Tobe Hooper. The name strikes in me an emotional response that I might best term "neutrambivalence"... He's brought us fun work the likes of Lifeforce and Salem's Lot; he's brought us classics such as Return of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Poltergeist; and then, like many horror directors, he also seems to have directed a lot of mediocre-to-lousy crap. He also, apparently, did some kind of remake of The Toolbox Murders, which I haven't seen but conceptually support; if you're going to remake something, you ought to make significant changes, and if you're going to do that, then the film might as well be one that no one really cared about to begin with. Y'know, it's like taking lead and making... well, if not gold, at least burnished lead or maybe some kind of low-grade copper.

So overall, my reaction to Hooper goes through stages kind of like those of grieving or healing: first pleasure, then confusion, then repulsion, then irritation, then neutrality. Neutrality with more than a hint of cynicism, actually... For instance, after seeing the changes he wrought from John Russo's original concept for Return of the Living Dead, it's hard to take him too seriously, even if a faithful adaptation of the wretched book would never have been even a tenth as successful.

Mortuary is an interesting work which sort of produced a microcosm of my feelings about the director... I felt variously interested, irritated, disappointed, amused, and ultimately some strange amalgam of ambivalent and disinterested. And just like Hooper's career (in my eyes, and my opinion is more humble than my words might make it sound), the film has some great high points, some dismal low points, and a lot of general decent-to-mediocre stuff in between.

The idea for this movie is simple--and, one might object, also predictable--but I also think it's good. I mean, it gets too easy to start complaining about predictability in movies. Sometimes it's nice to have a film that continually surprises you or changes your thinking, but other times it's nice to know that when you're renting a zombie film, somewhere along the lines it'll really have zombies in it (Zombie Island Massacre and others of your ilk, I'm glaring in your direction). The point of a movie--as far as I can tell, which might not be all that far--isn't always to astonish you with what you weren't expecting, but just to tell a story and tell it right.

The setting is an actual old house in Pomona with an old graveyard in it which--according to the cast and crew in the DVD's featurette--is supposed to be haunted. Either way, the house looks great for a horror film. It's dilapidated and old, and the surrounding area is suitably desolate. In the film, it has recently been purchased by the Doyle family (consisting of a single mother and two kids) because the mother, Leslie, wants to start a career as a mortician, and moreover a new life, hence the drive across the country (from somewhere 26 hours away). Upon arrival, they find that the septic tank backed up from recent rainfall, flooding the yard with sewage, stale water, and whatever chemicals and waste were drained from the mortuary area years ago. This on one hand seems cliched and maybe over-the-top; on the other hand, it also foregrounds the very palpable, visceral tone which zombies epitomize. So overall, I'm for it.

The downstairs is still filled with coffins, the lights hardly work, the house was never cleaned by a prison crew as the 'realtor' (a local politican) promised because the prisoners weren't allowed to be exposed to the chemicals, and to top it all off, there are rumors in circulation that the deformed and deranged son of the former inhabitants of the house (who themselves were brutally killed) is still alive somewhere on the premises. You might say, "Well, I'd never let anyone I loved live in a place like that, new career or not." Well... yeah. That's kind of a pitfall here. Yet Leslie Doyle is clearly meant to be obsessed with her chance for a Fresh Clean Start (tm), and is also perhaps a bit irresponsible, as we can see when she's sorting utensils out of a moving box: "Hm... Embalming... Kitchen... Embalming... Definitely kitchen... Ooh, embalming..."

Her teenaged son Jonathan is at an awkward enough age without being thrown into a small town hundreds of miles from his previous school and having to live in the local haunted house where his mother cuts up dead bodies. Hm... though sadly enough, that sort of situation might have made me less awkward in high school. His sister is, essentially, just a kid, sometimes scared, sometimes exuberant, and always quite admirably portrayed by Stephanie Patton, who's a much better child actress than most films of this sort can ever obtain.

There are competing strands of horrific narrative in this film, some regarding the history of the house and its Boo Radley-like rumored occupant, and then some strange sort of CGI fungus/sludge that appears to love the taste of blood and propagate through fluid transmission. At a more or less appropriate time, zombies also enter the mix, sometimes articulate and Pet Sematary-like, sometimes shambling and sort of Fulci-esque, but always undead and that's hard not to appreciate.

I'm fine with irrational characters, sometimes. It's kind of ridiculous to imagine any remotely sympathetic mother letting her kids live in a place loaded with mortuary contaminants and bad wiring, but the movie sells it well enough that I'll buy it. However, I don't buy so freaking many people constantly walking into very dark, secluded parts of an old and falling-apart house with either 1) no lighting device of any kind, or 2) just a lighter if there are flashlights downstairs. That's not even a matter of avoiding monsters, it's just a matter of what the hell are you doing if you can't see anything in an old house filled with sharp, rusted objects and floorboards that might well be rotted through?

I make allowances insofar as I can, but frankly, the characters in Mortuary are hard to believe sometimes, although in general they're more sympathetic than I expected them to be. The CGI fungus looks unnatural (not preternatural or supernatural), not to mention stultifying. And the zombies... well, as I said, they're uneven and often hiding conveniently behind easy-to-close doors sort of as if this were a Scooby-Doo cartoon. In fact, Scooby Doo might provide the right visual images if you want to imagine some of the action sequences, too, which I wouldn't exactly call "well-choreographed." And to round off my main complaints... the ending is terrible. I won't explain, just so you can see for yourself, but... it's one of those cheap endings that makes a bad horror flick that much worse.

As I always say, if you're as rabid a zombie movie watcher as I am, there's no point in giving you any pronouncements as to whether or not you should see this. And unlike some "zombie" films, it actually has some zombies in it. In the end, I guess that's the best recommendation I can give this film. "It has zombies in it." Watch at your own risk.

Labels: Horror: Zombies