You know your horror movie is in trouble when the scariest thing about it is the moldy CGI, the teenage dialogue feels like it was written by a substitute teacher with a head injury, and the whole thing plays out like Goosebumps directed by a man who forgot his glasses and his dignity. Welcome to Mortuary (2005), the cinematic equivalent of stepping into a freshly dug grave and realizing it’s filled with expired Taco Bell, teenage angst, and Tobe Hooper’s regrets.
This was Hooper’s swan song as a feature filmmaker. That’s right — the guy who gave us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, and Lifeforce (yes, even Lifeforce has its defenders) went out not with a bang, but with a low-budget gurgle of black slime and cringe-inducing performances. Watching Mortuary is like watching a legendary rock guitarist try to play a solo with mittens on. You want to look away, but your childhood memories of Salem’s Lot keep whispering, “Maybe there’s a good scene in here somewhere…”
There isn’t.
The “plot,” or What Passes For One in a Tobe Hooper Tax Write-Off
The movie follows a grieving family — the Doyle clan — who move to the small town of Santa Loraina to reopen a decaying funeral home. This home, naturally, is filled with cobwebs, trauma, secrets, and more bad lighting than a TikTok filmed in a parking garage.
The mother, Leslie (Denise Crosby), is a recently widowed mortician trying to make a fresh start. She brings along her teenage son Jonathan (Dan Byrd, doing his best to channel “every awkward horror teen from 2000-2006”) and her young daughter Jamie, who talks like she’s been raised on cough syrup and sarcasm. They move into the attached house, which is conveniently haunted by the worst script Hooper ever agreed to shoot.
There’s a local legend, of course. It involves “Bobby Fowler,” a deformed weirdo who lived in the mortuary’s crypt and may or may not have been killed by the townsfolk years ago. Classic small-town gothic stuff. Think The Goonies meets The Hills Have Eye Boogers. Naturally, this legend turns out to be true, and Bobby returns… not as a ghost, not exactly as a zombie, but as some kind of sentient infection made of tar, phlegm, and unexplained narrative choices.
Let’s break that down.
The big bad here is… fungus. Like actual mold. There’s a black slime that infects people, turning them into oozing zombie things with the intelligence of cheese dip and the movement of kids in gym class pretending to be trees. The infected scream, twitch, and try to spit slime into your mouth. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers if the aliens were made of expired yogurt.
The special effects? An insult to the word “special.” The mold zombies look like someone sneezed on leftover meatloaf and stuck googly eyes on it. The practical effects are rubbery and cartoonish, the CGI is bargain bin 2005 trash fire, and the creature design makes Pumpkinhead 2 look like The Thing.
And the titular mortuary? Not scary. Not even eerie. It looks like an abandoned Chili’s restaurant with a few plastic skulls duct-taped to the walls.
The Characters: A Parade of Walking Meat Suits
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Jonathan, our “hero,” spends most of the movie whining, pouting, or discovering bodies with all the urgency of a guy who dropped his iPod behind the couch.
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Leslie, played by poor Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar, what have they done to you?), slowly descends into madness as she becomes infected. Her character arc goes from “distant mom” to “black-mouthed slime puppet” in record time.
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The townsfolk are interchangeable yokels who exist solely to get infected, killed, or shout exposition about “Bobby Fowler” like he’s the town’s least interesting ghost story.
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And the local sheriff? He dies in a scene so poorly lit and chaotically edited it might as well have been filmed in a glove compartment during an earthquake.
There’s also a group of teens who serve as horror movie fodder — you know the type: flirty girl, stoner guy, comic relief who gets it in the throat. They show up, make bad decisions, and die. One of them vomits up a gallon of black slime in a scene so grotesquely ridiculous it’s almost admirable. Almost.
The Tone: Who Let This Movie Be This Confused?
Is it horror? Comedy? Satire? Public service announcement about black mold?
The movie flip-flops between goofy camp and wannabe Cronenberg body horror, never fully committing to either. One scene will have characters weeping over the dead, the next will have a slime-covered ghoul slip on a gravestone like it’s America’s Funniest Home Videos: Cemetery Edition.
There’s a scene where the family eats spaghetti, and the camera lingers on the sauce. For so long. It’s supposed to make you squirm. Instead, it makes you question your grocery list. Another scene features a guy drowning in embalming fluid while zombie mold-men hiss like clogged toilets around him. It sounds insane because it is.
The Pacing: A Moldy Crawl Toward Nothing
Mortuary is slow. Not atmospheric slow. Just “why am I watching this?” slow. There are long, pointless shots of characters doing nothing, walking around dark rooms, or talking about dreams they had — which, by the way, involve graveyards and slime. Every moment drips with the dread of wasted time. It’s like Hooper was trying to build tension, but accidentally built boredom instead.
By the time the “final battle” happens — involving shovels, mold zombies, a big pit, and screaming — you’re just begging for someone to turn on the lights, hose everything down, and end it all with fire.
The Ending: Mold Wins? Nobody Wins.
The movie closes on a scene so abrupt, so laughably dumb, that you wonder if they ran out of money, tape, or willpower. Our heroes may or may not survive. The mold might be stopped. Or not. Bobby Fowler rises again, I think, or maybe that’s his cousin. Doesn’t matter.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5 leaky embalming hoses
Mortuary is a sad, moldy footnote in Tobe Hooper’s career. It’s not scary. It’s not fun. It’s not even bad in a way that’s worth watching with friends and cheap beer. It’s like watching the idea of a horror movie rot in real time, buried under murky lighting, awful effects, and direction that screams “please just let me go home.”
If you want horror, watch Texas Chain Saw. If you want slime, watch The Blob. If you want both? Mortuary is the cinematic equivalent of spoiled mayonnaise left in a casket too long — and someone still thought it was worth serving.
