Hooper's last film, the distinctly average Toolbox Murders was a slight dissapointment to all those who still believe that the director of the legendary Texas Chainsaw Massacre has greatness left to give. In contrast to this muddles piece of work however, The Toolbox Murders looks a hell of a lot better.

The fatal flaw here is that this film just tries to be too many things at once. It is at turns a psycho/slasher movie, a black horror comedy, a serious Lovecraft adaptation/homage, a zombie flick and a teen drama. Hooper is just not an accomplished enough director to be able to pull this off.

This film uses elements from Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space as well as a couple of other references scattered here and there like the line of poetry carved on the tomb door - "That is not dead which can eternal lie/ and with strange aeons even death may die". Lovecraft is a challenge enough to put on the big screen and has rarely been done well and Mortuary isn't the film to break that trend I'm sorry to say.

Mortuary spends much of the first half setting itself up as a stalker/slasher movie. The single parent family who take centre stage move into a disused mortuary in the little town of Arkham (more Lovecraft there) intent on getting it running again as a buisness. It soon comes out through a piece of amusingly blatant exposition (the character who tells the story might as well turn to camera and say, "time for the backstory folks!") that the mortuary used to belong to a family of morticians who had a deformed son who is thought to have killed his family and still be at large wandering the graveyard at night. This idea is mantained for a little while with various threatening things happening to establish the prescence of the guy. Then the film reaches its halfway point.

Suddenly the weirdy graveyard fella is almost completely forgotten in favour of some black weed which is creeping all over the mortuary. This is then discarded in favour of some lame zombie action (well to be fair the weed is what reanimates the corpses). Then everybody runs around for a bit screaming until the film ends.

It is difficult to work out what Tobe Hooper was attempting to achieve with this film. It is damagingly flawed and confused. Barring one small scene there is not even any gore or violence in this movie, not neccessarily a bad thing by any means but in a film which seems to demmand it such as this it seems like another very surprising and unwise mis-step by the director.

The film is partially redeemed by a few strong performances and unusual characters. The town is populated by some endearingly quirky people and it is just a shame that these characters don't get to spend more time with us.

Mortuary looks cheap, makes little sense and has a slight multiple personality syndrome but it does gain marks for its attempt to bring Lovecraft to the screen and for not simply trotting out the same tired horror cliches.

Rating: 6/10

Review By Matt Compton