{"id":11602,"date":"2025-04-02T00:22:39","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T04:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=11602"},"modified":"2025-04-02T00:22:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T04:22:39","slug":"funeral-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/04\/02\/funeral-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Funeral Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Funeral Home <\/strong>(1980)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Motion Picture Marketing\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 93 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: William Fruet\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Ida Nelson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jerry Fielding\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Mark Irwin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 12, 1982 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $1.3M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating:<\/strong>\u00a0**<\/p>\n

\u00a0Let’s see…. cheap production values, actors that I’ve never heard of, lame script and Harvey Atkin. Funeral Home<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Let\u2019s talk about Funeral Home<\/strong> in greater detail. It\u2019s 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\u2019s told to stay out of the cellar. No, that\u2019s not suspicious at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Meanwhile, 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Heather gets romantically involved with the deputy\u2019s 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\u2019s disappearance. He supposedly ran off with another woman leaving his wife to live in a state of constant denial.<\/p>\n

\u00a0NO SPOLIERS HERE! <\/strong>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\u2019t see this person until the finale, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the killer’s identity. I\u2019ll tell you this much, it\u2019s not the mentally challenged handyman (Miller, Malone) living in the shed out back.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Anybody with half a brain would take one look at the big old spooky house and know it’s a great place to avoid. However,\u00a0Funeral Home<\/strong>\u00a0relies 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Heather 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\u2019d be remiss if I didn\u2019t mention the black cat that keeps showing up to freak out Heather. It got to a point where I started saying \u201cthere\u2019s that news van again\u201d every time it appeared. My fellow Philadelphians will get the reference.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Without giving too much away- actually, I don’t think it matters if I give away anything or not-\u00a0Funeral Home<\/strong>\u00a0is still lame. It\u2019s a rip-off of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho. Knowing that, you might be able to guess why unhinged Grandma doesn\u2019t want anybody snooping around the basement. It\u2019s 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\u2019s not one of his shining moments. It\u2019s neither scary nor suspenseful. It has no gore. It doesn\u2019t even have a decent body count. What, no gore? To borrow one of film producer Samuel Goldwyn’s most famous malaprops, include me out!<\/p>\n

\u00a0The fact that it took two years for\u00a0Funeral Home<\/strong>\u00a0to 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 \u201984 and found it rather lacking. It has a couple of half-decent points. One is Hawtrey’s unhinged performance. You just know there\u2019s something off about this woman. You know she\u2019s hiding something but what? That, of course, is a rhetorical question. We know damn well what she\u2019s hiding and it isn\u2019t a huge stash of money. Lesleh Donaldson is pretty good as the heroine of the picture. It isn\u2019t her fault she gets stuck with dopey dialogue. It\u2019s always a treat to see Atkin.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Funeral Home<\/strong> isn\u2019t necessarily a bad movie; it\u2019s just a weak one. It was clearly made for no other purpose than to make money off fans of schlock horror pictures. It didn\u2019t really succeed. It appears everybody thought it better just to give it a decent burial. Maybe they\u2019re right.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funeral Home (1980)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Motion Picture Marketing\/Horror-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 93 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence, language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: William Fruet\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Ida Nelson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Jerry Fielding\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Mark Irwin\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: August 12, 1982 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Kay Hawtrey, Lesleh Donaldson, Barry Morse, Dean Garbett, Stephen Miller, Alfred Humphreys, Peggy Mahon, Harvey Atkin, Bob Warner, Jack Van Evera, Les Rubie, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11621,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movies","category-horror"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Funeral-Home-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11602"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11623,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11602\/revisions\/11623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}