“I’m going to embalm you. It won’t hurt. You won’t even know it happened.”
I had high hopes when I flicked the TV on to start my Mortuary (1982) review.
“A girl and her boyfriend”, the synopsis reads, “suspect her mother and an undertaker are embalming people too soon.”
How good does that sound? Combined with the early 80s timeframe, and the oh-so-of-the-time poster art – which depicts an arm bursting through the soil of a freshly-dug grave – and I was pumped to get stuck into the film before writing my Mortuary (1982) review.
Sure, the Rotten Tomatoes score was an underwhelming 30%, but as we all know, horror – especially horror over four decades old – has to work all that harder for good reviews.
I ignored it.
I shouldn’t have.
Because unfortunately, Mortuary (1982) is a film with an identity crisis.
It doesn’t have the body count to be a fully-fledged slasher. It doesn’t have the sufficient suspense to work as a mystery – or the nuances of a proper plot to work as a mystery. Mortuary (1982) doesn’t have the gore to qualify as something more brutal or horrifying, either, nor – at the other end of the spectrum – the laughs to pass itself off as a slapstick.
Instead, we have a film of contradictions: one that casts aside the comic potential of its zany premise to instead take itself far too seriously, and that underutilises its best actors – while spending far, far too much time with its worst. (Which, unfortunately, is most of them.)
After a brief cold open in which we witness a man bludgeoned to death near a swimming pool, the film opens with Greg (David Wallace) and his friend Josh (Denis Mandel), who trespass into the warehouse of Josh’s former employer Hank Andrews (Christopher George). Josh – who washed the bodies at Andrews’s mortuary before he was sacked – is owed some money, and wants to steal a few tyres to rake back his debts.
It's a fun, promising setup for the kind of B-Movie we’re expecting – and Josh is duly dispatched by a masked, ghoulish figure in a billowing black robe – but somehow, the scene isn’t anywhere near as effective as it should be.
The scene – and this is a precedent set for the entirety of the movie that unfolds – is tonally indecisive. It’s not sure whether to grab for hokey silliness and play the violence for laughs, or try and do something more serious and scary. At times, I felt like we were getting an opening scene reminiscent of Return of the Living Dead (1985), with two buffoons messing around in a place – and with forces – best left alone, and all the goofiness that comes with that (excellent) film. But instead, what proceeds is just kind of…flat. Any attempts to build tension are derailed by the light (and completely incongruous) piano music, which accompanies Josh and Greg’s footfall as they explore the warehouse.
George and Josh then spy that local undertaker Hank Andrews – accompanied by several robed women – performing a kind of occult ritual in a hidden room within the warehouse. Perhaps more disturbing still is that one of the women is Eve Parson (Lynda Day George), the mother of Greg’s girlfriend Christie (Mary Elizabeth McDonough). This doesn’t appear to bother them too much, though, and Josh goes off to find his tyres. While Greg wanders around the warehouse, Josh is killed by the aforementioned masked figure, who impales him with an embalming rod. There’s a bit of light gore, but for the most part Mortuary (1982) – like the embalmed corpses it features – is a relatively bloodless affair. The killer drives off in Greg’s van, who assumes Josh has simply bailed with his ride. After Josh is killed, we’re fully expecting some misfortune to befall Greg in the warehouse – it could’ve made for an excellent scene – but no; again, that potential is squandered. One cut, and the next we see of Greg is him driving away in Christie’s car.
From here, the movie begins to show its hand – perhaps a little too much of it. We learn that the sunbathing man killed in the cold open was Christie's father, and that it happened a month ago; we properly meet Eve, and witness her ceaseless, merciless gaslighting of her daughter; we’re introduced to Andrews’s son, Paul, who attends school with Greg and Christie and clearly holds a torch for the latter. We also see the sheriff giving Greg a dressing-down for trespassing in Andrews’s warehouse, and – later – see him huddling conspiratorially with Eve and Andrews. From the get-go, it seems like the film is planning to hang its hat on some kind of middle-class, white-collar conspiracy being afoot – echoing that of Society (1989) – and that it’s related not only to Christie’s father’s death, but the mortuary, and the rituals observed within its walls. What ultimately transpires, though, does a lot to subvert that, and it’s in a couple of twists that Mortuary finds its best moments.
Unfortunately, the credit Mortuary (1982) builds with those manouevres is completely outweighed by the film’s two unforgivable drawbacks: the plot and the performances.
Let’s take Christie as an example. Despite her being only a month into the grieving process after her father died (although she suspects, correctly and in contrast to her mother’s views, that he was murdered), McDonough doesn’t play her as a grieving daughter. Instead, she’s just…kinda normal. She’s more interested in making out with Greg, and – in the moments she is portrayed as someone writhing in grief's grip – we only get the most literal manifestations of this. We see Christie thrashing around in her sleep and calling her father’s name, but nothing in the way of more nuanced, realistic depictions of bereavement.
As for David Wallace, he plays Greg with what seems to be a permanent half-smirk – like he’s just happy to be in the film and is enjoying himself. As he should – but it just pulled me out of the film in a big way. Christopher George and Bill Paxton are predictably excellent, but the contrasting tones of their respective performances – George going for straight-laced seriousness and Paxton for spectacularly sinister silliness – only serve to underline the creative contradictions that beset Mortuary (1982).
Bill Paxton, who plays Paul Andrews, is the best part of Mortuary (1982).
It doesn’t help that the film itself lurches extravagantly (and, no doubt, unintentionally) from tone to tone: at times watching as a soap, at times a kind of procedural, and at times a grim, sobering thinkpiece about the inevitably of death. (Just kidding.)
At times, the movie seems to be shooting straight for verisimilitude and realism; at other times we get more mystical, almost supernatural elements – the ghostly look of the killer, for example, or the scene in which Christie, seemingly called by the spirit of her deceased dad, is lured into the swimming pool and nearly drowns in a state of somnambulism.
At one point, the film almost takes a weird turn into the erotic, when Greg and Christie drop trou and proceed to have sex in the living room of her house. Christie breaks it up when her eyes settle on a framed picture of dead daddy on the mantelpiece – always a turn-off – and it’s a good job, too, because her mum shows up about five seconds later.
From this screenshot, this looks like it should've been a good scene. It wasn't.
Christie goes to bed, Greg meets her at the door, and the two unabashedly flirt. I thought, for a moment, that we were getting another, altogether different, sex scene – and the fact that it wouldn’t have been surprising just serves to reinforce how much of a total tonal hodgepodge this thing is.
Sure, some of the aesthetics are nice. We get a few long, rolling shots of cemeteries, and the snapshot of suburbia Mortuary (1982) paints provides a pleasant shot of nostalgia. But even then, it’s hard to escape the sense that Mortuary is only somewhat nice to look at because of the way it recalls similar, superior films from that era. (1979’s Phantasm and 1981’s Dead & Buried are two that come to mind – both are a joy to behold, and feature some variation on the undertaker-gone-mad plot Mortuary dabbles in to much-diminished effect.)
The movie Mortuary (1982), despite this screenshot, doesn't have anywhere near as much to do with mortuaries as the title would have you suggest.
Spoiler alert – we learn that the cabal of Andrews, Eve, and the sheriff was all a red herring, and the rituals they were hosting were simply seances, attempting to connect Eve with her late husband. In reality, the killer is Paul Andrews (Paxton). We learn, through an incredibly clunky piece of exposition, delivered in a staggeringly flippant monologue by Eve to Christie, that Paul asked Christie’s father, before he died, for her hand in marriage.
Dad said no, and not long later he turned up dead. It’s huge news, but also highlights the mind-boggling poor writing and plot holes that plague Mortuary (1982) throughout. Surely someone should’ve taken all that into account when investigating the case? I mean, we see Christie’s dad get murdered, and he’s clearly beaten around the face with some kind of stick or baton. It wasn’t an accident! And isn’t it important evidence that the weird son of the undertaker asked the guy, unsuccessfully, to marry his daughter?
We’re also reminded that Paul’s mother – Hank’s wife – killed herself not too long ago. Combine that with a disappearance at the warehouse owned by the Andrews’s business, and it’s not hard to put the pieces together.
Anyways, at this point, Eve and Christie – who have just settled their differences and made up in a scene that seems to cast everything the movie has hitherto established about these characters to the flames – are sharing a glass of brandy in the living room when they hear a strange noise that sounds nothing like the wind. “It’s probably just the wind”, Eve says .
They toast to peace. Again, it all feels forced, with each character behaving differently than they have the whole film – it’s almost like they’re changing our opinion of the mum just because she’s about to be butchered. (A tactic that, 30 years later, The Walking Dead series would repeat ad nauseum.) Well, it turns out that’s exactly what’s about to happen, and we again get a closeup of Paxton (in ghostly makeup) as he enters Eve’s room through the window and proceeds to turn her into a human pincushion. The murder scene is shot to convey almost orgasmic imagery as Paul grunts and heavily breathes his way through the kill, with the filmmakers playing – heavy-handedly – with the symbolism of sword-as-phallus. It’s an odd decision – nothing else about either character has been presented sexually so far, and the scene's lascivious overtones leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.
So, yes – the killer is revealed to be Hank Andrews here. But eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed that, if you watch the opening scene closely, you can tell it’s him there too. He turns out to be wearing a kind of thin latex mask that doesn’t conceal his features, but instead ghoulifies them – an odd choice for someone presumably intent on hiding their identity while committing severe crimes. Now, this probably wasn’t an issue for theatregoers back in 1982 – when Paxton was still an emerging actor – but, for modern-day audiences (who have witnessed Paxton’s rise to his status, before his death, as one of Hollywood’s most recognisable character actors) it’s a little different. If we know Paxton’s in the film, we recognise him – and it only robs Mortuary (1982) of the kind of potential that, in different hands and with a more discerning script, it would’ve had limitless ability to fulfil.
Back in the world of the film, though, Christie stumbles upon her mother’s body and a chase scene ensues. Again, this could have been such a good, nail-biting sequence, but the music that accompanies it, and the almost disinterested way in which it’s shot, deprive it of anything resembling fear or tension. There’s even a pounding heartbeat sound effect – a technique some friends and I used at the age of 14, when making this movie for Media Studies class – which only serves to underlie the almost amateurish approach to production. Well,. Christie ends up ripping the latex face mask off in a (probably unintentional) Scooby Doo riff, but Paul incapacitates her, before taking her to the mortuary and announcing his intentions to his unconscious victim: embalming her. In the process, he ends up having to kill his own father, spiking his old man through the mid-section after he catches his son in the embalming room and tries to intervene.
"And I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"
Greg gets wind of the plot though, of course, and it sets up a final confrontation. The whole thing plays out awkwardly, exacerbated (again, I know, broken record) by the bizarre decisions made around music. It seems to be present when it shouldn’t be, and lacking when it should be – giving these ostensibly climactic scenes a stilted, formal feel.
Then comes the big reveal – that the entire string of murders Paul has committed have led to his attempt at hosting a perverse, makeshift wedding, with only the dead in attendance. There’s Josh, Hank, Christie’s parents, and a woman we don’t recognise, all lined up in a semicircle in their Sunday best, as Paul prepares to marry his dream girl – but only after pumping her full of formaldehyde. It’s not clear whether Paul’s actions throughout the movie have been impulsive acts aimed at short-term gains, or if every person he’s killed have been part of some larger, macabre plan designed to enable the fulfilment of the young undertaker’s twisted ‘love’. Although these are questions the movie isn't concerned with.
The two wrestle, and the whole scene is lent a weirdly off-kilter feel by the fact that Greg…just doesn’t feel like a leading man. With a blond bob and pastel blue shirt, he’s a kind of cross between Fred from Scooby Doo (which by now I’m thinking director Howard Avedis must have been on a binge of before he made this) and Tom DeLonge from blink-182. By contrast, Paxton’s charisma almost makes Paul – if not a likeable character, then at least – a tragic one. He never seems quite as villainous as the multiple murders he commits suggest: he seems to repent killing his father almost instantly, and opts first to warn Greg off (and lock him in a room) rather than kill him. He’s crazy, yes, but evil no, and Paxton plays him with that easy, empathetic blend. He’s the best thing about this movie, hands down.
Bill Paxton plays Paul Andrews, the ultimate antagonist of Mortuary (1982).
Eventually, Christie regains consciousness and axes Paul in the back. For a wild second, I wondered if maybe she would end up axing Greg and choosing Paul – it’d be a fun, unexpected twist – but the movie doesn’t have the imagination for anything as left-field as that. Instead, Greg and Christie clobber Paul down together, and the movie winds down with a slow pan of the (mostly) embalmed guests, until – SHOCK – the unidentified woman, who's revealed to be Paul's mother, gets up out of the chair and races towards them with the cake-cutting knife! Guess she was still alive all along. We freezeframe, then cut to black to the (again incongruous) song Serenade No. 13 ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in G Major. It’s a shame the movie had to wait 90 minutes, and for its final shot, to give us its best moment. It’s also funny – and probably by no coincidence – that the movie’s final frame came on exactly 90 minutes, as though the writers/filmmakers had been told that was the minimum goal and that, once they hit it, they could call quitting time. It would certainly explain the meandering plot, snail-like pace, and lack of something – well, anything – happening.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that, for a movie called “Mortuary”, the film actually has very, very little to do with mortuaries – and if there’s any individual iota of irony that sums up the identity crisis at the heart of this misguided 80s attempt at a horror pic, it’s this.
Because no, Mortuary (1982) is a film that doesn’t know – and perhaps never knew – what it wants to be. It could have been a fun, spooky, EC Comics-esque romp. It could have worked as a more serious yarn about what happens to our bodies when we die, and the abuses of power those in charge of preparing them might commit.
It could have taken us down such a lurid litany of narrative avenues – what if, for instance, Eve was in on it? What if Hank was somehow enabling Paul’s killings, or the other way around? What if Christie really was under some kind of otherworldly hypnosis? – but squanders them all. But, worse still, it squanders a premise with such a potential to be one of the great 80s cult horror films – and for that, the genre is all the poorer.
Want more reviews of classic horror films? Try my thought pieces on Demons (1985), Night of the Living Dead (1990), or Braindead (1992), or – for something altogether more contemporary – my list of the top horror films to look forward to in 2025.
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