The Mortuary Collection (2019)

directed by Ryan Spindell

USA

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

From minute one, I was really impressed by how good this movie looks. It's amazing to me that this is just something you can watch anytime on Shudder, because aesthetically it looks like a movie that should have been preceded by a beloved cult TV show, a wildly successful effort to crowdfund a movie, a bunch of fan clubs, merch, and its own dedicated following. The sweeping overhead shots of the invented town of Raven's End and the detail put into establishing its backstory as a weird, monster-plagued place even before we hear the stories about it make this feel like it has far more history than a one-off film. I very much commend it for taking notes from classic horror anthologies of the 80s and 90s because it feels indistinguishable from them in all the best ways.

It looks like this is also a compilation of the director's previously shot short films, which explains why the wrap-around story, which I'm presuming was created solely for this film, is kind of the best part about it. The shorts are all great, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like there's a disparity between them that I understand now that I know the shorts had all been made a couple of years before the rest of the film. This is refreshing to see- a lot of older horror anthologies I watch fall into the trap of having the wrap-around be the most boring part, and a lot of times totally unrelated to the film as a whole, but really in this case everything works together to make a bigger story. And it does feel big. I can't believe this movie came out within the past five years.

The only issue I had with this was also, unfortunately, kind of the best part of it. Like I said, this feels very strongly like classic horror anthologies that we all know and love, and at times it feels too much like them. The filming style, the acting, the visuals, and everything else has all been upgraded to be 2019 quality, and it really is a pleasure to watch, but the scripts could have been taken from anything released between like 1980-1999. It just has that vibe of not being terribly deep, just focusing on what would make for good horror, not the most interesting or the most original, just... the most recognizable horror. And it's hard for me to get upset at that because it is good horror, it's enjoyable and it gives me that feeling of passion and playfulness that watching classic goofy horror movies does, but at the same time I wish it elevated itself a little bit beyond what I've already seen a hundred times.

I had moral issues with a couple of the shorts, I guess, and that's what tripped me up. The first and second ones were fine; the second one made me uncomfortable but not really in an ethical way, but the third and fourth used themes that aren't something I like to see in media being created in the present day. The third segment deals with disability in a way that makes it feel like it's more of a burden on the people around a disabled person than on the person themselves, mostly through depicting caregiver fatigue, and... making a movie about caregiver fatigue isn't the problem here, and it should be talked about more, but this is a movie about caregiver fatigue without any of the nuance that a discussion about it should have. I do feel like this was one of the better shorts visually- that final scene in the elevator was just gorgeous. But it shoots for a deep topic and instead of dealing with it respectfully it chooses to deal with it the way a movie that doesn't know anything about said topic would deal with it.

The final segment bleeds into the wrap-around in a cool way; again, I love how connected everything was. But it uses that ancient, tired "escaped mental patient" trope! And I hated it so much! This movie is so dedicated to looking and feeling classic, to using the same beats as the films it's emulating do, and you can feel that that is done with so much love and it's done so successfully that it makes this movie everything that it is, but it also doesn't weed out the parts of those classic films that are hurtful and offensive. I think this is a good example of why watching films shouldn't be a black-or-white activity- you can't watch something and absolutely refuse to acknowledge its problems because you like it, but you also can't discard something entirely because of its flaws (exceptions made, of course, for truly irredeemable media). It would be a shame to throw this whole movie away with all of its gorgeous outfitting and Clancy Brown's impeccably sinister-but-not-too-sinister performance, but we also have to see where it misfires.