There’s bad horror, and then there’s Mausoleum. The kind of bad where you don’t check your watch because you’re bored—you check it because you’re wondering if time itself has been possessed by the same demon that ate this script.
Michael Dugan’s Mausoleum is a 1983 supernatural cheapie that promises gothic chills, family curses, and demonic possession, but mostly delivers latex monster boobs, glowing green lights, and Bobbie Bresee looking like she wandered onto the wrong set while rehearsing for a shampoo commercial. The plot, such as it is, centers on Susan Walker (Bresee), who as a child stumbles into the family mausoleum after her mother’s funeral and winds up cursed by a demon that apparently waits around in crypts like a bad timeshare salesman.
Fast forward twenty years, and Susan is now married to Oliver (Marjoe Gortner, who deserves hazard pay just for showing up). On the outside she’s glamorous, but when the lights turn green and the synths kick in, she sprouts talons, glowing eyes, and—how shall we say this—killer assets. Yes, this is the only film where breasts become murder weapons, and no, that’s not nearly as fun as it sounds.
A Plot So Thin It Should Be on a Diet
The movie thinks it’s telling a tragic story about an inherited family curse. What it’s actually telling is the story of a woman who occasionally transforms into a Halloween mask from the clearance bin at Party City, murders the help, and then goes shopping.
Susan kills a drunk guy in the parking lot. Then she seduces and murders her gardener with a rake. Then she levitates her aunt and cracks her chest like a piñata. Later she murders another gardener because apparently this family hires landscapers by the dozen. By the midpoint, you start to feel sorry for the local gardening union—being employed by the Farrells is a death sentence.
Meanwhile, her husband Oliver reacts with the kind of mild alarm one reserves for a broken dishwasher. He calls her psychiatrist: “Hey doc, I think my wife might be sprouting fangs and murdering people, but maybe I just need more sleep.” Marjoe Gortner spends the movie oscillating between wooden confusion and dead-eyed resignation, as though even he knows his character’s greatest purpose is to die messily in the third act.
Demon Possession by Way of Softcore Cable
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a late-night Cinemax movie got possessed by The Exorcist, here’s your answer.
Bresee spends half the film topless, which is the movie’s one consistent special effect. Her acting technique alternates between wide-eyed innocence and demonic growling, with nothing in between. It’s less “possessed by evil” and more “possessed by someone trying to remember their lines while also flexing for a magazine shoot.”
And then there are the infamous monster breasts. In one of the film’s most unintentionally hilarious moments, Susan transforms during sex and sprouts teeth in her chest, impaling her unfortunate partner. Yes, her breasts literally kill a man. Somewhere in the annals of cinema history, that moment deserves a plaque for sheer audacity, if not execution.
The Supporting Cast: Victims of Paycheck Possession
LaWanda Page, forever remembered as Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son, shows up as the housekeeper. She takes one look at Susan glowing green and bolts out of the house, thereby becoming the smartest character in the movie. Sadly, her cameo is so brief you wonder if she wandered onto the set by mistake and they just rolled camera.
Norman Burton plays Dr. Andrews, the psychiatrist who realizes this isn’t a medical case but a full-blown demon infestation. He and his colleague consult dusty journals and discover that only a crown of thorns can expel the demon. Apparently, Jesus left behind some family heirlooms, and the Nomeds just happened to snag one. Convenient, if not remotely coherent.
Then there’s Ben, the gardener-turned-lover-turned-corpse who somehow shows up alive at the end as the gravekeeper in the world’s dumbest twist. If you’re asking how this makes sense, you’re thinking harder than the writers did.
Special Effects: More Glow Than Show
The movie does try to deliver spectacle, but its idea of special effects is basically green lighting gels, smoke machines, and latex prosthetics applied with duct tape. The demon makeup on Bresee looks like it was borrowed from a haunted hayride, and the glowing eyes effect is literally someone shining a flashlight into her pupils.
People levitate, but not in a scary way—more like a stagehand in the rafters accidentally tugged the wrong rope. Blood splatters, but it’s that thin, watery stage blood that looks like Hawaiian Punch. When the demon finally takes full form, it resembles a rejected Muppet from Jim Henson’s trash bin.
This thing won a jury prize at a sci-fi film festival in Paris, which makes me wonder if the jury was possessed too.
The Ending: Sealed With Stupidity
The climax involves Dr. Andrews putting the crown of thorns on Susan, which banishes the demon back to the family tomb. She cries, remembers she killed her family, and then—poof—the movie tries to convince us this is tragic. It’s not tragic. It’s Tuesday.
Then we get the gravekeeper twist: he’s actually Ben, the dead gardener. Why? Because the movie needed one last insult before rolling credits. It’s not a twist. It’s a shrug.
Final Thoughts: A Mausoleum That Should Have Stayed Locked
There’s a reason Mausoleum was labeled a “video nasty.” Not because it’s obscene or shocking, but because it’s nasty to your patience. It has all the ingredients of a guilty pleasure—campy performances, gratuitous nudity, rubber demons—but none of the spark. It’s as if the filmmakers knew they were making trash but forgot the crucial rule: good trash is fun. Bad trash is just trash.
Bobbie Bresee deserved better. Marjoe Gortner definitely deserved better. LaWanda Page deserved an entirely different film. What we got instead was a supernatural soap opera that mistakes glowing green light for atmosphere and topless demon transformations for horror.
If you ever stumble across this film, resist the temptation. The mausoleum door is locked for a reason. Leave the demon inside.
Grade: D
Not scary, not sexy, not coherent. Just a mausoleum of wasted time.
