Mortuary

      So remember how I said this Midnight Horror Collection had some movies starring people I've actually heard of? Mortuary's got Tasha Yar herself, Denise Crosby in it. That's a pretty disappointing career arc if you think about it. Featured player in Star Trek: The Next Generation to a movie on Volume 8 of the Midnight Horror Collection. But good on her for still working this many years later since the only other thing I can remember her doing was showing her tits in an episode of Red Shoe Diaries like ten years after Star Trek (something that, if the internet had been as widespread back then as it is now, probably would have made the phrase “Tasha Yar's tits” the top search of all time... although I'm betting that's still searched quite a bit on the internet even today). So yeah, on with the show.

      The movie looks like it's fairly recent (either that or my new TV and home theatre system can work magic) but the box doesn't give me any hints as to when exactly and we start with a girl holding a teddy bear in a van that's driving. For a good two minutes. No credits over top of this or anything, just random shots of the little girl's face and then the van driving down the road. The only time the van stops driving for a while is when a train is going across the road. Then it's back to more driving. There's some other kid riding shotgun in the van (probably an older brother to the girl in the back) and it looks like Tasha is the one driving. Worth noting that the kids both have brown hair and Tasha is still as blonde as she was 25 years ago. Also, considering she's probably pushing 50, she seems to look not too bad. Ha ha, the boy just made a joke about it being a twenty-six hour car ride. Maybe that opening two minutes was intentionally a metaphor?

      The van pulls into a mortuary (go figure) so I'm guessing the “new start and a new career” that Tasha was talking about has something to do with working there. Doesn't look like she made the right idea as the place looks to be a complete shit-hole and the guy that meets them there is laughing like a maniac for no apparent reason. And he doesn't stop. Even when he's talking. I've seen enough horror movies to know that's never a good sign. He's even laughing when talking about there being mold in the house and the septic tank (which “probably hasn't been emptied in fifty years”) that even contains the stuff from the mortuary drains overflowing. The U.S. Economy must be in REALLY bad shape if this place is worth moving a 26 hour car ride to get to. The outside of the house looks terrible but the first room they come into doesn't look that bad. Wow, I really spoke too soon on that one. The kitchen... wow. The water is brown. They apparently wouldn't even let a prison work crew go in there to clean it up because they didn't want to expose them to the chemicals that are there.

     The little girl wanders off and goes to find the coffin she'd seen earlier. The dad of the family is dead, so she's quietly whispering “daddy” as she tries to open the lid. The coffin falls and scares her. I hope that's not the limit of the special effects budget and/or the limit of the “scares” this movie is capable of.

      Now the boy is wandering off and exploring the house. The light for the attic doesn't work so he decides to go up there anyway. That'd be a dumb thing to do even if he wasn't in a movie. Go get a flashlight if you're going to do that. Also, despite it being broad daylight when they pulled up to the house, when he looks out the window down at the cemetery, it's clearly night. Little stuff like that pisses me off inordinately for some reason. Whoever wrote this wrote the “snarky teenager” part of this kid pretty well, I'll give them that much credit. Anyway, he decides he wants the room in the attic with the bars on the windows, the name “Bobby F.” carved into the windowsill, and the view of the graveyard to be his. His hair's not bad enough to be an emo kid so I'm guessing something is going to happen story-wise involving that room.

      Tasha finds a key ring and some keys in a beaker full of rock salt. She also inexplicably cuts herself reaching in to get them out. Seriously, there's nothing about the situation that would indicate she might get cut. A couple drops of blood land on the floor by a drain and (after they've left the room, naturally) some weird, computer animated, black stuff that look like pieces of string creep out and swallow up the blood. Spooky... I suppose.

      The boy, who has taken the family van to go get a burger or something, walks into a restaurant where there conveniently happens to be another guy that looks about his age sitting with two girls (a bleached blonde and a dyed red head) who are dressed pretty damn skanky. Did I actually just say that? I must be getting old, I need another drink. Anyway, the girls laugh at him (though they haven't actually interacted with him at all yet) when he asks for an application to work at the restaurant. I personally would have saved my laughing for when the woman behind the counter answers with “you've got a good aura, stop by tomorrow and we'll try it out. If you like it and I like you, the job's yours.” Seriously, what kind of hiring process is that? She also says “groovy”. It's an ageing hippy hiring process, got it. He finally turns around and looks at the three other kids there and the girls put on their sluttiest looks and say “hi there” only to flip him off and start laughing again after he tries to introduce himself. Fuck the lot of them, the guy looks like a douche and the girls are being bitches for no reason. Whatever, at least he gets three free sandwiches because... actually, there really seems to be no reason for the sandwiches to be “on the house” but they are.

      Next scene is the middle of the night. The boy (Jonathon, by the way) is outside smoking when there's the sound of someone running through the graveyard. You can't see anything, but he goes to investigate anyway. Stopping to look, and then swear, at a statue of an angel, the sound of running happens again, but this time there's a shadow that goes with it. Spooky... I guess. More investigating, and then he sees the shadow too. That freaks him out (I'm not sure what he expected when he went out looking for the source of a running sound, but whatever) and he tries to run back to the house. “Tries” because he takes two steps and falls down for no reason. This whole family seems to not be very coordinated; the girl can't open a coffin lid without causing the whole thing to fall, the mom cuts herself on something that shouldn't have been able to cut her at all, the boy can't even run five feet without falling over. I wouldn't be surprised to find out the dad died from slipping on a banana peal or something equally ridiculous. Anyway, he finds a necklace with a pretty impressive stone (looks like a ruby) in it lying on the ground so I guess being clumsy has its rewards.

      Oh my god. Tasha is seriously going through a box of stuff and having to sort it between kitchen utensils and embalming tools. Who the hell packs like that? Seriously, there is no way that's even the least bit sanitary. She then tries to open a door with her hands full up to her face with embalming stuff including, but not limited to, sharp objects and chemicals. For a woman that cuts herself on the perfectly round and smooth sides of a beaker, this cannot be a good idea. All that ends up happening, though, is she knocks everything over and has to pick it all up. Frankly, I'm surprised she didn't lose a leg or something. As she's cleaning it up, she finds what I can only describe as a being John Malkovich style door in the bottom of a wall. Naturally, she opens it and starts to crawl in to investigate. That's when Johnny boy shows up behind her to talk to her about the events of the night before so her journey into the body of a movie star will have to wait. Also, turns out it wasn't a ruby at all, just a medallion with someone's picture on it. Wow, I didn't think I was so drunk already that I'd make that big a mistake. I can't even blame a small screen size since this is playing on my new big screen. Tasha blows it off as nothing that there was someone out in the graveyard chasing her son around in the middle of the night and gives the necklace to her daughter to be part of “one of her costumes”.

      At his new job, Johnny gets introduced to the old hippy's niece who is also working there with the words “that's me niece Liz, she's pretty, isn't she?” She actually is, though, and she's not being a stuck up bitch like the other two were so I'm guessing we're supposed to like her. He tries to flirt with her... I think. He's pretty bad at it but it doesn't matter 'cause her boyfriend shows up right then. Poor Johnny can't catch a break. The three assholes from the night before show up again and this time the guy gets into a fist fight with Johnny for what seems to be no reason while the two girls cheer him on. The old hippy kicks the three of them out but her and Liz side with Johnny and me by calling the other three assholes so he's allowed to keep his job.

      Back at the mortuary, the little girl is wandering through the graveyard putting pieces of red licorice on top of all the graves. Tasha, as well as everyone watching, thinks this is odd and goes out to talk to her about it. She also finds one of the crypts unlocked with the door open and, as is her style, goes inside to investigate. Going even further down, she finds a weird plaque with a weird keyhole that perfectly fits one of the keys on the ring she found. Unfortunately, the sheriff shows up to welcome her to town so she can't open the door to investigate further. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! The sheriff, who stutters, actually used the phrase “graveyard babies” because apparently the local kids would go out there to hook up. That entire scene is hilarious.

      It's night again, and Liz and her boyfriend are finally answering the question Johnny asked them hours ago at the restaurant (namely “who is Bobby Fowler?” which is kinda what started the fight when John implied one of the girls was dating Bobby). That's another thing that bothers me with movies. Wouldn't they have answered that back when he actually asked it instead of waiting all this time? How many times a day do you ask random questions and then have the person you asked only tell you the answer eight hours later? Doing stuff like that you're more likely to forget what the hell you were talking about way back then. So yeah, the short version is: there's something evil in the soil that the mortuary is built on a, the Fowler family has been undertakers for generations up until the 60s when the last of them were abusing their “horribly deformed” son Bobby up until he mysteriously disappeared at the age of eight. Ten years later, the parents are found dead and the rumour goes that bobby killed them after they locked him alive in one of the graves and since then he comes out at night to be a menace. That might put a damper on some of those “graveyard babies”.

      The three assholes show up in the graveyard drinking and being idiots. They also bring spray paint and start marking up the angel statue. The guy is off pissing (literally pissing on the grave of his former teacher) when this happens, so when he gets back he's kinda pissed off that they didn't actually spray much of anything. But it's okay 'cause now they're inside the Fowler family crypt that Tasha was poking around in before. Drunken threesome inside a tomb. I'd say I don't understand kids these days except, even given what bitches the girls are, they're hot enough that I'd probably go for it too. Ugh. They actually say “it looks like somebody's living here”. They are all going to die. Probably before they finish having sex, too. Curses and killers should really stop being such cock-blocks. Yup, they don't even manage to get naked before they're killed. Sucks to be them. Also, I guess they really did do some spray painting beforehand 'cause there's a couple graves tagged in the next shot.

      The hippy that runs the restaurant is my favourite. She' rambling on about Bobby Fowler being alive and living in one of the tombs and somehow gets on about the CIA administered LSD tests they put her through back in the day. She even included the random old cowboy sitting at the counter (“yeah, you know what I'm talking about”) before just walking away. She's the best. Liz is pretty fascinated by the whole mortuary business. If it wasn't for the boyfriend she'd be wanting to go make a graveyard baby right now. Also, the old cowboy contributes again! He got disgusted with their talk about the embalming room and pushed his plate away. Comedy gold.

      Looks like boyfriend is coming along. And that obstacle's taking itself out of the way right now 'cause it turns out he's gay. Johnny can barely (re: not at all) contain the look of joy on his face at hearing this, and I start to wonder if maybe I should have actually been watching the movie when he first showed up rather than writing this 'cause I guess they actually weren't making out like I thought. Also, Tasha shows up out of nowhere (they are outside the mortuary at this point, to be fair) to gleefully announce that two bodies have come in. Liz is all about wanting to see them. There are probably some psychological issues there considering how sexually excited she seems to be at the idea of seeing some dead bodies.

      That changes pretty quick when she finds out one of them is her piano teacher. Tasha looks pretty crushed too. Guess she thought she was doing her son a favour by getting the girl all revved up for him (that sounds a lot dirtier when I look at it than I meant it to) instead Liz and not-boyfriend end up leaving right away with her saying “but... I've got a lesson tomorrow..” Guess you don't anymore.

      The natural next step after seeing the dead teacher, is for all three of the kids to go up to Johnny's room and smoke some pot. Instead of watching them do that, though, we're treated to Tasha Yar performing her first embalming. She... she is not very good at it. In the middle of the three teenagers smoking pot and Tasha squirting embalming fluid all over the room, the cops show up. I don't think this is really a horror movie at all. This is a black comedy. The stoned solution Liz comes up with (since Johnny is the one that has to go answer the door), is for him to “take his clothes off”. I'm assuming to change into something that doesn't smell like weed, but it's just funny 'cause it means both her and the gay friend get a free strip show.

      Now the blood starts to flow out of the body like it was supposed to before, but one of the tubes breaks so it starts spilling on the floor and mixing with the embalming fluid as they go down the drain with those evil black string stuff out there lapping it up. This is starting to look like the bakery scene from I Love Lucy that gets shown in commercials and parodied in shows it's so comical. It ends up being Tasha that gets to the door first 'cause Johnny is still busy trying to not smell like pot. Too bad the sheriff is there specifically to talk to him. This should be hilarious. Holy hell is it ever not. The sheriff turned from stuttering, seemingly incompetent cop to “trying to be a hard ass and yelling at a teenager for no reason” cop pretty fucking quickly. The only funny thing about it is when Tasha steps between them and pauses to take a couple quick sniffs. Damn movie moms always suspecting when their kid has been getting high. Also, she is apparently not a fan of him standing up and defending himself when someone attacks him (the sheriff was there about the fight 'cause now the assholes are missing) so she puts him “on chores until tonight”. I... I don't even know what that's supposed to mean as far as a punishment goes. A few hours of chores around the house that he was probably supposed to do anyway? She's as good and disciplining her kids as she is at embalming people.

      The sheriff is back to mildly incompetent cop again. No stutter anymore, though. He's exploring the graveyard and goes into the Fowler tomb too. That's the end of him.

      “Chores” apparently means washing the black stuff off the wall (they're assuming it's mold I guess) when the girl runs in screaming about how Bobby Fowler is in her closet. They go up to investigate but, of course, find no one there. They do find a burial shroud (something the legend says Bobby wears) and he took the necklace so, you know, maybe a good parent would go out to find the sheriff (who is clearly still looking around the graveyard since his car is out front... it has to be, right? I mean, he was killed hours ago so no one would have moved it) and get him to take a look around. That, as you might guess, doesn't happen. And no one brings up that there's a police car still sitting out front all day and night with no one coming back to claim it.

      Johnny is terrible at flirting. Liz is all but throwing herself at him and he only barely manages to pick up on it. He does actually kiss her, though, which, I'll be honest, is something I've failed to do in blatantly obvious situations like that before. Don't judge me, I know how stupid I was/continue to be.

      Oh hey, turns out those first three assholes aren't actually dead they're just... drained of life, I guess. They show up to the restaurant looking all pale and dishevelled anyway. Plus they're convulsing and stuff. The blonde isn't there, though, and they're still being assholes. Plus now they're vomiting black shit and the guy keeps yelling “shut up, punk!” Also, he pukes the black shit all over the hippy. I don't care for these assholes even more now, no matter how full of embalming fluid or evil or whatever the fuck it was that happened to them. This also might explain why no one noticed the cop car still being there since he might have come out in that same zombie-like state and driven off. I'll give that plot hole a pass, I suppose. For now, at least.

      And we're back to comedy night at the embalming table. This time it doesn't seem to go too wrong... except for when the black stuff shows up and goes into one of the wounds. This will likely not end well. Some more dead bodies are brought in and, since the tables are full, they're stored inside the coffins. Also, laughing guy from the beginning is there to deliver the bodies to her and he tries to hit on Tasha while they're storing the bodies from a car crash. AND HE DOESN'T STOP LAUGHING! For no goddamn reason! He's even worse at flirting than Johnathon 'cause he goes in for a kiss when it's REALLY not warranted. And he's a grown ass man. I suddenly don't feel so bad about being so socially awkward.

      Oh my god! The arm she was trying to sew back on just fell off and landed on the floor. I just about spit my drink over the keyboard when that happened. Oh, and the dead bodies are now alive and getting up to attack her because the black stuff got into them. The old piano teacher with Einstein hair is wearing what looks like a diaper. Tasha catches some of the black vomit in her mouth (like the hippy did) so this is not likely to end well.

      Johnny and friends show up at his house to find his sister dancing around in a princess costume outside and his mom acting all Stepford Wife-ish. She invites them to stay for supper and leads them into the kitchen where we find the black shit has taken over and is all over the walls, fridge, and pretty much everything else. Still entirely Stepford Wife,but now she's serving them bowls of “soup” which is, you guessed it, the black shit. Everyone else is suitably creeped out. The phrase “you will drink milk” is said in as creepy a way as you can make that sound. Which means it sounds ridiculous and you laugh at hearing it.

      The “soup” doesn't seem to like salt since it starts to fizzle and bubble over like a baking soda volcano when Liz tries to add some to it. Now Tasha starts to vomit up black shit and everyone else runs when she picks up a cleaver and chases after them. Naturally the only place to run to is into the graveyard because fuck logic. Also, why not lock yourself in the Fowler tomb while you're at it because clearly too many fucks were being given in this movie before now.

      This tomb just keeps going deeper and deeper. They do find the asshole blonde, but she's all freaked out and crazy. Doesn't seem to be infected by the black stuff, though, just regular “what the fuck have I seen” kind of freaked out crazy. She leads them to a way out that she didn't use before because... that would have made sense? Bah ha ha, the sheriff is back and he's as ridiculous as ever.

      The ladder out of the tomb leads through the Malkovich door and they emerge back into the house in an entirely different order than what they went up the ladder in. They're also now trapped in the house because the rest of the infected are outside the house. Also, to prove that the blonde wasn't infected, they cut her to see her blood. Now it won't stop bleeding so she goes to wash her hand off under the sink. Thankfully, it now runs clean water not brown. Not so thankfully, the black stuff reaches up from the sink and grabs a hold of her arm and gets into her hand. And for good measure some more shoots out that she catches in her mouth and swallows. From the first time you saw her, you knew she was going to end up in porn somehow. Johnny brings his sister up to his room and tells her to lock herself in there after he leaves because it's safer. That's actually some pretty sound logic, she's not done much in this movie and them locking the “princess” (she's still in the costume, after all) in a tower to protect her while the hero goes off to fight the evil is a pretty classic idea. Although, in fairy tales, it's never the people that lock the princess away that end up rescuing her. Just saying.

      Johnny gets back with the others and the blonde joins them. She's a hell of a lot less freaked out and crazy right now so that should really tip them off that something is wrong. Before they have time to realize this, though, the dead bodies that were brought in from the car crash start to rise and attack them. The blonde tries to help them escape so I guess she doesn't know she's one of them yet. They keep running and keep sealing themselves off in different rooms. In the meantime, Bobby Fowler's found his way up to the room with the little girl and grabs her.

      Blonde is starting to act like she's infected (only slightly in that she's not helping them hold the door closed) when Tasha bursts through the door. That ends with blonde being knocked into a shelf with a bunch of the rock salt on it and it spills on her. Remember what happened when Liz put salt on the soup? Yeah, now the blonde has that happen to her. Inexplicably, she starts to lift up her shirt as it's happening. You get some nice under-boob but she gets dissolved too quickly to finish flashing everyone. It really says something that, as she was dying, her last act was to try and expose her breasts to the world. God bless her. The salt thing seems to be the key, and Tasha runs away after seeing that they know this. After they kill a couple of the other infected, the gay guy sums it up by comparing it to something really simple and obvious by saying “it's like throwing salt on a snail”.

      They rush up to Bobby's room to try and find the girl, but when she doesn't answer they break in. In like two seconds. Without a whole lot of effort at all. You really deserve to have her taken by the bad guys when you're idea of a barricade to protect her is broken down in two seconds by you. Not the supernaturally powerful bad guys you're fighting, but by you.

      The girl gets carried away into the tomb by Bobby where he... just puts her in a separate room with her teddy bear and tries to give her a rattle to play with. Granted the rattle is made out of a skull, but the point is he's trying to be nice. She gives him a piece of licorice. Aww, they're trying to make the point that you shouldn't judge someone based on their looks and that Bobby Fowler, despite all the rumours in town about him, is actually not the evil bad guy. She tries to run away from him when his back is turned anyway.

     Now Johnny and crew are climbing down into the tomb to try and rescue his sister. Holy shit! The gay guy just got a hand rammed through his chest from behind! You... could really see that coming since he was standing away from Johnny and Liz with just the corpse filled background behind him. Also, the other two were carrying flashlights and he had a knife. That, combined with being the obvious third wheel, pretty much sealed his fate.

      Okay, remember when I said they were trying to say Bobby wasn't such a bad guy? Maybe check that as he's holding the little girl over top of some green glowing well while the sheriff, Tasha, and the remaining two assholes circle around it telling him to feed the girl to it. Also, for no possible reason that I can see, the asshole guy has the asshole girl on a leash and collar and she's down on all fours walking around like a dog. Where the fuck did that come from? And now the sheriff just shotgunned guy asshole's head off because fuck you that's why. “No more graveyard babies” indeed. Everyone that wasn't holding a hostage just got the salt treatment and Bobby did the right thing by throwing the girl to her brother instead of into the pit. This made the pit mad, and you won't like the pit when it's mad. If you're Bobby especially since he got grabbed by one of the tentacles and pulled in instead. It's only after all this that Liz does what they should have done five minutes ago and throws the backpack full of salt into the pit itself. This starts to kill the thing in there and also shake the tomb. Everyone scrambles to get out but... turns out it was just a few shakes, not a total collapse. At least, not until they were already clear of everything. Then some giant, poorly animated boulders fall down to close off the pit.

      All the other black stuff on the walls of the house start to disintegrate and our heroes lie down, exhausted, outside the house. Only to have the black stuff reach straight out of the ground and grab Johnny in what is clearly a violation of the rules they've built up so far in the movie and have Tasha suddenly appear in the house and come storming out to grab the little girl in what is an even bigger fuck you to the internal logic of the movie. Then the black stuff turns into a small lake of black stuff and dissolves Johnny and that's it. Seriously. Liz is left to her own devices (I guess), a for no reason there again Tasha Yar is free to go back and feed her daughter to the pit, and Johnny is now part of the black sludge puddle. The fuck?

      I was ready to say this was actually a half decent movie so long as you took it as a comedy rather than a flat out horror movie, but now... the fuck did I just watch? Did the same people that fucked up the end of Scarecrow Gone Wild get their hands on the end of this one too? I'm pissed off more than anything at this movie. The only other things to take away from this are: 1. with all the build up to how deformed Bobby Fowler was, given the way he looked, they would have been better suited to just hire Clint Howard and save the make-up budget. And 2. I kinda wonder about the black “mold” that used to show up and come back no matter how many times me and my old roomate tried to clean it in the toilets at one of the old places I used to live in. It looked pretty similar to the black shit in the movie and kept coming back like this stuff did... But yeah, what a fucking travesty that ending was. I am not impressed.