The short story that kicks things off (set in the 1950s) is about a woman (Christine Kilmer) at a party who can’t help but steal from some of the guests and even take a peek inside her host’s medicine cabinet, which leads to something truly unexpected and horrific. Most of the people Dark talks about committed some level of offense, with the implication being that they deserved to die. Less an anthology than a collection of bloody morality tales, there’s a definite Poe vibe going through some of these stories. This kicks off a series of stories, each one set in a different decade, told in an effort to impress Sam, who asks Dark to share with her some of the more extreme death tales. She notices a large collection of books in the spacious structure, and he reveals that they are filled with the stories of every dead person who has come to his funeral home-not only the story of how they died but also why. Shortly after the event is concluded, a young woman named Sam (Caitlin Fisher) shows up at the door seeking work (there’s a sign in the window), and she seems interesting enough to intrigue Dark. On this particular day, he’s overseeing the funeral of an unfortunate child, which makes the proceedings more melancholy than creepy, but give it time. There’s a spooky house on a hill, a place where the kids dare each other to go, but as it turns out, it’s spooky for a reason: it’s a funeral home-Raven’s End Mortuary-run by a deep-throated, ancient-looking mortician named Montgomery Dark (the distressed scenery-chewing Clancy Brown). The Mortuary Collection is writer-director Ryan Spindell’s first feature, and he sets things up and knocks them down with mixed results as far as the individual pieces go, but quite satisfyingly overall. They aren’t usually the cream of the crop or especially thought-provoking, but they have two or three elements that simply satisfy the needs of the moment-in this case, that moment is the couple of weeks leading up to Halloween. There are certain scary films whose only objective is to get the job done.
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