Mortuary

Mortuary follows a single mother (Denise Crosby’s Leslie) as she and her two children (Dan Byrd’s Jonathan and Stephanie Patton’s Jamie) move into a long-abandoned funeral parlor, with the movie detailing the family’s initial efforts at adjusting to their new surroundings and, eventually, coping with the spooky shenanigans that start to ensue. There’s little doubt that Mortuary strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the film, which moves at a disastrously glacial pace, doesn’t contain any attributes designed to capture and hold the viewer’s attention – with the hands-off atmosphere compounded by a narrative that’s almost aggressively familiar. It doesn’t help, either, that scripters Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch have suffused the proceedings with pointless subplots designed to pad out the interminable running time, with, for example, the continuing emphasis on the exploits of three local scumbags ranking high on the movie’s list of absolutely insufferable elements. Filmmaker Tobe Hooper’s curious decision to shy away from overt instances of gore is, to put it mildly, rather misguided, while the horror-centric bent of the movie’s third comes off as ill-conceived and kind of campy – with the loud, anticlimactic final stretch, which is rife with over-the-top performances and dodgy special effects, cementing Mortuary‘s place as a hopelessly incompetent and terminally tedious piece of work.

* out of ****