Leslie Doyle (Denise Crosby), a widow and recent mortuary school graduate and her two children, teen Jonathan (Dan Boyd) and 10-year old Jamie (Stephanie Patton), move to a small town. Leslie wants to start on a new career, and start a new life for them all.
The family pulls up to the dilapidated former Fowler Brothers Mortuary. A cemetery stands directly across from it. A cheesy real estate agent welcomes Leslie and her children. He tells Leslie because she has chosen a lease-to-buy option, she must pay for all the repairs, including the recently backed-up septic tank. Leslie doesn’t seem phased by this, and is excited to move in.
Inside the house, Jonathan wanders upstairs and into a room with bars on the windows. He sees the name BOBBY F carved into a piece of wood in the room. He runs his fingers over the carving, wondering who Bobby F could have been. Leslie comes to check on Jonathan and he asks if he can have the room as his bedroom. She tells him yes. Jonathan asks Leslie, “How are you going to do this?” Leslie just smiles and tells him everything will be all right. Jonathan begins joking with her about changing the name of the mortuary. “How about ‘Death for Less’?” He asks. Leslie rolls her eyes and starts out of the room. “What about ‘Discount Death Mart’?” he says after her. He’s obviously concerned about how Leslie is going to turn the mortuary around and make it profitable.
Leslie goes into the basement to start putting away her mortuary tools. She finds several canisters of salt, which she thinks was used to make ice cream, as she finds an old-fashioned ice cream maker in the basement. She also sees a set of keys in a broken glass measuring cup. She reaches into the glass to take out the keys. Even though she tries to be careful, she cuts her hand on the glass. Two drops of Leslie’s blood fall to the ground as she goes to get a bandage. She doesn’t see two black, snaky tendrils reach up from the drain in the floor of the mortuary creep up and absorb the blood.
Jonathan decides to explore the cemetery alone that night. He thinks he sees someone following him, so he runs toward the house. He trips and falls; in front of him in the dirt he sees a necklace. He picks it up and brings it to Leslie. Jamie sees it and likes it, so Leslie gives it to her.
While exploring the house, Leslie finds a small metal door near the floor in the hall. She opens the door and finds the space behind it is full of dust or ashes. She also finds one of the keys she found was strangely shaped, and unlocked a door in the back of a mausoleum in the cemetery. Before she could explore it further, the town’s sheriff came to check on her.
Jonathan gets a job at the local diner and is instantly smitten with diner owner Rita’s (Lee Garlington) niece, Liz (Alexandra Adi). Local teens Cal (Bug Hall), Sara (Tarah Paige) and Tina (Courtney Peldon) see Jonathan in the diner call him “Cemetery Boy.” Cal asks if he’s seen Bobby Fowler yet. Jonathan and Cal get into a fight. Rita breaks it up and tells Cal and his friends to leave.
Liz and her friend Grady (Rocky Marquette) tell Jonathan the story of the Fowlers. It was said that a man named Zeb Fowler moved to the small town many years ago. Nothing would grow in the fields he planted and his cattle began to die. He finally gave up farming and became an undertaker. Every member of the Fowler family since then was also an undertaker, except for Bobby, the last in the Fowler family line. It was said that Bobby was deformed and was abused by his parents. People thought Bobby’s parents killed him in 1962. But 10 years later, Bobby’s parents were found murdered. Since then the townspeople said that Bobby survived, living in a tomb in the cemetery, only coming out at night and wearing a burial shroud over his face. Even if he doesn’t believe the story, Jonathan realizes the Bobby F carved in his room is for Bobby Fowler.
Cal, Tina and Sara go into the cemetery at night. They use spray paint to desecrate some of the monuments. Drunk, they stumble into the mausoleum, where they enter the door Leslie didn’t get to open. Inside they find a room with some furniture and a casket. While messing around in the room the lid of the casket blows off and a menacing figure terrifies them.
Rita the diner owner tells Liz and Jonathan that Bobby Fowler is still alive. She said she’s seen him scrounging through dumpsters late at night. Liz and Jonathan don’t listen to Rita, and walk over to the mortuary with Grady. Leslie runs out the door, excited to tell Jonathan she has some bodies to embalm. Liz says she wants to see a body. Leslie is hesitant at first, but the agrees. When she shows them one of the bodies under a sheet, Liz freaks out because the dead man is her piano teacher. Grady and Jonathan take Liz upstairs to Jonathan’s room where they share a joint.
Leslie continues with her embalming, but being new, makes a mistake and blood begins to spill from the body into the drain. The snaky black tendrils reach up again and consume the blood.
Sheriff Howell (Michael Shamus Wiles) interrupts Leslie’s work by ringing the door bell. When she answers the door the sheriff says he needs to talk to Jonathan. He asks Jonathan if he’s seen the three teens from the diner. Jonathan says no, and the sheriff acts suspiciously toward him since Jonathan and the boy got into a fistfight. When he realizes Jonathan doesn’t know anything, he goes into the cemetery and sees the spray paint on the graves. He finds an empty spray can near the mausoleum. When he goes into the mausoleum, he is attacked by an unseen figure.
Jamie screams and Leslie and Jonathan run into the house. She tells them there was a man in her closet. They try to calm Jamie down. She says the man took her necklace that Jonathan found in the cemetery. Jonathan looks in the closet and finds a piece of cloth. He asks Jamie if it’s one of her costumes and she says no, that the man in her closet was wearing it over his face.
Back at the diner, Liz and Jonathan start a romance. When they share their first kiss they’re interruped by Cal and Tina. Cal and Tina look horrible and Tina begins vomiting a black liquid. Before the sheriff can arrive the teens leave as if nothing had happened.
The creepy real estate agent brings Leslie more bodies from a crash that happened on the interstate. She only has two tables in the embalming room, so she puts the bodies into the caskets in the casket showroom until she can get to them. How she could have done this I don’t know. The bodies would have begun to decompose and smell horrible. That’s why corpses are generally kept in refrigerators, but I didn’t see anything like that in the movie. Weird. As Leslie begins to work on the bodies on her tables, they suddenly jump up and start attacking her. One of them spits black liquid into her mouth.
Some time later, the kids are walking up to the mortuary, and Leslie tells them to come in for dinner. They all take seats in the kitchen, which is suddenly covered in the black, creepy tendrils that were seen in the basement. Leslie is acting very strange and dishes up the kids a nasty black soup. When Leslie yells at Jamie, Jamie gets scared. Leslie starts vomiting up black liquid and the kids all run out of the house and into the cemetery. They run into the mortuary and lock themselves in the mausoleum.
Walking into the door in the back of the mausoleum, they see the furniture and casket Cal, Tina and Sara. “Rita was right. He lives here. Bobby Fowler lives here!” says Liz, horrified. Leslie bursts into the mausoleum. The kids run through tunnels beneath the cemetery, trying to find a way out. They find Sara, hysterical. “Bobby works for it, he feeds it!” Sara tells them. The kids all run through the tunnels. Before they can get out Grady gets killed by the corpse of the dead piano teacher. Jonathan, Liz and Jamie run until they find a ladder, which ends up coming out through the small metal door Leslie found earlier. Suddenly Leslie is right behind them so the kids all run into the kitchen. Sara ends up being “infected” by one of the corpses that went after Leslie.
Jonathan, Liz and Jamie run through the casket room and find that the dead bodies from the car accident have turned into zombies and go after them. They run upstairs and Jonathan locks Jamie in her room, promising to come back for her. But Bobby Fowler (Price Carson) kidnaps Jamie and takes her back into the tunnels under the cemetery.
Liz finds out by accident that the creeps can be killed by salt. Which explains why there was so much salt in the embalming room. They grab as much salt as they can and take off to find Jamie.
In the tunnels, Jamie tries to keep herself from being killed by Bobby by giving him some red licorice. Bobby gets very excited as he collected all of the red licorice Jamie left on the gravestones the day before, telling her mother “They might get hungry.” I’m assuming she means the ghosts in the cemetery or something. Jamie escapes Bobby, but before Jonathan and Liz can rescue her, Bobby tries to throw Jamie into a pit filled with fangs. It kind of looked like the sand monster from “Star Wars” that Jabba the Hut tried to throw Luke Skywalker in. But Bobby releases Jamie and gets pulled into the fang pit himself. Liz throws a whole bag of salt into the pit and it explodes.
The kids run back through the tunnels, up the ladder and out the metal door. They run out of the house and collapse onto the grass in front of the house.
But the story isn’t over.
I’ll leave it at that, in case you ever want to waste 2 hours like I did.
“Mortuary” (2005)
Dan Byrd: Jonathan Doyle (most recently in “Aliens in America”)
Denise Crosby: Leslie Doyle (Lt. Tasha Yar in “Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Stephanie Patton: Jamie Doyle
Alexandra Adi: Liz
Rocky Marquette: Grady
Courtney Peldon: Tina
Bug Hall: Cal
Tarah Paige: Sara
Michael Shamus Wiles: Sheriff Howell
Price Carson: Bobby Fowler
Lee Garlington: Rita (most recently in “Medium” and “The Riches”)
Thanks to IMDb for additional information.
I’m so sorry Denise Crosby was in this. She was awesome as Lt. Yar.
Stinky Cheese Rating System: 10 Stinky Cheeses.
Denise Crosby as Leslie Doyle in “Mortuary.”
David Byrd plays Jonathan Doyle.
Stephanie Patton as Jamie Doyle in a scene from ”Mortuary.”
