Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies Part 1

This was for another website, so ignore my mind numbing intro. 

Hello friends, my name is Freddy Funbuns and although you might not know it yet, I am Your Favorite Mortician.  Instead of my usual schtick of trying to upsell you from that lousy minimal black plastic urn to an engraved, sleek polished granite urn with 340 cubic inches of room, or pointing out the merits of the Pieta 18 Gauge Sealing Casket adorned mistakenly with bronze reliefs of the Last Supper on each corner by taoist Chinese laborers making two dollars a day.  No, today I’m here to discuss the 1989 buddy film, Beverly Hills Body Snatchers and scrutinize it’s credibility regarding the Funeral Industry.

Beverly Hills Body Snatchers tells a tale very similar to how almost everyone gets into the Funeral Industry; by happenstance.  Freddy and Vincent are two young entrepreneurs who cannot catch a break on their latest invention the Surf-A-Matic 2000.  With zero sales to fund their feel good summer, the 18-year-old surfer dudes accept jobs at the Greener Pastures Funeral Home working under head mortician Lou and his kooky partner Doc.  However like most gainfully employed 18-year-old surfer bros from California in the late 80’s, they spent more time making sure their hair would maintain it’s style than taking their jobs seriously- and not taking the funeral industry seriously in their case consisted of corpse abuse, mutilation, and recreationally using formaldehyde.    But all of that changes when Freddy and Vincent learns that Doc is actually working on a reanimation formula.  Seeing the lucrative potential is this, they do an about face and sculpt their work ethic into becoming top notch body snatchers.  

This is what I would consider a volatile situation, and to make it even worse the staff at Greener Pastures Funeral Home are clueless to the fact that their lovable Uncle Vito has planned a hit on the mob boss Don Carlo to muscle his way to the top.  The stipulation though is Uncle Vito must present the dead corpse of Don Vito at his funeral for the other ethnically diverse organized crime families to view and prove he has indeed bought the farm.  Uncle Vito assigns this task to the trusted (and indebted) staff at the Greener Pastures Funeral Home-without telling them-and has his cronies drop Don Carlo’s body off at the Funeral Home.  Doc, who just kinda lurks around the mortuary, spots the freshly deceased Gambino in his prep room and thinks it is just another fresh corpse to practice on and re-animates the mob boss from the dead just in time for his funeral.  The good news is yes Doc’s serum works!  The bad news is he resurrects a dead, pissed of mobster who breaks into his own funeral and all hell breaks loose.  

Although Beverly Hills Body Snatchers has that nostalgic, 80’s, surfer dude, brain dead comedy vibe in spades, I, as a Mortician, have a few issues about it.  The first, and biggest contention is the paradigm shift the main characters go through in a very short amount of time sliding from happy go luck teenagers trying to sell their surf board invention to corpse defiling body snatchers.  The first pick up they do they have no problem what so ever letting their friend paint makeup on a corpse, cram a cigarette in it’s mouth and pose it in the window of a hearse as they drive down the road.  I consider myself a crass person, but even I took at least four months to be comfortable staging cadavers in awkward predicaments for my own enjoyment, these guys were practically doing it by lunch!