BY TODD GARBARINI
My love of horror films
dates back forty years. In the fall of 1986, I accidentally stumbled across an
aficionado’s bonanza – a local video store had hundreds of video posters in the
cabinets underneath the movies it was renting. One of the posters was for Mortuary
(1983), a horror film from the Vestron Video label that I knew of from another
video store but had not seen. I liked the poster art but knew nothing of the
film. To my recollection, it never played at area theaters, not even the
2-screen indoor/drive-in three miles from me that showed just about anything
that was low-budget and esoteric.
Mortuary
opened on Friday, September 2, 1983 in Los Angeles and is not a great movie,
but it is not terrible, either. It does, however, move at a snail’s pace, so be
forewarned if you have not seen it. It is one of the longest 93-minute
movies I have ever seen. Director Howard Avedis, who has also gone by the
tongue-twisters Hikmat Labib, Hekmat Aghanikyan, and (whew!) Hikmet L. Avedis,
also directed the 1976 Connie Stevens outing Scorchy; Texas Detour
(1978); and They’re Playing with Fire (1984) with Sybil Danning. Here he
enlists Mary Beth McDonough of The Waltons fame as Christie Parson (the
name taken from the characters of Christie Burns and Brooke Parsons in 1983’s Curtains,
or just a coincidence?), a young woman who lives with her parents in their
beautiful and unhumble abode and shows up just in time to see her father
floating in the family pool after getting walloped with a baseball bat on the
balcony. But who would want him dead?!
Her boyfriend Greg (David
Wallace) and a co-worker go to collect tires from a warehouse owned by a
funeral home, and he stumbles upon what appears to be some sort of weird
cult/devil worship shenanigans in another room with all the figures wearing
black cloaks, headed up by mortician Hank Andrews (Christopher George who sadly
passed away two months after the film’s release). Even 2019’s Black
Christmas featured a bunch of crazies running around in cloaks some 35
years later! Greg’s friend is stabbed and killed with a huge pole used for
embalming by one of the members. Christie gets involved and decides to play
sleuth and attempts to get to the bottom of her father’s murder – she refuses
to believe that he “drownedâ€. Her mother Eve Parson, played by Lynda Day
George, wife of actor Christopher George, wants to play everything off as
though nothing is happening. Meanwhile, Hank’s son Paul (Bill Paxton of all
people) is infatuated with Christie and does his best to win her affections,
even serving her flowers in a cemetery in front of her boyfriend – what a guy!
Mortuary is
one of those funeral home-based films that proliferated in the early 1980s and
out of all of them, my personal favorite has always been Tom McLoughlin’s One
Dark Night (1983), the spooky PG-rated Meg Tilly outing as a high schooler
who attempts to sleep overnight among crypts as part of an initiation. Michael
Dugan’s Mausoleum (1983), which starred a fetching Bobbie Bresee as a
possessed woman who had the misfortune of being married to Marjoe Gortner, is
terrible but great fun. Who could forget William Fruet’s 1980 film Funeral
Home with Lesleh Donaldson? That film has yet to be released on Blu-ray. Like
most horror films made since John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), they all
pretty much follow a cookie cutter pattern which starts with something terrible
that happens as either a flashback or as an event that is flashed back to later
on. Mortuary is one of a handful of horror films that were shot in one
year and released in another, specifically between April and July of 1981, but
released two years later more than likely due to budgetary constraints.
The granddaddy of funeral
home films is surely Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979), wildly imaginable
and one of the scariest and most original horror films ever made, though it is
made up of supernatural elements. Mortuary is more of a murder mystery,
but anyone who is a die-hard horror film fan will see the ending coming from a
mile away. It’s almost a mashup of Jacques Lacerte’s Love Me Deadly
(1972), Tom DeSimone’s Hell Night (1981) and J. Lee Thompson’s Happy
Birthday to Me (1981).
Mortuary
uses location filming to great effect as well. If the sprawling Parson mansion
looks familiar, it’s the former Gulls Way Estate at 26800 Pacific Coast Highway
in Malibu, CA which was used on many other films and television series episodes.
The living room itself is opulent, and a humorous sex scene between Christie
and Greg takes place here. The mansion was purchased in 2002 by Dick Clark and
the beautiful pool that Christie’s father died in was filled in with dirt.
Mortuary
has been released on Blu-ray from the MVD Rewind Collection, an imprint of MVD
Visual, in an upgraded video transfer attributed to Scorpion Releasing. I like
the concept of this release as it contains a slipcover featuring the old Mortuary
artwork as though it was a beat-up VHS rental return. Unfortunately, if you are
a big fan of this film, you will be disappointed with the overall release as it
contains only a fifteen-minute onscreen interview with John Cacavas who provided
the inspired musical score. The only other extra is a trailers section
comprised of The House on Sorority Row (1982), Dahmer (2002), Mikey
(1992), One Dark Night (1983), and Mortuary (2005). One of the
strangest things about this film is the television trailer, and why it is
missing is a mystery. It is comprised of a single scene featuring Michael
Berryman(!) digging a grave and being pulled into it, but the scene is nowhere
to be found in the movie! Nor is Michael Berryman in the film! I wish that I
had seen this trailer as a teenager, but no such luck. Think of the original
teaser trailer for Alien (1979) with the little egg and the piercing
shriek on the soundtrack.
This Blu-ray falls very
short of being considered a “special edition†despite the inclusion of a
fold-out poster of the cover art. I would have loved an audio commentary and I wonder
why this release is so sparse.
One thing is certain –
you’ll never experience Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik†the same way after
seeing the ending of Mortuary.
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