Funeral Home

An effectively spooky low-budget thriller that takes more inspiration from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) rather than Carpenter's Halloween (1978), as so many horror films from this era did.

A girl goes to help her grandmother with her new boarding house, a former funeral parlor, and begins to uncover sinister things as the guests start vanishing.

Solid direction uplifts this tight thriller, whose storyline is ultimately not very surprising. A few well-drawn characters do help to keep the story interesting. The rustic filming locations help to add to a chilling summer atmosphere and an air of mystery that works well to the films advantage. The re-occurring images of the black cat are a nice touch. The film is fairly subtle in its horrors, and probably comes off more compelling (and classy) because of it. In short, it's simple but good.

The cast is a strong point. Kay Hawtry is a stand-out as the grandmother, Lesleh Donaldson is fetching as our young female, and Dean Garbett is good as Donaldson's summer love.

All around, Funeral Home is a film that serves well as a thriller. It's not especially brilliant, but it does make for good entertainment.

*** out of ****

Also known as Cries In The Night, this little seen Canadian horror film directed by William Fruet arrived at the height of the slasher movie boom. It has a plot that may seem very familiar (especially if you've seen a certain Alfred Hitchcock film), but offers little to satisfy any perspective gorehounds sniffing around drawn in by the macabre set up. A teenage girl goes to stay with her grandmother at the small hotel she runs, which just so happened to once be a funeral parlour. When the guests start disappearing young Heather (Lesleh Donaldson) starts to investigate, and gets a nasty surprise when she looks in the basement. It's obscure but unspectacular stuff, and kind of disappeared from view after the initial home video boom of the early 80's before resurfacing on DVD years later much to the delight of completists.

Exceptional in all departments for a cheaply constructed horror film, FUNERAL HOME is the creepy little tale of a young girl relocating to a provincial town in order to assist her grandmother in converting the family funeral home business into a modest bed-and-breakfast retreat. When people begin to mysteriously disappear, a history of bizarre family secrets is gradually revealed in a suspenseful mystery which spires toward a bizarre and thoroughly satisfying conclusion.

A surprisingly adept parsimonious undertaking, FUNERAL HOME is an atmospheric chiller with primary characters which are believably written and energetically dramatized...a largely uncharted item demonstrative of what talented hands can craft with limited resources.

Worthwhile and recommended. 6.5/10

I'll give "Funeral Home" a little extra credit, since it was directed by William Fruet, who also gave us the decent revenge pic "Death Weekend." The plot has a young girl returning to her grandparents' home, the former funeral parlor now converted into a bed and breakfast by the grandmother; but who is grandma talking to in the basement every night, and who is bumping off the sinful heathens who stop and stay at the B&B? The typical genre stereotypes are present: Goofy Young Deputy, Mentally Challenged Gardener, Puritanical Parental Figure, and the Sweetly Innocent Girl. The plot itself echoes "Psycho" in more ways than one, but with a fraction of the budget and considerably less talent. The actors are fairly good for this type of low-rent affair, and there are a few cheesily-integrated, yet atmospherically effective flashback scenes, but "Funeral Home" is simply a forgettable affair.

Every now and then, you want to watch a movie that's just cozy and won't make you think too hard, scare you too much, or leave you too disturbed. One days like that, Funeral Home would make a nice movie companion. It never goes anywhere too dark, there's not any blood or gore to speak off, and it moves along at a reasonable pace, leaving you mostly unmoved, but not feeling like you wasted your time either.

Heather moves in with her quirky grandmother to turn their old funeral parlor into a boarding house and, as soon as the guests arrive, they start disappearing or dying under mysterious circumstances.

Any horror or mystery fan won't find the central mystery of Funeral Home too tough to crack, but that's part of the charm. Sometimes, it's just nice to see a familiar story well told.