#37 - The Mortuary Collection (2020)
(dir. Ryan Spindell)
A young woman responds to a "help wanted" sign outside a creepy old funeral home, and during the interview the mortician tells her stories about how various past, uh, "patrons" met their grisly ends. A thief finds something terrible when breaking in to a medicine cabinet; a college student who refuses to wear a condom faces some unexpected consequences; a man who puts his comatose wife out of her misery comes to regret it... This is an anthology film in the vein of Tales From the Crypt or Creepshow, and each segment follows a familiar format - someone commits some kind of transgression and pays the price for it - but there are some twists on the formula and it often goes much farther than you might expect in terms of blood and gore.
I really enjoyed the look of the film. The funeral home in particular has a very classic EC Comics feel to it. The time period of both the framing story and the various segments is left intentionally vague, but the clothing style and technology is generally late 20th-century. I think this was a really good choice, because the result is a sort of timeless feel and I think this movie will age well. If you look back at the classic Amicus horror anthologies (e.g. The Vault of Horror and the aforementioned Tales From the Crypt) they look dated as hell.
That's not to say this is on the same level as those classics, but I did enjoy it a lot. Clancy Brown is really fun as the creepy old mortician. Actors must love anthology "host" roles like this, where they get to overact and generally chew the hell out of the scenery - Brown brings to mind Clarence Williams III in Tales From the Hood especially.
This is a very good anthology, and while I don't think it will be remembered as an all-time great or anything, it's solid enough and has such a classic feel that I think it's a film that will have some staying power. It's definitely the closest thing we have to a 21st-century Tales From the Crypt. Recommended!
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