Review

Leslie Doyle, teenage son Jonathan, and pre-teen cutie Jamie are headed into the wilds of middle America to start a new life after Dad died due to unknown causes. Seems Leslie has headed back to school and got her diploma as a mortician, and the old Fowler's Brothers Mortuary is available for rent with an option to purchase. Yes, young kids, a house full of dead bodies, a graveyard out front, and an overflowing septic tank, sounds like some kind of bliss in an Adams Family sort of a way.

We soon learn the house harbours a sort of fungus the bogeyman that loves blood, oh and re-animating corpses. So this can't be good right? Add in a local lunatic that lives in a crypt and apparently doesn't have an aversion to "doing things" with local teens, and whatever the hell that thing was under the house, and you are pretty much right for ninety minutes worth of hocus-pocus. Ready to see if Tobe has thrown off the shackles of Boredwood and is back doing what he does best?

There's a light on over at the Frankenstein place, unfortunately the same can't be said about Tobe Hooper's recent endeavours in the horror genre. This is the dude that has given us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eaten Alive, Poltergeist (jury out, smells awfully like a Spielberg shadow loomed large there), and the surprisingly effective remake of The Toolbox Murders. So why is it that in between strong movies the Texan puts out half-arsed films such as Mortuary? I'm thinking Hollywood has a lot to answer for with Tobe's career and while we are at it a number of Downunder Directors that have washed up on its fatal shores. Clearly the horror intelligentsia had finally had enough of Hooper delivering sub-par fare, as Mortuary missed out on wide release at the cinema and had to fight tooth and nail to get even a DVD release. Finally after a long wait, had actually forgotten about this one, a DVD copy landed on my desk so I was good to go with Tobe's latest effort. Got to say end of day the wait wasn't worth it, another miss from Hooper, and no wonder something smelt in the state of California. That's a Shakespeare reference for readers from Utah and South Australia by the way.

As is unfortunately the case recently, Tobe Hooper follows a lot of other horror Directors in starting his movie well and lulling us into a false sense of security with what we are seeing. I would actually go further and state Hooper is on ten out of ten pace with the first half of Mortuary, there's some real craftsmanship going down. Hooper has tight shots of a young girl in the back seat of a car, she is clearly worried, and the Director is heavily hitting that with close-ups. Excellent acting from Stephanie Patton with Hooper hitting the M. Night path in getting the best out of a child actor. For mine this is the best sequence in the movie and it did hold out the promise that the Director was back to his best form. Hooper pans out and we get one of those annoying family interactions that must work for North American audiences but come off all cheesy and unbelievable to the rest of us on planet earth. We also touch bases with Lieutenant Tasha Yar driving the car, seems she has hung up the Starfleet uniform and is busy starting life as a funeral director.

Hooper starts well but then get's caught up in making all the mistakes Hollywood is reknowed for.

We soon learn that the young girl, Jamie (in the first of numerous horror references that we are only vaguely interested in), is more worried by her mom's new career and Dad's premature demise than actually moving to a new town 14 hours drive away from her old home. Actually I don't see what she's got to whinge about, apparently you don't have to do the school thing in the new place.

Now just remember the points Hooper is at pains to make, including a tumbling coffin in the parlour, Dad has recently died and Jamie still coming to terms with her loss. You are going to have to remember those points because Hooper completely forgets about them for the rest of the movie. And if anyone was thinking my smile was being turned upside down, hell yeah, this is sloppy moviemaking.

After being part of the family "oh that memory is a keeper" �Hooper introduces us to the house and one of the more whacko real estate agents you are ever likely to run across. Now got to say the house set is spot on, the old place is large, gloomy, and falling apart. What your local real estate salesperson would call a "home handyman" special and the rest of us would call a money pit. Strangely the house is the sort of place that Mrs J would love to purchase and do up. There's something slightly scary in that notion but I haven't put my finger on quite what yet. The house doubles as living quarters, in a sort of South American prison style, and a funeral home for the dear departed (whom we'll find shortly aren't as departed as the Doyles may wish). So we have coffins in the living room, an embalming lab down in the cellar, and a decaying cemetery out front. The real estate dude can inform us that the prison crew who were scheduled to clean the place up were unable to do so due to the dangers of residual chemicals on the property. Yes, well you did rent the old pile so that's either a lawsuit waiting to happen or a major plot hole. So Leslie and kids also have an overflowing septic, restraining myself from the obvious joke here, to add some fragrance to the general ambience.

Having established the family ties and the spooky location, Hooper gradually introduces the horror elements, remembering we are still talking the first half of the movie here. There's a sort of fungus that loves to suck up blood, that's never a good thing, and a barely glimpsed "something" in the cemetery grabbing the beer guzzling and cemetery-baby-making teens. The first half of Mortuary is all about shadows and suggestion rather than exposure; Hooper had the movie sitting up and begging for its dinner.

Right about the time I was thinking "you really shouldn't open locked doors in tombs, especially if they have warnings and strange key lock combinations", the movie started to get out of Hooper's control and swerve toward the safety rail, which I have to say isn't looking that sturdy. We go from suggestion to the sort of comic style horror that those old creep show movies were adept at using. The sets suddenly become simply sets, the actors start doing inexplicably stupid things, and a sort of "seen it all before" hits you over the head. In hindsight the introduction of zombies into the movie didn't really work, think Return of the Dead style walking corpses and you'll know what I mean. From being a serious horror flick Mortuary is suddenly all comic relief and the sort of date movie teens with the attention span of a retarded cat will enjoy.

To further ensure we will leave the movie with no happy memories at all Hooper introduces a salt solution that worked in Supernatural but here has you wondering "what the frack", and a sort of underground controlling monster in the caverns below the house. The implications are that our happily spawning fungus is somehow a part of Mr Teeth the well-dweller. A few people are immediately calling this a Lovecraftian overture, for mine it's about as Lovecraftian as that episode of Buffy were Sunnydale's resident superhero has to fight the exact same thing under the school.

Yes we do get an odious comic relief in the form of the Sherriff who might have worked if the script writers were better at their craft.

Dan Byrd (Jonathan) worked for mine, I could easily believe he was a U.S. teen doing the best that he could in a strange land. Nice performance and would like to see Byrd in something else. Denise Crosby (Leslie) is slumming it here and turns in an adequate performance without overly impressing. Stephanie Patton (Jamie) is simply great as the precocious young person, without becoming the irritant that so many of them do in U.S. horror flicks. Alexandra Adi (Liz) didn't have much to do but was pretty good at doing it. Rocky Marquette (Grady) got to play a gay role for no apparent reason other than the script required a gay character. And finally Courtney Peldon (Tina), there's another reference, is blonde and has big knockers, guess why she was cast?

No T&A or hint of it, or half dressed babes or shirtless dudes or ... all the funs been drained from this movie, seriously!

Joseph Conlan handed in a pretty schizo score to be honest. In parts it sounds like something John Carpenter would compose, elsewhere we get techno stylings with a nice rasping finger nails on a blackboard vibe going down, and to round things off strident violins are thrown in seemingly randomly. Whether this works or not for Mortuary I have no idea, but horror's greatest hits wasn't exactly floating my boat.

Every time I get a new Tobe Hooper movie on my desk I get kind of excited and am really hoping that this one will see Hooper returning to the glory days of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And every time its the same result, bitter disappointment at yet another sub standard horror flick. Mortuary starts well but loses traction by the midway point, crashes through the safety rail, and plunges into the valley of ineptitude, bursting into flames on impact. Hey to those who thought I had left that idea hanging in the main review, unlike the writers involved in Mortuary I'm making sure nothing is left hanging or forgotten. Guess Hooper's movie was okay and I didn't eject the DVD at any stage.

Since I have zero trivia on Mortuary and clearly no box office data, an answer to a few people who have been wondering how we decide what movies should get reviewed and why we don't spend most of our time with new releases. We review whatever movies strike the individual reviewer's fancy at the time; there is no set agenda besides the odd freebie being sent our way via the Distributors or readers. Generally we have to pay for movies, just like you, so the sales bins on occasion get a good going over. In terms of new movies, and here I can only talk about myself, I don't have time to catch every new release and considering a ticket will set you back $15.50 in this country I don't have the finances to watch every half-arsed effort hitting our cinema multiplexes. We don't get free movie tickets from the Distributors and hence are not beholden to anyone to give a flick a decent review because there's some sort of carrot being dangled.

This one is really not worth hunting out as its the same old same old coming at you. Hooper can do a lot better than Mortuary and its a constant surprise that he seemingly refuses to do so. There is not going to be a happy face after viewing Mortuary so my advice is to let the movie rest in peace without disturbing its slumber.