Mortuary Academy

MORTUARY ACADEMY is another wacky movie starring the irrepressible duo of Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel. Their running the titular establishment, while Bartel's character attempts a love affair with an overripe cadaver.

Meanwhile, two new enrollees stand to inherit the academy if they graduate. Bartel and Woronov do whatever they can to stop this from happening.

This is a humorous look at the funereal arts with heavy doses of goofy dialogue and zany characters. If you enjoy deceased, robotically resurrected rock bands, and aren't offended by the lighter side of necrophilia, then this movie will set in on you like rigor mortis. In a good way...

Ripping off the Police Academy movies, Mortuary Academy is about a pair of witless brothers named Grimm who inherit from their uncle both a large funeral home and a training school for morticians. I wasn't crazy about The Loved One which is always cited as THE film about the funeral business but it's Citizen Kane next to this one.

Christopher Atkins and Perry Lang are the brothers who inherit, but they're not licensed morticians and those pesky state laws require a license and a bit of training. So the brothers have to go to their own school where the current ones running the home want to see them fail.

That would be Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov who like things as they are where they are looting the business and pushing it to bankruptcy. Bartel also has a nice taste for necrophilia and his scenes cross over into the gross as he thinks he found the woman of his dreams, a teen virgin who died accidentally. Cross over quite a distance I might add.

I'm not sure Police Academy movie fans will even like this one.

One thing I never thought I'd see was Paul Bartel having passionate sex with a corpse. Thanks to this film, that which I thought impossible has become reality and I don't think I'll ever be able to close my eyes again without seeing the sight of a topless pot-bellied Bartel atop a beautiful dead teenage girl on the beach with his lips locked onto hers.

Believe me when I tell you that this sounds funnier than it really was. This movie is one long, tasteless, and painfully unfunny necrophilia joke. However, there are some sporadically amusing moments

A great cast is mostly wasted. Perry Lang continues (after The Hearse) his lustful pursuit of older women, only this time with more success, while Christopher Atkins tries hard and fails to fully explain why he's even in this movie. Caesar Romero and Wolfman Jack are here to collect a paycheck. Tracy Walter, Mary Waronov, and the rest do try hard.

The best performance is that of Stoney Jackson as the token black guy, who manages to be the funniest thing in this movie despite his lamentable rapping skills.

I'll give Mortuary Academy some credit though. I didn't hate it and it has perhaps the strangest Bar Mitzvah scene ever attempted in a motion picture.

This is pretty much the standard "boys are forced to attend school, school is in danger due to closing due to malicious incompetence, band saves the school" story. The acting is sub-par to serviceable, the comedy is debatable, and the special effects are just above what you would expect from a college freshmen project. Worse, the story seems to be written as they went and the dialogue rarely gets above forgettable.

It feels like they wanted to make a sex comedy centering on necrophilia, but they forgot most of the sex and all of the comedy. The only reason this movie is rated "R" is because of one scene; the rest is aggressively vanilla.

Just forget this movie; only if you're a fan of certain actors will it hold any interest. It's not even good as a movie you'd get drunk and make fun of it.

My review was written in May 1988 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.

"Mortuary Academy" is a genuinely amusing feature, getting a lot of laughs from black humor involving necrophilia. Specialized nature of this poor taste material naturally will limit audience saturation, but pic works very well on its own terms.

The "Eating Raoul" acting team of Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov adapts quite comfortably to similar roles as the manage and top lecturer at Grimm Mortuary and Academy, which has just been inherited by brothers Sam and Max Grimm (Perry Lang, Christopher Atkins) on the condition they graduate as morticians.

Rambunctious group of oddball students gets up to antics that would do the "Carry On" team proud, climaxing in the mechanical whiz in their midst (deadpan Tracey Walker) reanimating a dead heavy metal band to perform one last gig with the aid of animatronics, and thereby earn enough money to save the academy, which Bartel has bled dry.

Hilarious running gag has Bartel falling in love with a young cheerleader who choked on popcorn at a drive-in movie (corpse played by Cheryl Starbuck). This love affair goes far beyond the reaches of bad taste, but is a hoot, climaxing with an indescribable scene of the students using Tracey's mechanics to blackmail Bartel as he makes love to Starbuck. Coda has Bartel and his corpse honeymooning on a cruise ship with grotesque results and a tagline homage to "Some Like It Hot".

Aided by a very funny romantic score by David Spear, director Michael Schroede and writer William Kelman deliver fresh, uncensored material. Pacing is just right and Bartel's unctuous delivery (a la Vincent Price) hits just the right note of campiness without exaggeration.

Woronov's arch delivery again is the perfect foil for Bartel, supported by a solid ensemble. Of special note is the familiar saturnine-faced Anthony James, getting maximum laughs out of some of the script's best lines in his role as a parolee on a rehab program at the academy.