If the director of Mortuary sounds familiar, it's because Tobe Hooper was the mastermind behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Given that pedigree, you might expect Morturary to be a scary movie worthy of the horror hall of fame. And up until the last five minutes, it's actually a passable horror film.
Mortuary has all the right horror elements: quotes from H.P. Lovecraft, evil mold, a funeral home, a creepy cemetery, and Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) as the matriarch of a broken family. Jonathan (Dan Byrd), the teenage son, has the burden of responsibility as the "man" around the house and given his mother's poor skills as a professional embalmer (she reads from a book at one point), he has a lot of work to do. Much of that work involves protecting his sister Jamie (Stephanie Patton). This sad little family has uprooted itself for the last time in the hope of starting over.
Problems arise as soon as they arrive at their new home. Everybody in town is a caricature. There's a cackling idiot welcoming them to a wrecked cesspool of a funeral home, so overridden with mold and filth that you can't imagine any sane mother would allow her children to stay there. There are the one-dimensional teenagers who form a ménage-a-trois of stupidity – the busty blonde doesn't change clothes throughout the week, the better to show her cleavage. Love interest Liz (attractive Alexandra Adi, 25 at the time the movie was released) looks far too old to be 14. There's the sassy diner waitress, the weird but stern sheriff, and the gay friend. Whenever anyone commits a movie sin (premarital shenanigans, being a jerk, or being a gay friend) Hooper kills them off.
What seems at first like a slasher flick or a ghost story is actually a fairly pedestrian zombie movie. There are multiple culprits, including one Bobby Fowler (Price Carson) an abused mutant under the thrall of a black fungus that feeds on fresh blood. Fowler may well have a spark of good in him, but that plot point is glossed over by choppy editing. And near the end of the film, a zombie assault on the house transforms from a frenzied defense to a nonsensical series of cut scenes.
You know that a movie's suffered at the hands of an editor when geographical details begin to fall apart. The sheriff shows up looking for those meddling kids; but nobody notices when he disappears, leaving his police cruiser in front of the funeral home. Bobby appears in Jamie's bedroom and leaves behind a mask, but no one ever thinks to check how he got there. When they finally do check, it leads to the attic, which somehow magically leads to the graveyard across the street.
Most of those inconsistencies are easy to gloss over. The ending, however, is not. Hooper seems to be getting jaded – perhaps he's dissatisfied with the state of the genre he helped create. Whatever his reasoning, Hooper turns a standard zombie survival movie into a real downer by breaking all of his own rules. Monsters come back to life, destroyed characters are resurrected, and the final attack is so abrupt that you can't help but wonder how stupid the monster really is if it could just swallow people up in one gulp all along. Of the three survivors, one isn't even given a conclusion.
The worst thing about Mortuary is that it has just enough moments to make you care, which makes Hooper's slap-in-the-face ending sting all the more. Mortuary wasn't good to begin with, but the ending kills it dead.
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