The Man Hole: December 2023

Sunday, December 24, 2023

Sometime around noon on December 24th ...

From all of us to all of you, we wish that whatever you celebrate; even if it's only the coming of winter, that there is some magic mixed in with the love and beauty of the season. A happy and a merry to all.

And if you happen to be celebrating Christmas, Yule, Kwanzaa, or Hanukkah, we hope that your holiday season is everything you hoped for and that it is

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

The Mortuary Collection 2019

Since it's the middle of December, I felt that it was the perfect time to give a film review. No, not a Christmas film, silly, I usually do those in October. What we have today is a film titled The Mortuary Collection. An anthology horror film (which you should know by now is one of my favorite type of films) directed and written by Ryan Spindell. Starring is Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption, Pet Sematary 2 and LOST) as Montgomery Dark. Dark is a mysterious mortician with questionable purpose who tells four stories about people who have passed through the doors of his funeral parlor.

Dark tells these stories to a girl who shows up at the mortuary claiming to be looking for a job. The first story is sort of average and it concerns a woman who uses the bathroom while she is at a party. She does what a lot of people would do: she looks into the medicine cabinet. What she finds in there she would never have expected, ever. The next story, which was a step up from the first one, is about Jake, a frat boy who, meets a girl named Sandra. He gets her into bed and in the middle of having sex with her he removes his condom. The result is that ages old story of an unwanted pregnancy. Only, it's not Sandra who is pregnant, but rather Jake is the one who is with child. Exactly how did this happen and when the baby wants out, just how is that supposed to happen? Some really good gory effects in this one.

The next story is a step back in quality and it features a husband taking care of his catatonic wife. Everything he does is centered on taking care of her and he feels trapped and depressed as he sees life passing him by and he is just a spectator. One day his doctor suggests he just kill his wife with an overdose of pain medication. He takes the doctors suggestion to heart and things do disastrously wrong. As I said, very average. Back at the mortuary, Sam, the girl, tells Dark, she is really not there for a job. She is there for the dead child who Dark is about to cremate. She also informs him that she is not impressed with his stories. Sam then decides to tell him a story.

The story she tells is about herself while she is babysitting a boy named Logan. While she cooks dinner she watched a horror movie on TV but misses the bulletin concerning a mental patient who has escaped from a local asylum. Soon after Sam finds a strange man in the house and the two begin to fight as the man tries to get to Logan. He swears he is not the escaped patient but that doesn't stop Sam from killing him. This all would be bad enough, however, Sam's story isn't quite over.

This all leads to the ending of the wrap around story which really might be the best part of the movie. Not sure what that says about the rest of the film but I will say for a horror anthology this is pretty average but the one thing it has is atmosphere. The film just feels creepy. Brown seems to be born to play the part of Montgomery Dark. Playing Sam is Caitlin Carter (Cinema Verite) who does a decent enough of a job and then goes even further with an over the top ending to her story. Overall, I could see people giving this a higher rating than I will be giving it, it all depends on if it checks your boxes or not. As it is I will give this three bottles of embalming fluid out of five.