Mortuary (2005)
Review by The Film Fiend
Beloved cult horror director Tobe Hooper is one interesting fellow. Not because he makes good movies, mind you, but because the guy is so pathetically inconsistent that it borderlines on the absurd. How could the man responsible for both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist have crafted such mind-numbingly awful fare as Lifeforce and Crocodile? Don’t get me wrong — I don’t expect the guy to hit a home run out of the park every time he steps to the plate, but the distance between his good films and his bad films is actually quite staggering. I heard through the grapevine that someone is giving tours of this bottomless chasm next Christmas, so be sure to purchase your tickets early.
Hooper’s latest full-length feature Mortuary is, if nothing else, an interesting failure. This is due in part to the director’s questionable “kitchen sink” approach to Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch’s four napkin script. Instead of presenting the story as a quirky, mildly atmospheric zombie picture, Tobe is content to throw every single half-baked idea in his tattered bag of pathetic tricks at the screen in hopes that something will stick.
Along with the picture’s brutally unfunny talking zombies, you get yet another deformed psychopath with a blood-thirsty agenda, a poorly-conceived Lovecraftian monster, and a narrative that ultimately fails to bring these outrageous ideas together by the time the end credits make their entrance. And while it was nice to see Denise Crosby back in the proverbial saddle, it’s sad that she has ended up wasting her skills in such an uneven genre outing.
After losing her husband to the bony fingers of Mr. Reaper, dumpy mother Leslie (Crosby) moves her geeky son Jonathan (Dan Byrd) and her bratty daughter Jamie (Stephanie Patton) into an old mortuary in hopes of starting a new life for her dysfunctional family. Not only is the house a true vision of derelict suburban living, but there’s a nifty little graveyard right out front where the local thug population attempt to create “graveyard babies” with their lady friends. It’s every white woman’s dream come true.
Did I mention the house comes complete with a backed-up septic tank and a weird form of black moss that tends to gravitate towards spilled blood? I didn’t? Well, you get that, too, as well as a colorful cast of goofy local characters, all of whom are quick to tell poor Jonathan about the mortuary’s storied past. Throw in a cute but highly-annoying love interest (Alexandra Adi) and the prerequisite Scooby Doo mystery and you’ve got yourself a funky little dish nobody really wants to eat. My advice: give it to the dog and order out.
You can tell right from the start that Mortuary has no clue what it wants to be when it grows up. Is this a depressing Lifetime-esque family drama, or a low-calorie splatter comedy? A rejected Tales from the Crypt episode that someone felt the need to stretch into a 90-minute feature, or a straight-forward horror film designed specifically to give you the creeps? Because of these constant shifts in tone, the film ends up being a contrived mess that lacks any sort of cohesion whatsoever. In other words, it’s your prototypical Tobe Hooper film. Way to go!
If that isn’t enough to kick-start your irritable bowel syndrome, the film also forces you to contend with an ending that relies heavily on a cheap, ineffective CGI monster that could have easily been brought to life with some latex, a handful of foam, and a few skilled puppeteers. However, considering the rest of the film is just as silly as its hackneyed ending, I honestly should have expected as much. And despite the advice of that cocky film leprechaun who sleeps on my right shoulder, I kept hoping and praying and pleading and begging to the Celluloid Gawds of Hollywoodland for a finale that would justify the time spent with this crime against humanity. Unfortunately, my hopes and dreams for a decent direct-to-video experience were pummeled and left for dead on the side of a busy highway like so many cheap truck-stop hookers. For shame.
The film’s lone highlight is up-and-coming star Dan Byrd, who seems to be having a good time despite the lame dialogue and sleepy script he’s given to work with. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that he’s really the only reason you should even bother with Mortuary in the first place. Thankfully, young Byrd has a rather meaty role in Alexandre Aja’s gore-encrusted remake The Hills Have Eyes, which also happens to be rather high on my list of the best horror flicks of 2006. Hoorah for me? You betcha, Bernie.
Had Hooper decided early on what kind of film he wanted to make, perhaps Mortuary wouldn’t be such an insufferable pail of rancid rubbish. Then again, with a laughable script from the dynamic duo responsible for both Crocodile AND Crocodile 2, it’s a wonder this film ever had a snowball’s chance in Hell of being anything other than middle-of-the-road. As it stands, it’s pretty much worthless, with the exception of one creepy sequence in the mortuary’s dank basement and a wonderful performance from Dan Byrd. Tobe Hooper, it seems, is just another unreliable horror filmmaker with one too many failures on his bloated, diseased resume. Oh, well. At least this one’s better than Crocodile.
Then again, what isn’t?
Popularity: 2% [?]
[ ‹‹ Frankenhooker (1990) The Thirst (2006) ›› ]
