily enough there were two films made in the same year during 1983 called Mortuary & then none until 2005 when another two were made during the same year called Mortuary as well!
This deeply unfunny & unscary horror comedy was directed by the one time great Tobe Hooper whose career has been a literal roller-coaster & uneven to say the least, from his first film the classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to his second the darkly grim & macabre Eaten Alive (1976) to the Salem's Lot (1979) film to The Funhouse (1981) to Poltergeist (1982) he had some cracking films to his credit & a good reputation in the horror genre. Then things began to fall apart, he went through a phase of making entertainingly bad films like Lifeforce (1985), the Invaders from Mars (1986) remake & The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) all of which I love but flopped both critically & commercially. Unfortunately since then Hooper has made nothing but bad film after bad film even going as low as to direct the lousy straight-to-video/DVD Sci-Fi Channel style creature feature Crocodile (2000) & then there's this, Mortuary. The script by Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch (who also wrote the awful aforementioned Tobe Hooper directed Cocodile & his Toolbox Murders (2003) remake) really tries to be some sort of amusing teen comedy horror but fails spectacularly, I honestly don't think I even smiled let alone laughed at one single moment in Mortuary. All the gags really miss the mark for me, from supposedly funny scenes of zombies being sick on people to a seedy Mayor to a Sheriff with a stutter to a sarcastic café owner this is as funny as filling out tax returns. The horror side of things are no better, it's takes an absolute age for anything to happen & when it does it's nothing more than scenes of teenagers screaming & running from a few zombies. The script & plot are atrocious & nothing has any sort of explanation behind it. For instance we never find out what the fungus is, where it came from or why it suddenly appeared. We never find out why there's some guy living under the graveyard or what he motivations are or why no-one has ever seen him before. We never find out why salt kills the fungus or why at the end the film totally contradicts itself & has all the fungus survive even though we just saw it destroyed. We never find out what the fungus wants or why it controls people or what their purpose is. Basically Mortuary feels like lots of totally unconnected ideas thrown together without any sort of reason.
Director Hooper turns in a reasonable looking flick I'll give him that much but overall the film still sucks. The character's are awful, you will not care for any of them & by the end you will be rooting for the fungus & zombies. So what could save such a poorly conceived & written film like Mortuary? That's right, lots of blood, gore & zombie action. Unfortunately Hooper lets us down big time in this department too, there's a severed arm & zombie punches it's hand through someone's neck & that really is all the gore there is. For a film that goes on for over 90 minutes & is so bad that just isn't good enough. There's no nudity either in case you were wondering which you probably weren't. The film is competently made but there's no real atmosphere, it's not scary, there's no impending sense of doom or gloom & the whole thing feels very flat & not too dissimilar to a cheap TV flick.
Technically the film has reasonable production values, cinematography & special make-up effects although some of the CGI computer effects at the end are terrible. Filmed in Los Angeles. The acting isn't anything to get excited about & you know your in trouble when a little twelve year old girl gives the best performance.
Mortuary is a poor attempt at a horror comedy that is neither horrific or funny & the plot feels like it had no thought put into it at all, this is disappointing by anybodies standard but with the once great Tobe Hooper's name attached it's even worse. Funnily enough there were two films made in the same year during 1983 called Mortuary & then none until 2005 when another two were made during the same year called Mortuary as well!