The Worst Film Ever

the audience applauded

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Oh Canada.Your horror movies are so strange, so unlike anywhere else, as you remain such a polite country, our neighbor to the north. What strange horrors have you brought to me today? Oh look - it's 1980's Funeral Home, otherwise known by the much better title Cries in the Night.Heather (Lesleh Donaldson, Curtains, Happy Birthday to Me) is spending the summer in a small town with her grandmother, who has turned her home, which was once a funeral home, into a quaint inn. Her husband's been missing for several years, so she also makes ends meet by selling artificial flowers. She even has her own handyman, Billy, who is mentally challenged.The only problem is that when people check in, they end up missing. Like that unmarried adulterous couple. And that real estate developer. And when Heather comes home at night, she hears her grandmother talk to someone who isn't there.Well, it seems like Heather's grandfather was having an affair with Helena Davis, which her grandmother denies to everyone, including Helena's husband (Barry Morse, the Inspector from TV's original The Fugitive) - who is soon murdered with a pickaxe.Heather and her boyfriend Rick start investigating, finally finding the corpse of her grandfather. Now, Maude speaks with his voice and comes after them with an axe. Luckily, the police arrive just in time.As the credits roll, the cops explain all of it to us. It's such a weird ending, with an overly long explanation fighting for screen time with the names of the gaffers.This movie just felt like a slog. I continually kept checking to see how much more time was left. I hate when movies make me do that.

I by passed this film numerous times on Amazon Prime and finally, with nothing else to watch, decided to take a chance. AP's copy was dark and degraded and had a weird bubble 3D thing going on at times, but I'm sure it was the best of what it could be for the age and manner filmed.Made for HARD on the eyes watching, though. I'm sure most of the scares were lost on how dark everything was. There was a movie I saw a long time ago and I remember it had Yvonne DeCarlo in it...probably one of the last things she did. She and her husband seemed like everyday old folk but were an early version of the Devil's Rejects family.This movie reminded me of that.Not bad. Worth a watch. I just hope the copy you see is better than the one I watched.

This not esp. novel or compelling horror flick has its teenage heroine (not a very good actress) spending the summer at grandmother's country B&B, where some of the less agreeable guests have a tendency to check in and then never be heard from again. Less flamboyant than the similar likes of "Motel Hell," "Eaten Alive" and so forth, this takes a long time getting to any real action, and the climax is not particularly surprising or memorable. Still, it's competently made by its sometimes interesting Canadian director ("House by the Lake"), and mostly decently acted, esp. by Grandma, who is relatively restrained in a role that easily could have been treated as a camp gorgon. Admittedly, I watched a pretty poor-quality online dupe, so it might play better seen on a DVD or whatever. God knows there are plenty of duller or more inept vintage 70s/80s semi-slasher horrors; this one just isn't idiosyncratic or scary enough to leave any lasting impression.

Not bad at all. As a proudly slumming Certified Canadian Cinema Artist, Fruet adds some juice to this elemental eighties horror scenario, getting the most out of a pretty good bunch of actors and playing each situation for as much horror, comedy or pathos as it will support. The flashbacks are well integrated, and the occasional gore is incidental to the unnervingly careful pacing and genuinely creepy atmosphere, with credit also due to Jerry Fielding's excellent score and Mark Irwin's moody-to-murky cinematography. And while it's not hard to guess where things are going, it doesn't really bother you until you get there, at which point the Psycho ripoff becomes a bit too overbearing, and the staging slips into cluttered chaos. But the critique of rural parochialism is textured with digs at equally obnoxious urban types, and the treatment of the 'slow' yard hand is refreshingly kind; they even have the grace to bury the ludicrous pop-psych wrapup under the end credits.