Mortuary Academy (1988)

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Hello Youtube.
I am Torstein from Cinema Terror and if you are looking for a great hidden gem 80's comedy...
then look somewhere else as I am reviewing Mortuary Academy from 1988.
In Mortuary Academy we meet the two brothers Max and Sam Grimm.
After learning that their uncle has passed away and left his valuable Grimm Mortuary
and Academy in their name, they have to attend and pass a semester in this academy to inherit
the entire business.
Unbeknownst to them, the current head of the academy, played by Paul Bartel, has different
ideas as to who is deserving of the mortuary academy and together with teacher and lover
Mary, they come up with a plan to keep the brothers from achieving their goal and rightfully
inheritance.
In typical goofball 80's way, Mortuary Academy doesn't follow a straight plot narration.
During their time at the academy, the brothers and the other characters get into different
side stories that are supposed to keep us all entertained for nearly 90 minutes.
Which it fails at.
Mortuary Academy is not an entertaining film.
By all means, I am sure that it has some fans out there, but for me all the jokes fell flat.
And you know you are watching a film from a different time when one of the reoccuring
gags revolves around necrophilia.
Not only do they have the head of the academy be a necrophiliac who ends up taking a corpse
on a date night, but when he looses the corpse at the beach they thought it would be a fun
idea to have it be gang raped by four dudes, off screen thankfully.
It's bad taste shock comedy and while I don't have any trouble with that, it just becomes
tasteless when the comedy don't work.
It feels like they just thought up some scenarios that sounded fun while they were sitting around
talking, and probably drinking beer, but didn't bother to take the time to make the jokes
work.
While there is a lot of shit going on in the film, it still feels lazy.
They just throw stuff up on screen and hope you will find some of it funny, which I did
not.
They start out introducing a potential love story between one of the Grimm boys, I can't
remember who is who, and a shy, nerdy girl named Valerie, played by Lynn Danielson.
Instead of letting that potential romance breathe and give some heart to the film, they
go left field as Valerie's dog has been sat on and now the students help out the brilliant
eccentric one to reanimate the dog back to life using robot technology.
Something, something.
Same can also be said about the main brothers Grimm.
They are supposed to be the main focus of the film, but since the narration tend to
go into these side stories, there aren't enough time spent on giving the brothers some conflict,
especially between each other as a story line where they become mad at each other and then
come back together at the end due to them being brothers and all would have fit the
film quite well.
The cast is not bad though.
Most of them seem to be engaged in giving good performances and the characters do become
unique in their own right.
I do wish we had gotten more of the Valerie character as Danielson was quite the beauty.
I just wish they all had gotten some better material to work with.
The brainchild of Mortuary Academy must have been Paul Bartel.
He is both credited as a screenwriter and as mentioned, he plays the head of the academy
and is the star of the cast.
This film is made a few years after he made a name for himself on the 1982 crime comedy
Eating Raoul together with co-star Mary Woronov, who plays the horny teacher in this film.
His character gets way too much screen time in Mortuary Academy and I honestly did not
find him funny at all in this film.
Mortuary Academy is an 80's comedy with warts and all.
While I am sure some will find the goofyness that is going on here to be funny, this film
did not hit at all for me.
I hated the tasteless gags, I could not get into any of the characters due to the lack
of development that they got and just found Mortuary Academy to be a waste of my time.
Sorry if I upset any fans of this film, but my final verdict on Mortuary Academy is that
it is not worth watching.
I am only giving this a poor 1.5 out of 5.
Anyone else out there seen Mortuary Academy?
Did you like it more than I did?
Any 80's comedies hidden gems that you feel more people should check out?
Let me know about it in the comment section below.
If you liked this video and want to hear me talk about something similiar, but better,
then check out my review for Roland Emmerich's Hollywood Monster.
As always, like subscribe and that stuff is highly appreciated, thank you for watching
and hope to see you again next time on Cinema Terror.
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Mortuary Academy (1988) - Movie Review

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