Mortuary is the latest effort from Tobe Hooper. It's a direct-to-video release but sounded better than a few of Hooper's older works such as The Funhouse and The Mangler so I thought I'd check it out.

Mortuary starts out like a typical haunted house with a single mom, an angsty teenage son, and a younger daughter moving into an abandoned mortuary in a small town full of oddballs. It's not long before the kids start hearing scary stories about a deformed man hanging around the cemetary. About halfway into the story, Mortuary becomes much more like a zombie movie, with an inky black slime turning people into brainless creeps.

I found this movie to be much better than a few of Hooper's past efforts. As soon as the movie begins, there's a strong, creepy atmosphere present that is sustained relatively well throughout, accompanied by some decent pacing. There's also some quirky gallows humor in Mortuary that gives it the movie some variety in terms of tone (in particular, an attempted embalming that goes horribly wrong and ends up a formaldehyde-tinged mess).

While most of this is executed pretty well, the problem with Mortuary is that it can't balance these things very well. It's hard to tell whether the movie wants to be creepy or more "splatstick." The result is rather disjointed. The acting isn't that great either. Denise Crosby (Pet Semetary) is decent as the mother and a few minor characters come off okay but the kids who serve as the main characters of Mortuary are lacking.

All in all, Mortuary's got some good things in it but these things don't really work well together in addition to a few other shortcomings. It's a decent horror flick that's worth a rent but it's no Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Ugh this movie was horrible. Thought it had only two or three good parts in (my favorite was when the mom was sewing the girl's hand back together and they came back to life, and when that other teenage girl was like "That's my piano teacher!"), this movie wasn't one of Tobe's best.

I didn't see the ending because I thought I'd have more fun outside in the dark than watching this movie, so I left when the blonde chick was washing her hand off after they cut it open, and the black slime spewed into her mouth or something.

But all in all, I give this movie 2 out of 4 stars, worse than Crocidile and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After seeing this movie, I'm actually sort of glad they cut off Tobe on the upcoming movie "Zombies".

Sean