MORTUARY {2005}

 UM . . . . . WE ALL KNOW THAT THIS IS A COMEDY, RIGHT??? 

I mean, this movie (and all of Tobe Hooper's latter work) gets shat on from a great height.  And sometimes it's deserved (DANCE OF THE DEAD, anyone???).  But not here.  MORTUARY is a great watch.  It's genuinely funny (and it's supposed to be).  I can't count the reviews of this movie which seem to think it's a straight horror movie and the badmouthing is extreme.  It's kinda mind-boggling how many people don't notice this is a horror comedy.  Hooper is playing with a boatload of horror cliches here.  Denise Crosby's character of a rookie mortician who buys a mortuary sight unseen to find that it's a fallling down wreck with sewage backed up onto the muddy lawn. 

The scene where she is performing her first autopsy by basically reading along with an "EMBALMING FOR DUMMIES" book is hilarious.  I mean, the hose falls out of the corpse's jugular squirting embalming fluid all over the place then the hose in the corpse's femoral artery comes loose spewing blood around.  During this time, her son and his teenage friends are upstairs getting high which the local sheriff is ringing the doorbell.  Crosby is hollering "Can somebody get the door" while the teens are upstairs spraying room deodorizer trying to mask the pot smell.  And the sheriff keeps ringing.  And the hoses keep writhing and squirting.  I mean, come on.  Does anyone really think this is meant to be taken seriously?!?!?! 

MORTUARY really plays like a 60's sitcom which takes place in a funeral home.  With monsters.  This is also a comedy remake of H.P. Lovecraft's THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE in a way with the fungoid growths everywhere.  Not a direct adaptation, of course, but there's definitely a strong Lovecraftian influence in the hijinx.  Just look at the scene where Denise Crosby enters the open tomb and reads the inscription mentioning "strange aeons".  A direct Lovecraft term.  The scene where Denise Crosby is cooking dinner for her son and his friends also can't be seen as anything other than comedy. 

The walls are absolutely covered with the vine-like fungus growths and nobody notices them?!?!?!  Or mentions them.  Like a typical teenager wouldn't immediately say "What's with the vines, Mom?"  Crosby is playing this scene for broad comedy with the teenagers as straight men.  She then actually winks as she's humming the "Mmm Mmm Good" jingle for Campbell's soup before bellowing "IT . . . . IS . . . . SEASONED . . . . PERFECTLY!!" whe one of the kids attempts to use the salt shaker.  It's established pretty quickly that there's some sort of fungus-like substance that really likes to consume blood; this fungus also likes to enter into a person (via another infected person's black vomit) and take them over so that they become zomboid monsters.  It's also kinda impressive that the movie has a gay character who is not a stereotype but a full character.  MORTUARY is a horror comedy which means it's half horror movie and half comedy but the two halves work beautifully together.  I'm really quite surprised how much I liked this movie since I went into it expecting a crapfest.  That's what I get for reading reviews.  I really can't understand how soooooooooooo many people can be blind to the fact this is a horror comedy.  Sorry to keep harping on that but it really boggles my mind.   But really, MORTUARY is a really fun ride.