This was just so much fun, not perfect, but a lot of fun. People are still expecting Tobe Hooper to direct another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is too bad, because this is a really enjoyable horror movie. It has a lot of great B-movie atmosphere, hot chicks, small town punks, and some original gore concepts. The idea of a conscious fungus colony is pretty creepy, gross and scary! It is definitely a Lovecraftian-theme, and some parts of the small town backstory resemble "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and a little-bit of "The Outsider". It also has some similarities with Lucio Fulci's "The House By the Cemetery", a film I love. I even noticed a few nods to Hooper's "Poltergeist", and "Eaten Alive", and 1998's "Phantoms". This is really just a very funny, and creepy ride. It doesn't have any great statements to make, and a lot of it isn't new, but the combinations are new. Sometimes, it's just good to have some fun with the genre.
Denise Crosby was really great as the single-mom who moves her family to a small California town as the new mortician. They find a really rundown old mortuary that rests on an island of muck, which lets us know we're in for some grim, dirty horror. Greg Travis returns from Toolbox Murders as a shady local-businessman who rents the accursed property to unsuspecting tenants, and his foppish gimp-character laughs all the time. Hilarious! All the characters are well-drawn, and likable with a few notable-exceptions, so those characters "die" early-on. They all seem and act as real people do, like Dan Byrd's character as the son, he's very believable. While the film is a light-horror with lots of humor, the plot line is actually very grim. Many online-reviewers have expressed anger at the ending of this film, calling it a "cheap-ending", but I don't see this at all. Did I mention the girl with the kool-aid hair looked pretty hot? But, honestly, could the ending be any more unexpected?
Not many American horror-directors allow sympathetic characters to die-off completely, or have their identities taken-over or destroyed. It's in the indie-productions or Asian and European horror that it occurs in the story, if it does at all. We remember John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982) because he breaks this rule, even to the very-end of the film. Knowing the rules helps! At the time, many people were angered by this, but it's part of the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr. from 1938. There is above-ground horror, and there is underground-horror like Campbell and Lovecraft, Bloch, Derleth, etc. We know there are some things that you just don't do in a mainstream-film, which is exactly why they should be done in horror. To do horror well, you have to betray the audience.
The only way for horror to progress is by a violation of taboos, and a knowledge of what works. Killing the heroes certainly works, but it's too-bad for those who feel emotionally betrayed. The ending of Mortuary was just a fun fake-out. There were two other scenes that stood-out: the infected mother serving the kids dinner in a parody of domesticity, and the scene at the subterranean-well. The infected were just completely mechanical and insane, I loved it. The latter-scene was a nod to parts of "Invaders from Mars" (1986), Hooper's remake of the 1953 classic. If you hadn't noticed, many of Hooper's films center on a family unit in some way. He makes some pretty interesting comments on the family in his films, and not all of them are sympathetic. This film just supports his countercultural-background, and people get irritated by his jabs, or when they don't get it.
The only major complaint I have with Mortuary is that some of the CGI could have been better. It drew too much attention to itself, but some of it was pretty good. As much as it costs, why not do a few mattes and miniatures in the real-world? There was also a scene in the mortuary where some accident victims reanimate that should have been staged better, but this is a low-budget horror (el cheapo). I would wager this movie cost under $1 million, which is impressive considering the results. I doubt Uwe Boll or Paul Thomas Anderson could even pay-themselves on this, but their films basically suck at $30-40 million. The cinematography is great, with some looming low-shots, and very interesting night-photography and composition.
The house and its setting are very realistic and bleak--it makes one wonder exactly what is possible in some of our most-polluted quarters of America. Nearly every small town has a local boogeyman story like the Bobby Fowler character, and the mortuary house was well-drawn: a place of death, where nothing grows, but something there feasts on the dead and the living. After the biggest rain in 50-years, it something has reawakened to feast more-than-ever. The behavior of the "infected" is pretty unsettling and machine-like, keeping with Hooper's fear of a mechanical-horror. He seems to enjoy portraying people in social-roles (cop, mother, punker, movie-reviewer, skater, girlfriend, employee, sibling, goth, metalhead, authoritarian, homosexual, judge, manager, wife, husband, etc.) as a form of living-death, but who can complain when this is our lives? All-in-all, it was just-entertaining (I know, the end of the world!), with a few jolts and some effectively disgusting makeup. The tone gets more-and-more hysterical and bizarre, and that's what I expect from Tobe Hooper. This is the same level of film-making he was at when he did Eaten Alive, and it's low-budget but very solid. The origins of the zombification were pretty original, and there were some moments of greatness in the imagery. I'm a sucker for graveyards. This is a great-addition to the works of Tobe Hooper, he has nothing to be ashamed-of here.That's all if ever claimed to be. A decent B-movie horror with a some shocks.
Denise Crosby was really great as the single-mom who moves her family to a small California town as the new mortician. They find a really rundown old mortuary that rests on an island of muck, which lets us know we're in for some grim, dirty horror. Greg Travis returns from Toolbox Murders as a shady local-businessman who rents the accursed property to unsuspecting tenants, and his foppish gimp-character laughs all the time. Hilarious! All the characters are well-drawn, and likable with a few notable-exceptions, so those characters "die" early-on. They all seem and act as real people do, like Dan Byrd's character as the son, he's very believable. While the film is a light-horror with lots of humor, the plot line is actually very grim. Many online-reviewers have expressed anger at the ending of this film, calling it a "cheap-ending", but I don't see this at all. Did I mention the girl with the kool-aid hair looked pretty hot? But, honestly, could the ending be any more unexpected?
Not many American horror-directors allow sympathetic characters to die-off completely, or have their identities taken-over or destroyed. It's in the indie-productions or Asian and European horror that it occurs in the story, if it does at all. We remember John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982) because he breaks this rule, even to the very-end of the film. Knowing the rules helps! At the time, many people were angered by this, but it's part of the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr. from 1938. There is above-ground horror, and there is underground-horror like Campbell and Lovecraft, Bloch, Derleth, etc. We know there are some things that you just don't do in a mainstream-film, which is exactly why they should be done in horror. To do horror well, you have to betray the audience.
The only way for horror to progress is by a violation of taboos, and a knowledge of what works. Killing the heroes certainly works, but it's too-bad for those who feel emotionally betrayed. The ending of Mortuary was just a fun fake-out. There were two other scenes that stood-out: the infected mother serving the kids dinner in a parody of domesticity, and the scene at the subterranean-well. The infected were just completely mechanical and insane, I loved it. The latter-scene was a nod to parts of "Invaders from Mars" (1986), Hooper's remake of the 1953 classic. If you hadn't noticed, many of Hooper's films center on a family unit in some way. He makes some pretty interesting comments on the family in his films, and not all of them are sympathetic. This film just supports his countercultural-background, and people get irritated by his jabs, or when they don't get it.
The only major complaint I have with Mortuary is that some of the CGI could have been better. It drew too much attention to itself, but some of it was pretty good. As much as it costs, why not do a few mattes and miniatures in the real-world? There was also a scene in the mortuary where some accident victims reanimate that should have been staged better, but this is a low-budget horror (el cheapo). I would wager this movie cost under $1 million, which is impressive considering the results. I doubt Uwe Boll or Paul Thomas Anderson could even pay-themselves on this, but their films basically suck at $30-40 million. The cinematography is great, with some looming low-shots, and very interesting night-photography and composition.
The house and its setting are very realistic and bleak--it makes one wonder exactly what is possible in some of our most-polluted quarters of America. Nearly every small town has a local boogeyman story like the Bobby Fowler character, and the mortuary house was well-drawn: a place of death, where nothing grows, but something there feasts on the dead and the living. After the biggest rain in 50-years, it something has reawakened to feast more-than-ever. The behavior of the "infected" is pretty unsettling and machine-like, keeping with Hooper's fear of a mechanical-horror. He seems to enjoy portraying people in social-roles (cop, mother, punker, movie-reviewer, skater, girlfriend, employee, sibling, goth, metalhead, authoritarian, homosexual, judge, manager, wife, husband, etc.) as a form of living-death, but who can complain when this is our lives? All-in-all, it was just-entertaining (I know, the end of the world!), with a few jolts and some effectively disgusting makeup. The tone gets more-and-more hysterical and bizarre, and that's what I expect from Tobe Hooper. This is the same level of film-making he was at when he did Eaten Alive, and it's low-budget but very solid. The origins of the zombification were pretty original, and there were some moments of greatness in the imagery. I'm a sucker for graveyards. This is a great-addition to the works of Tobe Hooper, he has nothing to be ashamed-of here.That's all if ever claimed to be. A decent B-movie horror with a some shocks.