Mortuary (1984)

This movie would have been a lot more fun if there had been a bunch of people around when I watched it. As it was, I sat alone in my apartment until the wee hours watching this sometimes funny, always incompetant horror/thriller. To quote Jerry Seinfeld: "I can't watch this movie alone! Who am I going to make snide comments to?"

This is an 80s movie but acts like a 70s movie, which means two things: hair and disco. I understand fashion enough to comprehend why having massive amounts of hair was once considered fashionable. However, I am completely stumped as to why anyone *ever* thought disco music was a good thing.

The plot of this movie, as near as I could figure, revolves around a guy who kills people. Now, this isn't too uncommon a plot in modern horror movies, and occaisionally this simplistic plot can even work. However, when it is executed as slowly and painfully as it is in this movie, you find yourself thinking "Ok already! Enough posturing! Kill somebody!"

It's obvious that the people involved in this movie were trying hard not to make a slasher movie. Unfortunately, their attempts at making a psychological thriller fall so far short of the mark, I found myself wishing it *was* a slasher movie. At least then something would have been happening on screen. However, they do go in for the old horror movie cliche of the bad guy having his own "scary" sound effect/music that is played whenever he shows up. Unfortunately, they chose a super-annoying heartbeat sound effect that grates on the nerves way more than it inspires fear.

The script writers involved in this movie need to take some basic lessons in story telling. One of my favorite scenes in the movie involves two people hanging out in a cemetary for no apparent reason. No reason, that is, except so they can be in place to bump into a third character and have some contrived dialogue explaining what this new character is doing at the cemetary. I find it hard to believe that the script writers couldn't find a better way of saying "the guy's mother killed herself." The best way the script writers could think of for explaining important background information to the viewer was to have two characters have "as you already know" and "as I've told you before" type conversations. The infodumps come so often and are so blatant that I think it would have been a better idea if they had just had the background story slowly cycling across the bottom of the screen throughout the whole movie.

Although there was a lot to laugh at in this movie, the laughs were spread too thin amongst a lot of groaning and head-slapping. This is a good party movie, but don't try to watch it alone.