Funeral Home

APRIL 13, 2007

GENRE: CRAP, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (BUDGET PACK!!!)

It’s almost not entirely fair to call Funeral Home ‘crap’ (UPDATE: "Crap" tag rescinded! Read my new Blu-ray review to find out why). Maybe I should make a new category simply called “Boring”. It’s not that the film is wall to wall awful like the other movies in the crap subgenre (such as Blood Trails or Cube 2), it’s just boring as a dog’s ass. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if it was really a horror movie (actually, I’m still not) until someone finally got killed around the half hour mark. Some of the movies in my budget set (yep, this is another one, folks) are just filler and can’t be considered horror.

This one manages to classify as horror via a few slasher style sequences (including one that is 99% exact to Steve Christy’s murder in Friday the 13th, I’m not sure which movie came first but considering today's date I consider that pretty coincidental) and the film's 'scary' title, which is also misleading since it takes place at a hotel (which USED to be a Funeral Home, but that'd be like calling Planet of the Apes "Earth"). There's also the ending, which reveals that the killer (the owner of the hotel) has a split personality and keeps a corpse in the basement. Which is a great idea, but it’s just sort of botched in this film. Imagine what someone like Hitchcock could do with this concept!

Jokes aside, the movie is so intent on ripping off Psycho, it even features action over the end credits! But it one ups Psycho by actually having characters provide the epilogue/exposition while we learn who the key grips and assistant directors were. Lazy Hitch just had a car get pulled out of a lake.

Back to the coincidences though, I haven’t mentioned it, but it’s strange how often a film will share some random thing in common with the film I watched the day before. For example, both Ginger Snaps and Cutting Class were on pan and scan, featureless DVDs. And both Cutting Class and the previous day's The Burning were 80s slashers that featured (now) highly respectable people making their debuts. And now today’s movie, just like yesterday’s movie Devil Times Five, features a brunette woman cruelly attempting to “seduce” a retarded man. What sort of surprising connection will tomorrow’s movie have with this? Maybe it will also happen to feature scene after scene of the obvious villain claiming not to know where the victims “disappeared to all of a sudden” every 10 minutes or so.

Speaking of the retarded man, consider this charming line of dialogue: “He’s not very bright, so I let him have the shack around the back of the house.” This comes courtesy of the owner of the hotel, which has plenty of empty rooms. It’s really endearing when a character we are supposed to like is treating some poor sap like a dog because he doesn’t know any better.

My favorite shot in the film.

And in keeping with the theme of learning things from low budget movies in the public domain, I leave you with this chilling fact (a cop says it so it must be true): “Do you know how many people go missing in America every day? Thousands!” Wow.

What say you?