SYNOPSICS
Mortuary (2005) is a English movie. Tobe Hooper has directed this movie. Dan Byrd,Denise Crosby,Stephanie Patton,Alexandra Adi are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2005. Mortuary (2005) is considered one of the best Horror,Mystery,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
The widow Leslie Doyle has just lost her husband and moves with her teenage son Jonathan and her young daughter Jamie to a mortuary in a small town in California that she has bought with the intention of starting a new business, practicing her knowledge as mortician. When they arrive, Leslie realizes that she was lured by the former owner, Elliot, and that the decrepit Fowler Brothers Funeral Home was completely abandoned and with problem with the septic sewer. While Leslie tries to improve and clean the place and start embalming corpses, Jonathan is informed about the legend of Bobby Fowler, the deformed son of the Fowlers. Meanwhile a weird substance attacks people, transforming them in zombies.
Mortuary (2005) Trailers
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Mortuary (2005) Reviews
Got off in a good foot...then tripped and fell flat on it's face.
This movie seemed to have a lot going for it in the beginning. An interesting story, a great location (who doesn't love old, decrepit houses with a cemetery in the front yard), and good performances (this is the third decent performance out of Dan Byrd that I've seen...he's got potential)...and for the first portion of the film, and had a great deal of atmosphere as well. Then something went horribly wrong; I'm not sure what, but as the movie began it's last half, it began to remind me of a spoof film I saw once called "Night of the Living Bread" (which is genius, by the way)...and I'm pretty sure, despite what some have said, that the movie was NOT meant to be a spoof. The lighting crew must've gone home, because you can't see a damn thing for the last 20 minutes except various facial features. The story became very confusing, as it couldn't focus on one of two villains...a deformed crazy-man living in a tomb, or an evil black fungus...hmmm. There was absolutely no climax to the film, and the end was so unbelievably predictable, that as it played out, I began to narrate it just a step ahead...and was spot on. *sigh*
quite scary but on the whole flawed horror flick
Mortuary is a horror film with the atmosphere of mystery, some gore scenes and zombies. The story is bizarre and, in fact, quite clichéd. A family moves to a small town where they plan on starting new life while running funeral home. The local appears to be on haunted ground. The first half of the film is atmospheric and well-developed. The acting is surprisingly good and convincing and all characters are pretty lively. The old neglected house surrounded by graveyard seems to be really spooky. Problems begin during the second half of the film when the film tries to be more brutal and extreme. This part is certainly undeveloped and pretentious as the origin of a black fungus has never been explained. Besides, characters behave in a stupid, illogical way, which really hurts in this pic. As far as technical side of the film is concerned, the cinematography and make-up of zombies are good. However, terrible CGI effects completely ruin the end of the movie. Although in many ways ridiculous and sloppy, Mortuary is a decent, quite scary horror movie which I can solely recommend to horror fans. Nevertheless, I've expected much more from Tobe Hooper.
Seriously, Tobe...zombie fungus?!?
Most avid horror fans no longer consider Tobe Hooper to be a prominent director of the genre whereas I, naive dork that I am, continue to look forward to every new project that has his name attached to it. After all, he'll always remain the creator of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and, more recently, "The Toolbox Murders" turned out to be an engaging and scary little flick. Few positive things can be said about "Mortuary", however, as it certainly doesn't look like a movie made by someone with over 30 years of experience in the field of horror cinema. The plot is stupid and drowning in clichés, the dialogs are awful, the acting performances disastrous and the gory moments (not even that many, mind you) look even cheesier than those in zero-budget 80's slashers. And then still the old school embalming sequences look brilliant compared to the downright horrible CGI effect that are used near the end of the film. Add to all this a total lack of tension, humor or distracting nudity and we've got ourselves one of the worst horror movies of the year 2005. "Mortuary" makes no sense from the first second already and it gradually gets worse with every plot twist or new character that is introduced. A young widow drags her two children to a godforsaken village where she hopes to take a fresh start as the local mortician! Okay, here we have a woman who clearly never worked with dead bodies before in her life and living in a slum surrounded by eerie gravestones is supposed to help her kids get over the trauma of losing their father? The mortuary has a dubious history, naturally, and bizarre fungus grows from every hole in the walls, turning a bunch of insufferable teenagers into slavering zombies. We never get a proper explanation about the fungus' origin or its exact connection with the deformed ghoul living in the Fowler family tomb. Maybe it's better like this, as I'm sure any form of explanation only would have made the movie even more stupid. This is just an irredeemably bad film, insulting the intellect of even the most undemanding horror audiences. Avoid at all costs!
Mortuary Does What it Sets-out To Do
This was just so much fun, not perfect, but a lot of fun. People are still expecting Tobe Hooper to direct another Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is too bad, because this is a really enjoyable horror movie. It has a lot of great B-movie atmosphere, hot chicks, small town punks, and some original gore concepts. The idea of a conscious fungus colony is pretty creepy, gross and scary! It is definitely a Lovecraftian-theme, and some parts of the small town backstory resemble "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwich Horror", and a little-bit of "The Outsider". It also has some similarities with Lucio Fulci's "The House By the Cemetery", a film I love. I even noticed a few nods to Hooper's "Poltergeist", and "Eaten Alive", and 1998's "Phantoms". This is really just a very funny, and creepy ride. It doesn't have any great statements to make, and a lot of it isn't new, but the combinations are new. Sometimes, it's just good to have some fun with the genre. Denise Crosby was really great as the single-mom who moves her family to a small California town as the new mortician. They find a really rundown old mortuary that rests on an island of muck, which lets us know we're in for some grim, dirty horror. Greg Travis returns from Toolbox Murders as a shady local-businessman who rents the accursed property to unsuspecting tenants, and his foppish gimp-character laughs all the time. Hilarious! All the characters are well-drawn, and likable with a few notable-exceptions, so those characters "die" early-on. They all seem and act as real people do, like Dan Byrd's character as the son, he's very believable. While the film is a light-horror with lots of humor, the plot line is actually very grim. Many online-reviewers have expressed anger at the ending of this film, calling it a "cheap-ending", but I don't see this at all. Did I mention the girl with the kool-aid hair looked pretty hot? But, honestly, could the ending be any more unexpected? Not many American horror-directors allow sympathetic characters to die-off completely, or have their identities taken-over or destroyed. It's in the indie-productions or Asian and European horror that it occurs in the story, if it does at all. We remember John Carpenter's "The Thing" (1982) because he breaks this rule, even to the very-end of the film. Knowing the rules helps! At the time, many people were angered by this, but it's part of the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr. from 1938. There is above-ground horror, and there is underground-horror like Campbell and Lovecraft, Bloch, Derleth, etc. We know there are some things that you just don't do in a mainstream-film, which is exactly why they should be done in horror. To do horror well, you have to betray the audience. The only way for horror to progress is by a violation of taboos, and a knowledge of what works. Killing the heroes certainly works, but it's too-bad for those who feel emotionally betrayed. The ending of Mortuary was just a fun fake-out. There were two other scenes that stood-out: the infected mother serving the kids dinner in a parody of domesticity, and the scene at the subterranean-well. The infected were just completely mechanical and insane, I loved it. The latter-scene was a nod to parts of "Invaders from Mars" (1986), Hooper's remake of the 1953 classic. If you hadn't noticed, many of Hooper's films center on a family unit in some way. He makes some pretty interesting comments on the family in his films, and not all of them are sympathetic. This film just supports his countercultural-background, and people get irritated by his jabs, or when they don't get it. The only major complaint I have with Mortuary is that some of the CGI could have been better. It drew too much attention to itself, but some of it was pretty good. As much as it costs, why not do a few mattes and miniatures in the real-world? There was also a scene in the mortuary where some accident victims reanimate that should have been staged better, but this is a low-budget horror (el cheapo). I would wager this movie cost under $1 million, which is impressive considering the results. I doubt Uwe Boll or Paul Thomas Anderson could even pay-themselves on this, but their films basically suck at $30-40 million. The cinematography is great, with some looming low-shots, and very interesting night-photography and composition. The house and its setting are very realistic and bleak--it makes one wonder exactly what is possible in some of our most-polluted quarters of America. Nearly every small town has a local boogeyman story like the Bobby Fowler character, and the mortuary house was well-drawn: a place of death, where nothing grows, but something there feasts on the dead and the living. After the biggest rain in 50-years, it something has reawakened to feast more-than-ever. The behavior of the "infected" is pretty unsettling and machine-like, keeping with Hooper's fear of a mechanical-horror. He seems to enjoy portraying people in social-roles (cop, mother, punker, movie-reviewer, skater, girlfriend, employee, sibling, goth, metalhead, authoritarian, homosexual, judge, manager, wife, husband, etc.) as a form of living-death, but who can complain when this is our lives? All-in-all, it was just-entertaining (I know, the end of the world!), with a few jolts and some effectively disgusting makeup. The tone gets more-and-more hysterical and bizarre, and that's what I expect from Tobe Hooper. This is the same level of film-making he was at when he did Eaten Alive, and it's low-budget but very solid. The origins of the zombification were pretty original, and there were some moments of greatness in the imagery. I'm a sucker for graveyards. This is a great-addition to the works of Tobe Hooper, he has nothing to be ashamed-of here.That's all if ever claimed to be. A decent B-movie horror with a some shocks.
Campy Fun
I really think everyone is missing the point of this movie. Maybe it was the marketing, which made it seem like a true Tobe Hooper horror film. However, after having worked on this movie, I know that it was meant to be more of a parody of its own self, and not to be taken seriously. This is what the writers intended. Also, having worked with Tobe, I know that he always saw himself as a director of comedy, but he just fell into the horror genre. This movie should be characterized as a horror/comedy combo (horredy). It's meant to be more entertaining than scary, complete with cheesy dialog. If you re-watch the film with this in mind, you may have a different opinion of it.