Mortuary
Graveyard antics offer little of value

My objection to a film like Mortuary is that with only a little effort — a very little effort — the film could have easily been so much better. Oftentimes, someone will rush to the defense of such a film by saying it's just supposed to be for fun; sometimes it's the makers who will present this argument.

Well, maybe. Maybe you just wanted to make something dumb and entertaining, a light bit of fluff. Still, the question remains: considering how very little effort it would have taken to make it better, it just seems lazy not to have done so. Ideas are not the mortal enemy of fun.

Consider this set up: A family loses their father to death. The loss of a parent is serious business. Mom, now a widow, has been studying embalming, but her practical experience is almost zilch. Still, she has a family to keep going and life goes on, so she and her two kids, still in mourning, pack up and move to a small town so mom can take over a broken down disaster of a mortuary. In other words, a family who should be trying to heal from their brush with death instead choose to immerse themselves wholly in the very thing they are probably least able to deal with.

That's a good skeleton; you can hang all kinds of things on it, dress it up nicely. To a clever writer, there is even plenty of room for grim dark humor. To me, themes, situations and story-lines practically write themselves. Ideas abound, but the makers of Mortuary can't seem to throw them out fast enough in favor of a jokey, parody-like approach that ends up serving no discernible purpose.

So much of Mortuary is so just plain goofy that its clear they are trying to make a parody. What's not clear is the target of their parody. Horror parodies are nothing new. In fact they're kind of commonplace by now. So commonplace that the methods used to mock horror film clichés are themselves cliché: the over-the-top gore effect, the non-sequiter response to a horrific situation (For instance, say a decapitated head lands in someone's lap, and that person's response is to say something like "Oh, man, I just got this suit cleaned." Ha ha ha; lame), the worst cliché is trivialization of the idea that anything should even be a cause for horror.

The flaw of such simple-minded parody is obvious. Without something else to bring to the table, what's the point? Maybe — ha ha — it's all just a big lark, but it's not interesting. This is because ideas are not the mortal enemy of entertainment; ironically, it is the lack of anything interesting to say that is the death of entertainment.

Mortuary's idea of entertainment is to toss every element it can think of into the mix. There's the horny teenagers, the good teenagers, the mortuary is haunted, there's a Jason-like legend involved with the place, which borrows liberally from director Tobe Hooper's own The Funhouse, there's the herky jerky zombies and the cheap-ass fake ending. But what's the point?

Stuart Gordon's Reanimator is a film that mixes comedy and horror admirably. The reason it works is that its humor is mixed in without ever losing track of its driving themes: the overwhelming dread of mortality and Herbert West's indestructible scientific arrogance. Those are ideas you can play with, have fun with.

So could it have been with Mortuary; unfortunately, they chose instead to make a film about nothing at all. To the actors and tech crew who so gamely give it their all in service of such films, I apologize for not having the energy to explore other elements of the film.