Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers

My review was written in January 1990 after watching the film on a Shapiro Glickenhaus video cassette A meager attempt at black humor, "Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers" makes little use of its title locale in spoofing "Burke & Hare" antics. Pic briefly played in Phoenix last September ahead of home video.

Jo Mostow's pic actually is more a mafia spoof than fantasy film, giving it an archaic early-'70s feel. Vic Tayback plays a funeral home owner assisted by mad scientist Frank Gorshin who has young kids imposed on him as workers by mobster Art Metrano. They're Rodney Eastman and Warren Selko, Metrano's nephews, who use the grim workplace to throw ghoulish parties for their friends.

Plot sickens when the current mafia don, Seth Jaffe, is killed on a golf course and Gorshin foolishly re-animates the corpse in one of his experiments. It escapes and unfunny mayhem ensues.

Lack of solid laughs is a big defect (e.g., an oriental mobster played by Keone Young is named "Don Ho") and pic does nothing interesting with its zombies subplot. Cast becomes increasingly agitated to ill effect. Even Gorshi, who one would expect to do an impression (Colin Clive, maybe?), simply walks through this one.

Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers takes place at a Beverly Hills mortuary where a scientist and I suppose, a mortician, have teamed up to experiment on bringing corpses back to life. But, the experiment was funded by a loan from a local mob boss who is breathing down the second-in-command's (Vic) neck to get their loan fully repaid. But Vic's got other plans and instead, tries to buy his time by forcing his two idiot (but not totally braindead) surfer nephews to work at the mortuary and keep an eye on his debtors. But actually, they work against their uncle, promised a cut in on the expected corpse-reviving scheme that the mortician and scientist say will make them rich. Needless to say, things do not go as planned.

This movie was, for the most part, a disappointing comedy. I suppose by the animated cover art, I was expecting some stupid humor, but the film actually fails to offer many laughs, despite the potential in the story. Even the moments with the corpses running around unsupervised weren't funny. With the filmmakers having failed to take advantage of a rather idiotic series of events, it is mediocre at best.