The Mortuary Collection Review

Review of The Mortuary Collection (2019) by screenqueeen: 👍 3.5/5

Horror anthologies have a certain handicap going against them. Because each segment is typically submitted by completely different filmmakers, you're likely to run into mismatched tones, pacing and oftentimes a confusing variety of either underlying morals or multiple points of focus for each segment versus the wraparound -- it's a lot to take in sometimes. And sometimes there's almost nothing to take in.

But what MORTUARY COLLECTION does to sweep all the above issues away is to provide multiple short stories within its wraparound, all keeping it in-house (see what I did there), maintaining a singular voice both on the page and on the screen. Spindell has filmed a small handful of shorts (most are available on his Vimeo page except for one episode of a series unfortunately lost to the doomed entity formerly known as Quibi), and as of this writing I haven't seen them but I can tell that his industriousness evident in MORTUARY likely is a continued strength from his earlier projects.

There's something playful about the later segments and the wraparound's culmination that suggests an influence of Raimi, Romero, a little bit of King, and a healthy dose of Dougherty. Based on how much you may have enjoyed TRICK 'R TREAT that may be an indicator of your enjoyment of this.

The start of the movie and its first segment is all style, and it gets some of the horror trapping fodder out of the way as well as giving Custer the one-liners audience members would usually utter or yell or scream (would they? I haven't been in a cinema in over a year), heckling the movie and its segments in a fashion that's never overdone or even near the self-aware content that us horror heads find so cringey nowadays. Clancy Brown's Montgomery Dark/resident Tall Man is also not-so-secretly the best part of this, humoring a girl who's claimed to have shown up to the funeral home he operates due to the help wanted sign hanging outside by telling her stories about not only how people died but why, which works very well to address the moral issues that people would normally roll their eyes over.

You can tell I enjoyed it but I'd actually like to see more Mortuary Collections in the future. There's a lot more books in that library.