The Doyle family consisting of a mother, her son and a young daughter moves to start a new life running a funeral home somewhere in California. The house is old and have definitely seen better days and around the house is a graveyard. There are rumours about a man who disappered, returned and killed his parents and then disappeared again, and the locals fear the place. It doesn't take long before the Doyle family becomes aware of that something's lurking beneath the soil of their new property, something that raises the dead from their graves.
Been waiting to check out this new Tobe Hooper flick, but unfortunately it left me very disappointed. I have no idea why and how Hooper could make a movie like this. While it practically oozes horror and has a lot of potential, in the end it just ends up being completely ridiculous. Actually, everything is quite ridiculous from beginning to end. I thought he did a really good job with the Toolbox Murders remake, but the man definitely seems to have lost it again, big-time. Weird thing is that he has made some really good movies in his days and on top of that, some really horrible ones as well. I mean, of course every movie he makes can't be great, but the differences between his movies are just so big it's hard to know what to expect. As with Mortuary I never saw it coming, it's just so darn bad.
40 minutes into the movie I couldn't wait for it to end, but thought that it might pick up after a while. It never did and the ending itself is just so horrible and lame it's amazing. I actually felt a bit cheated after watching Mortuary, as I said before, it practially oozes of horror all the way through, but is just so cheap, predictable and non-effective it almost hurts. It's so bad because I really wanted to like it, and it sure could've been a decent flick. The story is nothing special but it works fine, it's just everything else that's so bad. I would like to have seen this exact same movie directed by Rob Zombie, I think that could've been something. That with a change of all the actors too. Oh the actors, I don't even wanna go there.
This family buys a mortuary and the mom is supposed to become the new local mortician of the small town they now live in. Funny thing is that I thought that she was a mortician before moving, but she doesn't seem to have clue to what she's doing. Their new house is not very new and is super shitty to the max to quote The Hellacopters, and there's also some black fungus or some kind of mold looking stuff that clings to the walls and floors around the house. The son of the family meets some new friends and gets to hear the local story, some sort of urban legend about a man named Bobby Fowler who disappeared and years later murdered his parents to disapper once again. The daughter of the family also claims that she saw a man in her closet that looked like they described Fowler. Soon the dead comes alive again and everything turns into a big uninteresting and non scary mess.
The award for being the most irritating person goes to the little daughter of the family. Either she's super happy and acts like a retard or she screams and whins until one just wants to chop his ears off. She so annoying and meaningless it's undescribable, I almost got sick putting up with watching her constantly whining, screaming and crying. Then we have the local sheriff who's such a bad actor I can't even find words to describe it. Other than that, all the other actors suck beyond belief. There's not one single decent actor or actress in the entire film, unbelivable.
We get a little gore here and there but it's nothing much. The scares are so cheap and they use a lot of loud sounds every now and then to scare the viewer, something that's just irritating and doesn't work at all. Mortuary has a lot of things going for it on the horror front, like the creepy old house, the graveyard just outside, the fact that it's a funeral home with coffins and stuff inside. But it never does anything good with it, instead it uses tons of old clichés and that makes it just too lame to put up with. The atmosphere is at times pretty nice, but is ruined by the worthless acting and the stupid and non-effective scares.
The reason I gave this movie a rating of two out of ten is because: 1. It has a lot of potential and some of the surroundings look really good. And 2, because even if it's complete crap it's at least fast-paced, stuff happen all the time and it's over pretty quickly. They use some CGI effects towards the end that look so stupid and ruins everything even more, although I don't know if that's really possible. I hope Tobe Hoopers next project will be better than this, on the other hand it sure can't be any worse. Avoid.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2005
DIRECTOR: Tobe Hooper
WRITING CREDITS: Jace Anderson, Adam Gierasch
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Dan Byrd, Stephanie Patton, Price Carson
COUNTRY: USA, Germany
RUNTIME: 94 min
RATING: 2/10
Mortuary Website/IMDB Click here
Mortuary Trailer Click here
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