'The Mortuary Collection' (2020)

I think my Shudder subscription might finally be starting to pay for itself... :o) I've been trying to watch a little more horror than usual, since I started this blog (almost a year ago now...) Not only that but I've been trying to watch different stuff instead of my usual favourites that I keep going back to. Not that they won't all be featured here at some point but, you know... it's always good to try different stuff every now and then. I've had a lot of good luck with 'horror anthology films' (is that what you call them? Well, that's what I'm going to call them) in the last few years and the 'Creepshow' series, that I watched a couple of months ago, ended up being really good as well. With that in mind, when I saw adverts for 'The Mortuary Collection', I knew that I had to give it a go. And I'm glad that I did. I was a little dubious when I saw the run time was just under two hours (there's not enough time, these days, to watch a two hour film) but 'The Mortuary Collection' ended up being a lot of fun and chilling at the same time...

'The world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories...'

In the town of Raven's End, everyone has a story to tell, mostly after they've died... Mortician Montgomery Dark is looking for help and takes a potential new hire around the mortuary, telling her stories of the people who have died in Raven's End. The living have their own stories to tell though and the best story will be the last one told...

Now I wasn’t expecting loads from this movie. The rule of thumb for ‘horror anthology movies’ seems to be that you get a couple of good stories, a half decent one and a poor one; it’s the law of averages (I think that’s what it’s called), not everyone is going to like everything, that’s just the way it goes. I was more than pleasantly surprised then to see that not only did every story hit the mark, for me, but so did the framing narrative (not as well, admittedly, but it still more than did the job). ‘The Mortuary Collection’ was a two hour film but it didn’t feel like one as it was so easy to get into the stories and follow them through to their chilling endings.

I won’t go too much into each story as to be honest, I want you to watch them if you can. There is a theme running through them, namely that your sins will always find you out, and it was interesting to see this theme gradually built upon over the course of the stories. The first story is a short one, very succinctly told and all the more effective for it. Don’t do bad things or bad things will happen to you. I liked the random weirdness of this one. There’s no explanation for it, it just is what it is. It’s a great hook to get you into the film. As the stories move on, the theme stays the same but the plots get more involved with just the right balance of gore and suspense. You’ll feel for one protagonist, laugh and wince as another gets what they deserve and tell yourself that you really should have seen that coming, but didn’t and it all makes a lot of sense now… You’ll also realise that Montgomery Dark isn’t just telling these stories for the hell of it, he’s actually trying to give someone a chance to understand them and make the right decision before it’s too late. And wow… talk about hiding stuff in plain sight…  There is a lot going on and it’s all shot beautifully (especially the ending of the third story, it was horribly grim but looked absolutely lovely).

I’ve got about a million things that I really need to get done for work so this is going to be a shorter post than normal, sorry about that but I do need to keep my job though… ;o) What I will say though is that if you like horror movies, ‘horror anthology’ movies or just movies with a bit of a twist then you really need to be watching ‘The Mortuary Collection’ sooner rather than later. It had everything I was looking for which means that it has to have at least one thing you’re looking for (and it’s all handled superbly). Seriously, go and watch it.