Talk about having a bad day: in the opening scene for The Undertaker, a woman gets a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere, but hasn't got a spare; a biker stops and offers to take her to a gas station, but instead tries to rape her; she runs away and flags down a car, asking the driver to take her to town, only her 'saviour' is none other than 'maniac' Joe Spinell as deranged mortician Roscoe. Next time we see the woman, she's on Roscoe's slab, throat cut, having her dead boobs fondled. How's about that then, guys and gals?
This exploitative intro perfectly sets the tone for the whole film, which delivers loads of female nudity (all the young women get their tops off at some point), some reasonably gory kills, and a sublimely scuzzy performance from Spinell as yet another greaseball lunatic, all shot in glorious sleaze-o-rama (voyeuristic POV shots, heavy breathing, grainy photography and lots of sweat).
Out to expose the psycho mortician is his nephew Nick (Patrick Askin), who goes to his college anthropology teacher Pam Hayes (Rebecca Varon) for help, asking her to come to the funeral home so that he can show her evidence of his uncle's crimes. Nick is unable to find Roscoe's polaroid collection of his victims, and so Pam remains unconvinced. But when Roscoe gets wind of their snooping, he adds them to his kill list - is that enough to convince you, Ms. Hayes?
While the psycho-killer plot is nothing to write home about, this one scores points for the following: Pam's lecture on necrophilia (luckily, no slide show), the naked chick tied to a tree and sliced open by a whimpering Roscoe, Roscoe pressing a girl's face onto her hot frying pan, Pam's shower scene, the revelation that Roscoe ejaculates over his victim's intestines, Pam's bff Mandy (Susan Bachli) naked in bed, a juicy 'knife in the eye' kill, a receipt spike through the neck, Mandy (in her underwear) being decapitated, a 'machete in the head' gag, the downbeat 'no-one gets out alive' attitude, and for giving Spinell his own catchphrase: 'You moron!'.
6.5/10, which I'll round up to 7 despite the very dumb closing shot in which one of Roscoe's victims, whose body has been hanging in the mortuary cellar for days, turns out to be still alive.
N.B. There are two versions of this film available: the Code Red cut is missing the gore and is padded out with footage from public domain movies; the Vinegar Syndrome release has got all of the gore and none of the padding (this is the version I saw).
