Curt Ayers | Through the Shattered Lens

Here! Watch the trailer for the 1983 slasher film, Mortuary!

(It’s the first trailer shown in the video below. Be sure to stick around for the Humongous trailer.)

OH MY GOD! That sure was scary, wasn’t it!? In case you didn’t recognize him, that was beloved horror character actor Michael Berryman getting dragged into that grave. No matter how bad the film was (or is), Michael Berryman was one of those actors who was always worth watching. Based on the trailer, Mortuary has got to be some sort of classic, right?

Well…no.

The trailer’s a classic but, unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the film. This isn’t just a case of scenes from the film being edited into the trailer in such a way that the audience is misled as to what’s actually going on in the movie. Almost all trailers do that…

No, the trailer for Mortuary contains literally no scenes from the actual film. Michael Berryman isn’t even in Mortuary!

But you know who is in the film?

BILL PAXTON!

That’s right … a very young Bill Paxton made his film debut in Mortuary. Even better, he got to play the killer! Now, I know you probably think that I just spoiled the film for you but seriously, Paxton is so obviously the murderer that it doesn’t really count as a spoiler. Paxton plays Paul Andrews, the teenage son of mortician, Hank Andrews (Christopher George). Everyone agrees that Paul is a little bit weird. Or, as someone says in the film, “Paul’s been so strange since his mother committed suicide.” Someone else agrees and then adds that it probably doesn’t help that apparently, Hank used to force Paul to sleep in the mortuary.

In the role of Paul, Paxton gives a very odd performance. I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s a good performance and, if I ever meet Bill Paxton, I’m not going to bring this movie up. But seriously, Paxton’s performance is so weird that you can’t stop watching him. There’s a scene where he literally skips through a cemetery. He seems to be having fun and good for him!

Paul is a little obsessed with Christie (Mary Beth McDonough). Christie has been having issues since her father’s mysterious drowning. Everyone keeps telling Christie that her father just had an accident in the pool but the audience knows — via the first scene in the film — that her father was only in that pool because someone hit him with a baseball bat. Ever since her father’s death, Christie has been sleep walking and having night terrors. She demands that her boyfriend, Greg (David Wallace), help her find out what really happened to her father.

Greg, however, is still trying to figure out what happened to his best friend, Josh (Denis Mendel). Earlier, Greg and Josh broke into the mortuary so that they could steal a tire. Josh went off on his own and ended up getting stabbed to death with an embalming pipe. Greg never noticed because he was busy spying on what was apparently a black magic ceremony involving Hank and a coven of witches.

And one of the witches was … Christie’s mother, Eve (Lynda Day George)!

When Eve isn’t busy practicing the dark arts, she’s telling her daughter that she needs to get over her father’s death. Is Eve trying to drive Christie crazy? Does Hank know that Paul is homicidal? Will Greg ever figure out that Josh is dead?

And most importantly — will this film feature any disco roller skating!?

YOU BET IT DOES!

I’m probably making Mortuary sound more fun that it actually is. It’s actually a fairly slow-moving slasher film and neither Greg nor Christie are particularly interesting or likable. Still, the film features Bill Paxton skipping in a cemetery and that’s worth something.

If you’re willing to look, you can find Mortuary on YouTube, though I’ve been told that the version that was uploaded was the television version so some things have been cut out.

But you know who hasn’t been cut out?

BILL PAXTON, THAT’S WHO!

YouTube, my old friend, you have failed me.

For the longest time, the 1982 anti-drug melodrama Desperate Lives has been available for viewing on YouTube. I first watched it two years ago, after I read an online article about a scene in which a teenage Helen Hunt takes PCP and jumps through a window. And, when I watched it, I was stunned. I knew that the film was going to be over-the-top and silly, largely because it’s hard to imagine how a film featuring a teenage Helen Hunt taking PCP could be anything other than that. But, even with my experience of watching over the top message movies, nothing could have quite prepared me for Desperate Lives.

So, I figured, for this review, that I’d say a few snarky words about Desperate Lives and then I’d just add something like, “And you can watch it below!” And then I would embed the entire movie and all of y’all could just click on play and watch a movie on the Lens.

Unfortunately, Desperate Lives has been taken off of YouTube. I assume the upload violated some sort of copyright thing. And really, it’s kinda stupid because seriously, Desperate Lives is one of those films that really deserves to be seen for free on YouTube.

Oh well. You can still watch a video of Helen Hunt jumping through that window. The video below also features some additional elements from Desperate Lives.

For instance, you get to see Diana Scarwid playing the angriest high school guidance counselor in the world. Scarwid knows that students like Helen Hunt are using drugs and that her fellow faculty members are turning a blind eye to everything’s that’s happening. From the minute she first appears on screen, Scarwid is shouting at someone and she doesn’t stop screaming until the film ends.

And you also get to see Doug McKeon, playing Helen Hunt’s brother. McKeon goes for a drive with his girlfriend, who has just taken PCP herself. As their car goes flying off a mountain, she says, “Wheeee!”

In the video below, you also get to see that the only reason Helen Hunt used drugs was because her boyfriend begged her to. That’s a scenario that seems to show up in a lot of high school drug films and it’s strange because it’s something that I’ve never actually seen happen or heard about happening in real life. In fact, in real life, most users of hard drugs are actually very happy to not share their supply.

Unfortunately, the video below does not feature any scenes of Sam Bottoms as the world’s most charming drug dealer and that’s a shame because he gives the only good performance in the entire film (sorry, Helen!).

Even worse, the video doesn’t include any scenes from the film’s memorably insane conclusion, in which Scarwid searches every single locker in the school and then interrupts a pep rally so she can set everyone’s stash on fire in the middle of the gym. Making it even better is that all the students are so moved by Scarwid’s final speech that they start tossing all of the drugs that they have on them into the fire.

Which means that the film essentially ends with the entire school getting high off of a huge marijuana bonfire.

No, that scene cannot be found in the video below. But you can find Helen Hunt jumping through a window so enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEpyLzHeozY