Funeral Home (1980) Motion Picture Marketing/Horror-Thriller RT: 93 minutes Rated R (violence, language) Director: William Fruet Screenplay: Ida Nelson Music: Jerry Fielding Cinematography: Mark Irwin Release date: August 12, 1982 (US) Cast: Kay Hawtrey, Lesleh Donaldson, Barry Morse, Dean Garbett, Stephen Miller, Alfred Humphreys, Peggy Mahon, Harvey Atkin, Bob Warner, Jack Van Evera, Les Rubie, Doris Petrie, Bill Lake, Brett Davidson, Chris Crabb, Robert Craig, Linda Dalby, Gerard Jordan, Eleanor Beecroft, James Crammond. Box Office: $1.3M (US)
Rating: **
Let’s see…. cheap production values, actors that I’ve never heard of, lame script and Harvey Atkin. Funeral Home must be one of the infamous Canadian tax shelter movies of the early 80s! Okay, that part about the actors is something of an exaggeration. I’ve seen both Lesleh Donaldson (Happy Birthday to Me) and Kay Hawtrey (Police Academy) before and I am very familiar with Harvey Atkin (Meatballs, Visiting Hours). When you see his name listed in the credits, it must be a Canadian-made film.
Let’s talk about Funeral Home in greater detail. It’s a not especially scary horror-thriller about strange goings-on at a tourist hotel that used to be a funeral home (hence the title). Maude Chalmers (Hawtrey), an eccentric type, turned it into an inn shortly after the mysterious disappearance of her husband, the town undertaker. Her teen granddaughter Heather (Donaldson) comes to help out for the summer. She soon realizes something isn’t right when she hears her grandmother talking to somebody in the cellar. When the girl asks about it, she’s told to stay out of the cellar. No, that’s not suspicious at all.
Meanwhile, there have been several unexplained disappearances around town. Most recently, a real estate developer looking to buy up property in the small town went missing. Rookie deputy Joe Yates (Humphreys, First Blood) wants to get to the bottom of it. The sheriff (Warner, Black Christmas) tells him to drop it and concentrate on giving out tickets to tourists.
Heather gets romantically involved with the deputy’s younger brother Rick (Garbett in his sole acting credit). Unlike the teens in any slasher movie, their romance is chaste and sex-free. He clues her in to what her grandfather was really like. He was a mean drunk who loved to scare curious children by locking them in the basement. He also tells her the truth (or so everybody thinks) about the man’s disappearance. He supposedly ran off with another woman leaving his wife to live in a state of constant denial.
NO SPOLIERS HERE! We come to learn that the people who disappeared all stayed at the inn. We also learn that the killer drives around in a hearse. Although we don’t see this person until the finale, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the killer’s identity. I’ll tell you this much, it’s not the mentally challenged handyman (Miller, Malone) living in the shed out back.
Anybody with half a brain would take one look at the big old spooky house and know it’s a great place to avoid. However, Funeral Home relies on our old friend the Idiot Plot to ensure that none of the guests ever notice the obvious. None of them are particularly bright. Maude outright disapproves of some of them like the travelling salesman (Atkin) who shows up with his nasty mistress (Mahon). You see, Maude is a religious woman and won’t tolerate any sinful hanky panky in her house. It isn’t long before the hearse dispatches these individuals by pushing their car right into the lake. Oh, I almost forgot about the hotel’s permanent resident Mr. Davis (Morse) who makes regular trips to the local police station. Hmmmm, what could he be up to? He meets his non-bloody demise at the business end of a pickaxe.
Heather might be the only one with any common sense albeit in short supply. She brilliantly observes at one point, “There is something wrong in that house, something evil.” And it doesn’t stop there. She later points out, “My grandmother is afraid of something and I think it’s down in that cellar.” Obviously, we’re talking about a member of Mensa here. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the black cat that keeps showing up to freak out Heather. It got to a point where I started saying “there’s that news van again” every time it appeared. My fellow Philadelphians will get the reference.
Without giving too much away- actually, I don’t think it matters if I give away anything or not- Funeral Home is still lame. It’s a rip-off of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Knowing that, you might be able to guess why unhinged Grandma doesn’t want anybody snooping around the basement. It’s directed by William Fruet whose filmography includes Canadian tax shelter classics like The House by the Lake (1980), Search and Destroy (1981), Spasms (1983), Bedroom Eyes (1984) and Killer Party (1986). It’s not one of his shining moments. It’s neither scary nor suspenseful. It has no gore. It doesn’t even have a decent body count. What, no gore? To borrow one of film producer Samuel Goldwyn’s most famous malaprops, include me out!
The fact that it took two years for Funeral Home to open in theaters in the lower 48 should indicate something about the quality of the picture. I saw it on cable late one night in summer ’84 and found it rather lacking. It has a couple of half-decent points. One is Hawtrey’s unhinged performance. You just know there’s something off about this woman. You know she’s hiding something but what? That, of course, is a rhetorical question. We know damn well what she’s hiding and it isn’t a huge stash of money. Lesleh Donaldson is pretty good as the heroine of the picture. It isn’t her fault she gets stuck with dopey dialogue. It’s always a treat to see Atkin.
Funeral Home isn’t necessarily a bad movie; it’s just a weak one. It was clearly made for no other purpose than to make money off fans of schlock horror pictures. It didn’t really succeed. It appears everybody thought it better just to give it a decent burial. Maybe they’re right.
