Tobe Hooper has always been a bit of an odd duck director to me. He undoubtedly deserves the title “Master of Horror” (even if his episodes of the show are never among the best the series has to offer), if only for the obvious reason, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Despite having made one of the most classic and iconic horror/exploitation movies in the single most prolific horror/exploitation decade ever, his output since has been uneven at best. Poltergeist, while obviously a financial success, isn’t exactly one of the all-time great horror movies. Even TCM2, while I personally love it, isn’t as well-received in many quarters as the original. Eaten Alive is an interesting attempt at recapturing the atmosphere of TCM, and equally interesting in the fact that Hooper seems totally unable to bottle lightning twice, and it pretty much falls on its face.
Beyond his never being able to make another movie quite as awesome as Chainsaw, Hooper has never developed a signature style. Most of the other great horror directors have a touch that makes their movies immediately recognizable to their fans. I think John Carpenter is the best example of this. Even if it’s a movie of his you’ve never seen before, and you come into it halfway through on late-night cable, and don’t instantly recognize a character or situation you know is in that movie ahead of time, you can tell it’s a Carpenter movie. The framing, the way the film looks, everything about it screams, “I’m a John Carpenter movie!” Not so with Hooper. Catch one of his less-famous flicks in the middle, and you might say, “Huh, this was a Tobe Hooper movie, eh?” when the credits roll, but watching it you’d never tell. It could have been any made-for-Sci-Fi-Channel time-waster (I’m looking at you, Crocodile).
That said, Mortuary, while it looks like pretty much any other DTV horror flick from the last ten years, at least has an air of having been made by a seasoned professional instead of some young upstart, and has scattered throughout a dash of that black graveyard humor that is probably the closest thing Hooper has to a signature.
Leslie Doyle and her children Jamie and Jonathan are starting a new life re-opening a long-disused funeral parlor. At first, they dismiss local rumors that the parlor is haunted by the ghost of Bobby Fowler, a deformed boy who killed his parents there years ago. As a strange black fungus begins crawling out of the basement and infecting people and corpses alike, turning them into zombies, Jamie, Jonathan, and their new friends find themselves facing a horror of Lovecraftian proportions (that famous quote from “Call of Cthulhu” is even inscribed on a tomb)… that can be killed… uh… with table salt. Geez. Yeah. Good ol’ sodium chloride.
Overall, the movie is a fun ride, if not exactly brimming with originality. Typical “teens adjusting to a new town” schtick occupies most of the first half, until the local hooligans get possessed by the Sarlac in the basement. Yeah, you heard right. Sadly, the monster looks like a fan-art rendition of the Sarlac from Return of the Jedi (that’s right, I pointed out what a Sarlac was for the two people reading this who aren’t geek enough to know that already), animated with graphics that just barely hold up to Nintendo64 standards. The black fungus looks pretty cool, though. I honestly have no idea why, once they saw how stupid the N64 Sarlac looked, they didn’t just cut it out of the movie and stick with the fungus and the zombies. Would have been enough for me. Just sayin’.
But as stupid as the lousy and totally unnecessary CGI is, the solution to the conflict is the real head-scratcher. For starters, why salt? I can see the two writers, brains fried, sitting at their computer and racing against a deadline, having to turn in the script in just a few hours. They get to the end of the movie. The kids are in the basement with Bobby Fowler and Leslie and all the other possessed fungus zombies. They can’t figure out how to get the kids out of there. One looks to the other and says, “How about salt”? “What?” “Salt. Table salt.” “Ah, fuck it. Why the hell not? We get paid either way.” And salt it was. When star stones and reading backwards incantations from the Necronomicon won’t chase away those pesky elder gods, nail the fuckers in the face with a shot of Mrs. Dash and they’ll melt like that green chick in that one movie with the Pink Floyd music and the hanging midget.
Worse than that, it doesn’t even really work. I mean, we see several different times how salt totally destroys both the fungus and anyone infected with it. They establish the hell out of the fact that a fungus zombie will melt away to nothing in about five seconds when dosed with even a pinch of the stuff. After melting mom and Bobby and all the others into puddles of black sludge, they toss a whole sackful of the stuff into the Sarlac pit and the whole fucking basement explodes like a hamster jacked up on supercrack. The kids get outside, everything seems fine…and then MOM POPS UP AND GRABS JAMIE WHILE JONATHAN GETS DRUG INTO THE GROUND BY SARLAC TENTACLES! What the FUCK? If you drill into your audience’s head that there is a certain thing that can be absolutely relied upon to destroy the monster, don’t toss it out the window in the finale just to have a lame-ass “shock” ending. Not shocking, guys. Fucking irritating. Lazy, half-assed writing. Sentence fragments. Nothing destroys suspension of disbelief like establishing a set of rules that your movie’s universe obeys, and then breaking those rules. If you don’t give a crap about your story, don’t expect me to, bub.
The Moral of the Story: If you’re going to try to give your movie appeal by having a soundtrack on Relapse Records, don’t skip over all the awesome bands they represent and use the ones that suck.
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