The Mortuary Assistant

Word of warning: don’t watch this while having lunch. Or dinner. Or, simply put, while you’re eating! This decidedly oddball horror (based on the popular video game) boasts some truly-stomach churning moments set in a mortuary, even though the overall result won’t leave viewers craving for more.

Central character is a young woman named Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland) - a woman with a very troubled past (as we’re about to find out in flashback sequences) and a former addict, who, after one year of having joined Narcotics Anonymous meetings on a regular basis, got the all clear. She also got herself a night job as a mortuary assistant (as you do) at River Fields Mortuary, which is probably a good thing, as it prevents her from possible visits in various boozers and thus preventing her from a relapse. Then again, you can always get sozzled in front of the telly. 

The opening scene looks promising, with Rebecca preparing a female corpse for embalming (don’t watch this scene if you have an appointment booked with your dentist…) while everything is overseen by her new employer, a weird kinda chap (there’s a surprise) named Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks). Before finishing up and being told her training was successful, we see Rebecca dispatching the embalmed corpse into a cremator oven, which is even weirder, because why bother embalming a corpse which then gets shoved into the cremator… Well, it gets weirder still when the corpse inside the cremator, surrounded by flames, seems to move… 

No rest for the wicked because no sooner is Rebecca home, when her boss calls her back into the mortuary for a ‘special nightshift’ (she’s going to be on her own this time around) and her job is once again preparing the corpses for the cremator. But shock, horror! The corpses don’t seem quite dead, despite having been spliced and guts removed and what have you. Things soon get from bad to worse when she realises supernatural forces are at work and none of the corpses are quite dead. Oh, and did I mention that poor Rebecca is taken over by bizarre and violent hallucinations? Not only do these make her eyes yellowish (in that possessed by a demon-kind of way) but somehow, part of the hallucinations lead her back to a trauma involving her father and her younger self years earlier.

Somehow, Rebecca wakes up at home in her bedroom, when her sponsor cum shrink Kelly (Keena Ferguson Frasier) rings the doorbell, though Rebecca has no recollection of having called her. Nonetheless, just when Kelly makes progress calming the anxiously hysteric Rebecca down, she turns again and with her yellowish demonic eyes and seemingly supernatural strength attacks and kills Kelly with a corkscrew. Suddenly, the phone rings and it’s her employer Raymond, urging her to get back to the mortuary asap as it’s the only place where Rebecca is safe…and others are safe from her. Raymond says that he will explain more back in the mortuary, though he says this a few times during the course of the film without ever disclosing too much. Just as Rebecca has turned back again to normal and - to her terror - realises what she has done, the dead Kelly rises again behind her, but Rebecca manages to make it to the front door when, upon opening it, a doppelgänger-Kelly stands at the entrance. Who is the real Kelly, who’s the demonic Kelly?

Rebecca runs down the fire escape stairs and back into the mortuary, where Raymond explains that a demonic entity tries to possess her body and the corpses in the morgue are already possessed and ‘undead’. She will only survive if she’s able to guess the name of the demon and use special chemicals on the corpses, a so-called re-agent which is the blood from a woman which Raymond has locked away in an upright standing, wooden box in the storage room with a tiny ‘window’ for air. Of course, this should be the cue for the real mayhem to begin, alas, things never turn quite horrific enough, while the various hallucination sequences make everything more confusing rather than scary. 
Although Willa Holland and Paul Sparks deliver their parts satisfactory and the scenes in the mortuary will please fans of guts ’n’ gore, overall the film feels choppy and suffers from an inconsistent pace, for one, it takes a while for any action to kick in.

THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT (a Shudder original) has just been released on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital, with a ‘Behind the Scenes’ featurette as Bonus.