Excellent adaptation.

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Tobe Hooper's career in horror has had its ups and downs. For every bonafide classic on his resume like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Poltergeist," there's a bomb like "Invaders from Mars" or "The Mangler" to counteract it. I haven't seen much of Tobe's more recent work, and the comments here on IMDb for "Mortuary" didn't exactly fill me with confidence at first. But what the hell, this DVD was cheap ($5.99 for a "Horror Collection" disc, with three other movies in addition to "Mortuary") so I figured "Ehhh, what the hell, let's give the old boy a shot." "Mortuary" wasn't as bad as I feared but wasn't exactly a masterpiece either. The story is standard stuff -- a recently widowed Mom (Denise Crosby of "Star Trek: TNG" and "Pet Sematery" fame - good Lord, time has not been kind to her) and her two kids move to a new town where Mom (who's fresh out of Mortician's School) plans to re-open the long-abandoned funeral parlor. The teenage son reminded me of a low-rent Barry Watson from "7th Heaven," while his pre-teen sister is, quite frankly, the most annoying Horror Movie Little Girl since Danielle Harris' mute Jamie Lloyd in "Halloween 5." Right off the bat, I found myself hoping that something horrible would happen to her. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not. Anyway, the house they settle into is a creaky, run down dump overlooking the graveyard, the septic tank overflows on a regular basis, and Mom's downstairs embalming area has weird black mold growing all over the walls. The kids are less than thrilled with their new living situation, of course, but none of this seems to phase Mom, who anxiously gets to work on her first batch of "clients" (she keeps her mortician's textbooks propped up on the corpse's chests as she works!) while the teenage son meets some kids at the local diner who tell him the legend of "Billy," a deformed kid who used to live in the house he now occupies. Seems that "Billy" bashed his parents' brains in after a lifetime of abuse and supposedly lives hidden from the world in one of the graveyard tombs outside the funeral home. Nice, huh? Eventually a couple of standard horror-movie stupid teenager characters have a late night run-in with "Billy," who infects them with some sort of zombie virus that causes them to reappear later, coughing up nasty black stuff on people. Needless to say, things go immediately downhill for everybody from here on. Oh, and did I mention that there's some sort of Lovecraftian demi-god monster with lots of teeth and tentacles living in a pit under the house? So, um, yeah, there's a lot going on here. For the last half of this film, I swear it felt like Hooper just gave up and hit the "TOTALLY RANDOM" button.Fortunately, "Mortuary" is one of those movies that moves along quickly enough that you don't really have time to think about how ridiculous it is until it's over. By the time Crosby's character gets infected, becomes a zombie, and starts chasing her kids through a series of passages and tunnels under the funeral home (which look like they were borrowed from "The Goonies"), you may start to wonder if "Mortuary" was intended to be a zombie film, a creature film, or a disease film. It seems to me that Hooper simply mixed clichés from all three genres into one very loud, fast moving, silly soup. The CGI used to create the "monster" under the house is some of the cheapest I've seen outside of an Asylum film, and the abrupt ending reeks of "We have no idea how to end this, so we're just gonna throw one last shock at you rather than give you a satisfactory conclusion." I honestly didn't think much of this movie at first glance, but when I compared it to 2 other films that were on the same DVD ("Bloody Mary" and "Wages of Sin") that I watched afterwards, "Mortuary's" stock shot up a few extra points because the other two were WAY worse. OK, so "Mortuary" wasn't a classic, but it at least kept me entertained to a certain degree. I'd say it's not a bad flick if you can get it cheap (like I did) or if it turns up on SyFy Channel sometime but you're not missing out on a hidden gem if you decide to skip it.

Okay, this film is pretty awful to be sure and it has flaws that are soon too hard to disguise, so I will begin with what I liked about it. The setting of that creepy house and those mortuary rooms, and the cemetery all helped create an effectively eerie atmosphere. The first half of the film is very suspenseful and even well-acted through most of this part. Tobe Hooper, falling to a nadir in terms of talent and money to work with it seems to me, does inject some taut situations - an errant hand here in a shadow and things like that. Then all hell breaks loose - so to speak - and this film quickly degenerates into something sophomoric and seemingly incompetently made. Just take a look at the final scene where a zombie fungus and its minions chase the remaining family through the house. It looks like some of the actresses there are taking direction whilst on camera! The acting turns real bad unfortunately, and this movie becomes a joke midway through. The film had promise. Some of the acting leads have talent. Denise Crosby plays the mother and is good and credible..until...yes, the second half of the film. The story is the biggest problem I would guess as it seems to have no direction midway and everything follows suit. Hooper is better than this and though it seems like ages since he made a real good horror film, I am generally a fan of his work. He can create some of the most disturbing scenes with less on screen than most of his contemporaries. Mortuary has some promise, some genuinely scary moments, and a whole lot of inept acting, direction, and storytelling.

Mortuary (2005) ** (out of 4) Being a teen is hard but it's even harder when your mom is a mortician and moves you into a creepy house with a cemetery attached to it. That's what happens to Jonathan (Dan Byrd) who learns that the house is apparently not only haunted but stalked by a deformed maniac. I think it's fair to say Hooper has been a disappointment ever since his debut even though every fan keeps hoping his next film will be one worth writing home about. This one here, like so many in his career, isn't a terrible movie but at the same times there's really nothing special in it. This film mixes THE SHINING, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS and a little bit of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD but it can't hold a candle to any of those films and in the end you can't help but feel you've wasted your time. Right from the start you can't help but think the mother is stupid for keeping her children there but the reasons behind the "hauntings" is quite silly and doesn't work by the time they pop up at the end. The movie is never scary which doesn't help matters when it doesn't have much gore either. The special effects are poor CGI that look so obviously fake so here's yet another negative. The cast aren't too bad as they deliver the type of performances you'd expect to find in this type of film. Hooper manages to keep the film moving at a nice pace but the screenplay really doesn't give him too much to work with.

Tobe Hooper is best known for 2 horror-classics: Texas Chain Saw Massacre(1974) and Poltergeist(1982). Although, he had some help from Spielberg on the second one. But that was a long time ago. His remake on Toolbox Murders was not a great film but with Mortuary he hits a new low. Since the story takes place in and around a mortuary, he must have thought: that is scary enough. So no exciting story with thrills. In the first half, nothing happens at all, and the characters are annoying and very irritating at times. Miss Crosby once starred in the great Pet Sematary (but that was also a long time ago...) The effects in the second half are rather fake, some are o.k. but overall they are not convincing (like the entire cast for that matter).I'm still wondering why I finished watching til the end, I guess I had some hope considering it was a Tobe Hooper movie. But I really hope he has retired since this turkey..