Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jeremiah Kipp
Starring: Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, John Adams, Keena Ferguson Frasier
After decades of failures, video game adaptations are suddenly a hit at the box office, with screen translations of such heavy hitters as Super Mario Bros, Sonic the Hedgehog and Minecraft among the biggest earners of recent years. Just as there are cult movies, there are cult video games. Take The Mortuary Assistant, in which the player takes on the icky job of the title and attempts to finish their night shift at a morgue while evading demons. With another cult horror game, Five Nights at Freddy's, spawning two hit movies, it's no surprise that The Mortuary Assistant has now received a cinematic adaptation.
This one is directed by Jeremiah Kipp, who made the interesting coming-of-age horror Slapface a few years back, and is co-written by Tracee Beebe and the game's creator Brian Clarke. I'm not sure involving the creators of these games in the creative process of translating their work to the screen is a wise idea. The Five Nights at Freddy's movies were co-written by their creator, and they suffer with an obsession over fealty to the source rather than creating onscreen thrills. The Mortuary Assistant has the same issues. After setting up what seems like a simple b-movie horror premise, it becomes bogged down in establishing and expanding the lore of the game rather than fashioning suspense and scares.
The opening act has much promise. Rebecca (Willa Holland) has kicked her drug and alcohol addiction and just completed an internship at a city morgue. Her sullen boss Raymond (Paul Sparks) has promoted Rebecca to the role of his assistant. She will work the day shift while he covers nights. On her first night off however, Rebecca receives a call from Paul, who is unable to take the night shift. Three corpses have just arrived, and he gives Rebecca the odd instruction to embalm the bodies before immediately cremating them.
For its first half hour or so, The Mortuary Assistant leans into the simplicity of generating creepy atmosphere from its setting and Rebecca's unenviable job. There are gruesome close-ups of Rebecca's handy work, which she performs with the chipper attitude of a 1950s suburban housewife preparing a pot roast. It might make us wince seeing intestines crammed into crevices and wounds stitched up, but it's just another night at the office for Rebecca. Except this is no normal night. What Rebecca fails to realise is that a demon is using corpses as a way to escape into our world, and it has Rebecca in mind for its next vessel.
Kipp does a good job of using the widescreen frame to allow the audience to see corpses opening their eyes and moving their fingers in the foreground while Rebecca potters about obliviously in the background, or vice versa. Giving the audience a heads up that the protagonist isn't aware of is how suspense is generated, but that tension dissipates once the plot begins to unravel. The movie begins to adopt the structure of a video game rather than a movie, pausing for what are the equivalent of instructional cut scenes as creepy Raymond reappears to dish out confusing exposition in the manner of a dungeon master. This kills the momentum, and with most of the horror set-pieces revealing themselves as hallucinations on the part of Rebecca, the stakes are lessened as we inevitably start to assume Rebecca is simply going to wake up from her latest nightmare.
Holland does her best with a role that requires her to look as confused as the audience feels. Like Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead 2, Holland is essentially playing two versions of her character, the regular Rebecca and the possessed version. She's convincing in both roles, but the movie could have benefitted from the comic approach of Raimi's classic. The Mortuary Assistant plays its narrative deadly serious, and it's the latest American horror to burden itself with a subplot concerning the dreaded T-word - "Trauma" - with the demon exploiting Rebecca's fraught past. It's simply not well-written enough to pull off such weighty themes, and ultimately this is a night shift that will have the audience yawning by the time the sun rises.
The Mortuary Assistant is on Shudder from March 27th.
