Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies!!!!! The EMBALMER!

This is the last article I did for Cultured Vultures. They are a great website but my articles weren't really finding an audience so every now and then i'll be posting new articles of 'Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies' on this site. 

A dark cloud falls over Venice as one girl after another disappears off the streets. Police are convinced they are only missing, not abducted, but the local suave reporter feels there are more diabolical forces at play. Could it all be just a coincidence or could it be..........the guy in scuba gear?!?!!

The Embalmer is a 1965 Italian horror film about a shrouded lunatic who lives in the tunnels under Venice, Italy. He is kept company by a harem of standing, embalmed women who he has kidnapped, killed and EMBALMED!!!! When he feels the need to add to his collection of dead darlings he takes to the streets in a very conspicuous, not very scary, scuba diving outfit and drags his helpless victims into the Grand Canal back to his secret lair. 

I enjoyed The Embalmer as a straight forward horror movie; the villain looked spooky and had a classic villain vernacular; the underground tunnels he lurked in looked great and I loved the secret chamber containing the skeletons from a secret society of other embalmers, but there was lack of mortuary chachkies for me to nerd out on. 

One of two things I can discuss regarding the legitimate mortuary aspects in The Embalmer is The villain used a gravity feed embalming setup in his underground lair to embalm his victims. This is a glass tank (usually made to hold a gallon as opposed to the standard three gallons of an electric embalming machine) suspended above the deceased to slowly embalm at a very low pressure controlled only by the height of the tank. This system isn’t used too often anymore in American funeral homes, but it is still used in medical universities to embalm cadavers for long term preservation. The thought process is if your flow is slow the embalming solution has time to penetrate tissue better and not circulate out and down the drain into your and my water system. Also, at a lower pressure there is a lower risk in damaging the vascular system by creating a blow out in an artery leaving some portion of the body unpreserved.  

From my desensitized point of view I figure if you’re looking at a line of tables with folks needing to be ‘juiced’ and you don’t want to spend the night on the fart couch in the mortuary’s lobby - the terms ‘slow flow’ and ‘low pressure’ aren’t even crossing your mind. 

The second interesting thing Your Favorite Mortician noticed in The Embalmer is the display of beautiful, young, but dead Italian women in the villain’s lair. No that didn’t catch my attention because of the obvious Freudian slip, but because they were all embalmed to stand up. Although The Embalmer was shot in 1965, the idea of positional embalming has been brought to my attention only in the last few years when pictures of posed embalmed corpses from the Marin Funeral Home in Puerto Rico started to circulate the internet. 

Now I know nothing about how embalming people into standing or posed positions is achieved but whats a little blind speculation gonna hurt? Looking at these embalmed bodies I’m noticing none of their clothing appears to be cut so I’m wondering if these bodies are in some way pieced together with a mannequin body or body parts. Embalm the hell out of the head and hands, chemically dry then wrap the stumps and skewer them onto a mannequin body with a plastic dowel. This would be to only worry about a couple things potentially going wrong instead of a whole body to potentially ruin a funeral. 

If these people are intact they would have been completely exanguinated of any blood and probably eviscerated to avoid anything from leaking out. Sure you could pack their asses like they were taking a trip to mars, but viscera, shit, and piss are tenacious and if there is a way to leak, your body is gonna leak. I would also be chemically cauterizing the hell out of anything and everything on that body; any injection site, any abrasion, any pimple that might weep, ANYTHING!  

Now I’ve had some crazy requests working in the funeral biz: cutting out someone’s heart and slicing it into quarters to cremate separately, doing a shot of tequila with a family with their dead relative’s cremated remains in it, and being instructed to pull thong straps out of a young women’s jeans for the public viewing to name a few. But I’ve never been asked to embalm someone into a position other than lying flat-but hey if anyone out there has the money and wants me to give it the ol’ college try drop me a line!

New Article for 'Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies' featuring My Girl!

YOU'RE CRYING.......NOT ME!

In my pursuit to track down movies for the moribund I have rattled graves, knocked on crypts, and roused the dust off of the old cinematic undertakers. But even this mortician, Your Favorite Mortician, needs a break from the grim and obscene. I looked back to when I was young and impressionable and remembered watching the 1991 movie My Girl and how it centered around Vada Sultenfuss living in her family’s funeral home. That fits the M.O. for Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies so I gave it another watch after twenty five years. As I watched My Girl I felt like I had opened a pandora’s box to my youth, I was 9 when it came out, and I immediately started remembering all of the cool funeral related scenes and it made me feel excited again; an odd feeling for this mortician since my heart has grown cold cocooned in a calloused membrane of coal after a decade of dealing with the garrulous demands of the bereaved. After watching it, I realized My Girl was as poignant in creating my interest in the death industry as Return of the Living Dead and the Tales From the Crypt episode Undertaking Palor. 

My Girl is a story about Vada Sultenfuss; an 11-year-old girl going into her adolescents living in a funeral home with her single Dad, her Uncle, and her Grandmother who suffers from dementia. When Vada isn’t being inundated with child sized caskets and neat hearses pulling in and out of their driveway she, and her best friend Thomas J, spend their summer riding their bikes, climbing trees, and starting to experience the harsh reality of life post childhood-yes everything dies, including you, including me. 

Vada starts psychosomatically showing physical symptoms from her fears of death and continually visits the doctor for everything from cancer, to Jaundice, to an enlarged left breast and a permanently stuck chicken bone. Thomas J brilliantly explains this to the nurse in the doctor’s office while he waits for Vada by stating, ‘it’s because of all the dead people. If you can’t beat them join them y’know.’ 

One thing I have noticed during my tenure in the death biz is people’s hesitation to explain things to children and coddle them instead of talking to them like a person. I’m no child psychologist, thank God, but in my opinion that will warp a kid’s minds even more in the long run. Adults still to this day think if a person is bounced under a train or dies in a fire they will look totally fine and require no preparation to be viewed because you know, like on CSI. 

Through the movie you suspect the Grandmother who suffers from dementia is the red herring expected to at some point die but it’s Thomas J who ends up dying after he gets attacked by a swarm of bees. I have to give the writer credit for absolutely destroying my mind when I watched this but it opened up a dialog about death in my mind and in the ensuing next few years I had numerous people in my life die both tragically and naturally and I really credit My Girl to my perseverance through those years because I had already began to process what death really is. Death has become such a taboo thing to talk about that almost every aspect of our culture does it’s best to sanitize the reality of death and sweep it away out of sight and I couldn’t even imagine how ridiculous people’s reactions would be if a movie similar to My Girl came out today. One could deduct that  this hysteria of removing the reality of death from our culture reflects that most of us, even the staunchly religious, are afraid to die. 

My Girl a great movie on a cerebral level that tackles the psychology of death and how people come to terms with it as they age-hell I learned more from this movie than any goddamn Kubler-Ross book I had to read in Mortuary School-but My Girl is also rife with legitimate funeral sundries and authentic ‘Mortician-isms.’

The Sultenfuss preproom is in the basement of the house, and if you’ve ever been to an older funeral home in a big old house they usually are equipped with the preproom and staging areas below the house and have either elevators or a pulley system to get the dead up and down floors. Working on the left coast we don’t have a lot of those but they are everywhere on the East Coast.

All of the bottles of embalming chemicals in the preproom look authentic and I recognized the embalming machine as a Duotronic, one of the best and durable embalming machines ever made in this mortician’s opinion! They last forever, have a big enough tank to dunk a baby in to topically embalm(seriously) and the pump can handle harsher chemicals like PermaCav and Phenol when embalming cadavers for longterm anatomical study. Music is constantly played in the preproom when Vada’s Dad Harry and his brother Phil are in there embalming which is one of the best perks of working in a preproom all day and if another mortician ever tells you your taste in music isn’t respectful to the dead you can tell them Freddy Funbuns says to go get fucked. Harry and Phil Sultenfuss dress the part of frumpy undertakers to a T; uncomfortable pants that accentuate horrible aspects of your ass and dress shirts,vests, and blazers that just don’t seem to fit around that paunch you get being surrounded by the dismal mortuary environment.  

When Harry hires Shelly, the hippy makeup artist, he has a hilarious conversation with her about the overuse of makeup on corpses. Shelly tries to plead her case saying this is the last time she could look her best but Harry shuts her down and says make her look like the picture he gave her. At least Shelly had the good fortune of getting a picture at all, and a recent picture at that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been handed a photo of someone from 1986 and asked, ‘make her look like this.’ I have always gone by the age old adage, less is more, and have quit on the spot during a very brief stint working at a corporate funeral home over an argument I got into with my manager over makeup. I left the preproom with Miss September of 1941 looking very prim and respectable only to return to my manager caking on makeup as if she was going to do a photoshoot for a window display at Sephora. But that manager had an issue with her own overzealous use of makeup and it’s very difficult to argue with someone who looks like the contemporary version of Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. 

The only scene in My Girl I called sceptic on is when we see Thomas J in his open casket after being killed by anaphylactic shock from hundreds of bee stings. He looked like he just had a few bumps on his face lying peacefully dressed in his white suit. If this  scenario was accurate you are going to be looking at excessive swelling all over his face to the point of being completely unrecognizable; depending on if emergency personnel tried any resuscitation on Thomas J he could have a trachea tube through his throat; and a lot of discoloration and tissue damage from the litany of bee stings. Now you could break out the electric spatula and hypertonic solution to try and draw out some of the swelling but when you’re injecting a person’s head directly you run the risk of causing even more swelling. This mortician would opt for either a closed casket or a private viewing with a completely draped body except for a hand exposed for the parents to hold and say goodbye. I hate to break it to you but all of those scenarios suck  and usually lead to this mortician spending the night with a bottle of Rumplemintz and Return of the Living Dead. 

I would recommend My Girl to anyone interested in movies about the funeral industry. It’s a rare occurrence, as you’ll see from these articles, to find movies about the funeral industry without murdering undertakers, zombies, necrophilia, or worse......heartfelt unrealistic bullshit. If given a thoughtful discussion on the subject of the stages of grief and coming to terms with the reality of death, My Girl would be a great movie to be shown in Funeral Psychology classes. That class was usually boring and reserved for my 1:00pm buzz after getting drunk during lunch. My Girl was a catalyst in my interest in the funeral industry at 9 years old and I’ve had a lot of women my age call the funeral homes I’ve worked at asking “do you guys hire.....like makeup artists for corpses?” I usually respond, “you mean like in My Girl? No we don’t but if you want to send over your resume I’ll keep it on file.” There was usually a bet followed by that conversation if their resume will list a strip club as their current employer, about 80% of the time it did. 

Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies: Dancing for the Dead!!!!

I’m the first to admit that the funeral customs in the United States are dated and banal events. There are the pomp and circumstance, old testament type funerals that haven’t wavered since......whenever. There are also celebrations of life that usually run for two hours of poor planning, garrulous storytelling about the deceased, and music selections that no matter how many times I’ve heard the same songs I still enthusiastically nod and say, ‘wow, that’s a really great song choice.’ Believe me, the Nick Cave version of “Death is Not the End” is played at a lot of funerals. 

Not to say I haven’t had my fair share of off funerals. I had a guy knife a chicken through the neck and pour the blood onto the ground around the grave plot. I’ve watched a group of people pile stacks of money into the crematory. And I’ve watched a pack of hippies outfit a dead dog in a coat and crown made of marijuana buds. But even after seeing all of that I still say to myself, “Dammit this funeral needs strippers!” and that is exactly what the documentary, Dancing for the Dead, is about!

Funeral carts have been a part of Taiwan’s history since the late 1800’s. Originally they were just flower carts being dragged behind a coffin, going from temple to temple to pay respects to the mishmash of Gods contrived from the presence of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Christianity in Taiwanese culture. 

Over time with the carts became more elaborate and sometime during the 1980’s, of COURSE, strippers started getting integrated into the show. According to a few folks interviewed for the documentary, a very important aspect of the Taiwanese culture is paying respect to the dearly departed. Mourners do this by integrating things into the funeral the corpse liked during life like specific food being eaten at the funeral, placing flasks of booze in the casket, and hiring strippers to dance and sing! What a magical culture! I imagine my body would be lit on fire in a strip club’s parking lot if my wife ever thought I enjoyed strippers.

In Taiwan the consensus is all celebrations must be what they call Mala- which translates to Hot and Noisy. The more hot and noisy the celebration the more successful it is and the happier the Gods are. This becomes a competition of sorts and is taken very serious in neighborhoods. Speaking of Gods, did I tell you how much the Taiwanese love satiating their Gods? They love’em! Especially the lower Gods because lower Gods love to eat, smoke, get drunk, roll dice, and sleep with prostitutes - religion here I come. So how do you appeal to a lower God with the habits of Charles Bukowski so your 91 year old father’s funeral is off the hook? You guessed it. 

Strange funeral rituals and customs are usually based on something horrifying. For example the disposition of dissolving people in an alkaline fluid filled pressure cooker until their body is soft enough to go down a drain into the water system and their bones are left to be pulverized into tiny chunks and put into an urn.....wait that’s the United States and it’s called Alkaline Hydrolysis. Watching Dancing for the Dead and learning about Electric Funeral Carts is like a breath of fresh air for this Mortician because for once a funeral is literally a hot, loud, sexually charged party as opposed to black clouds and frowny faces.......or skinning corpses, killing the wife of the deceased so he won’t be lonely in heaven, and smashing the body apart with rocks on top of a mountain so birds can bring their spirit to heaven.

Your Favorite Mortician Episode Four!

Unless you spend your death care days working as a full time embalmer sequestered in the dark recesses of a funeral home’s preproom or on an eight hour cigarette break working as a crematory operator, you’re going to be a funeral director who is very acquainted with the local cemeteries. Around my neck of the woods we have every type of cemetery you can think of: a National Cemetery, one of the biggest mausoleums in the country, numerous Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, hundreds of high priced commercial cemeteries, thousands of city maintained Pioneer Cemeteries, and an astronomical amount of backwoods cemeteries that are used half the time by derelict yokels for target practicing the local vermin and empty flower vases.  

All of these types of cemeteries comes with their very own eclectic mix of owners and caretakers ranging from business professional yuppies waiting to take as much of your money as possible, to bumpkins who ‘can’t remember if we buried Ethel here or over there.’ One of my favorites that I had the pleasure of working with was the befuddled old caretaker I met at Laurel Hill Pioneer Cemetery. He became quite upset with me when I pointed out his illegal method of grouping his outer burial container and the opening and closing charge as one ‘Cemetery Fee.’ See kids, when cemeteries require an outer burial container for their cemetery and the crooked old bastard only accepts them if bought through their own cemetery, that’s a clever way to charge clueless consumers whatever they want. After I pointed this out to him, he blubbered on about some non-sense through his jack-o-lantern teeth and every subsequent conversation I’ve ever had included both he and his wife getting on two different phones in their home and reciting bible verses mixed with threats about never recommending our funeral home. Those kooky old bible thumpin’ caretakers.

The horror flick that got me reminiscing about cemeteries is 1958’s, I Bury the Living, that just happens to be based in the ostentatiously named Immortal Hills Cemetery. And yes, that cemetery has a kooky old caretaker named Andy McKee, but ol’ Andy isn’t nearly as nefarious as the aforementioned law breaking evangelist. 

Andy is the grounds’ stalwart being around Immortal Hills Cemetery for over forty years of service. His list of skills acquired over those forty years reads like a true renaissance man: digging graves, chiseling headstones, picking up dead flower arrangements, and locking the gate. He is a lighthearted old timer and is quite excited to meet the newly appointed Chairman of the cemetery, Robert Kraft, of Kraft Department Stores. When Robert arrives at the cemetery his dapper appearance and flashy car, no doubt bought at the Nazi Party’s going out of business sale, contrast Andy’s drunk Irish stereotype look, and he’s covered in mud!  They both hit it off well and Andy immediately starts showing Mr. Kraft the stunning attributes of his work shed with the same zeal as a dirty caveman showing an alien fire. 

The first thing on Mr. Kraft’s list however isn’t a tour, it is to discuss Andy’s retirement with full pension for years of hard work. Andy isn’t too keen on that idea and tries to reason with Robert against the offer saying that will basically kill him because he’ll have no purpose anymore. They say youth is wasted on the young, but life is wasted on the elderly. I don’t care what kind of pride I might have doing any job, getting a full pension upon retirement as a cemetery’s caretaker is a pretty good score for Andy, because judging by his looks he’d probably end up some frozen guy found behind a grocery store after a snowstorm.  

Back at Kraft’s Department Store the other board members level with Robert about his role in the cemetery and how important that role is in perpetuating their good standing in the city regardless of the non-gratis salary that comes with being Immortal Hills’ new Chairman. Although Kraft’s is a department store, this is something that happens a lot in funeral homes and it’s a side of the funeral industry, amongst scores of other issues, I absolutely hate. 

When you are low on the totem pole trying to get through school or an apprenticeship you get forced into doing crap like this all the time instead of the owner whose name is on the front sign. Whether it’s volunteering time after hours to visit retirement homes to host some ridiculous Q & A session catered with coffee and See’s Candy or getting stuck at another drunk driving assembly at the High School, all of these so called community service functions are awful, glad handing, brown nosing nightmares with the purpose of keeping the mortuary’s name in the public view hoping that the payoff will be dragging another customer back to the funeral home once the Almighty swoops in.   

So under duress Robert Kraft accepts his fate as the new Chairman and stops by the cemetery to go over some more paperwork with Andy when his friend and new wife stop by to select graves in the family plot. Because? They just got married! An odd request but Robert’s friend insists he choose the plots right then because he is not going to get a cent from his family trust unless he selects the graves for him and his new wife, logical enough. But Robert accidentally puts two black pins, indicating someone is dead and buried, in their two plots on the gigantic cemetery map instead of white pins, which are placed when someone has purchased the grave plots in advance. Eerily, the young couple violently die shortly after and Robert can’t help but feel it could be more than a coincidence.

Now if that had happened to me........I would get a little freaked out and probably steer clear of the gigantic map of the cemetery in the work shed, unless it killed people who didn’t use their blinkers-I HATE that. Robert Kraft on the other hand decides to replace another white pin with black, and that person dies. And then he does it again, and they die. After that the police officer Robert contacts insists he does it again, and they’ll keep an eye on the person, but they die too! Finally the fellow chairmen of Kraft Department stores also, incredulously, convince Robert to switch the pins on ALL of their OWN plots just to show him HE’S crazy, and you guessed it, THEY DIE. 

  

After the pile of bodies mounts Robert Kraft gets the brilliant idea of taking all of the black pins out of the graves and replace them with white pins again to undo all the death he is recklessly responsible for. I Bury the Living was made in 1958 remember, so this is a pre-George Romero timeframe and Robert doesn’t have any precedent of the hell that resurrecting the dead could bring. Do the dead come back to life? Does Robert find out what powers he ultimately possesses? 

What I will say is there are some good twists through the rest of I Bury the Living and Your Favorite Mortician, ME, was very entertained. There are a lot of well shot scenes full of authentic headstones from a very profitable period in cemetery sales. I also enjoyed the genuine aesthetic of the groundskeeper’s shack full of old flower easels, bible stands for pastors, a lot of dirt, and a slew of traffic signs to guide the bereaved through the cemetery driveways.   

So next time all you potential apprentices out there are thinking about going to a cemetery to ponder suicide, take selfies staring at the ground with mascara running down your face, or take nudes draped over some moss covered headstone, weigh out staying at home and watching I Bury the Living instead. Trust me, all the cemetarians out there are tired of your morose loitering and discarded Djarum Blacks amongst the headstones.

Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies Numero Tres!

It can be a lonely, strange trip living your life at the mortuary. Always being on call and having an erratic schedule will make you appreciate even the simplest of pleasures when they occur. I can’t tell you how good a meal can taste when you can actually sit down and not worry about the phone ringing with someone’s needs or how rejuvenating sleeping a straight six hours can feel after wrenching dead bodies out of the nooks and crannies of a city for four days straight. 

Physically, death calls can deteriorate your body over time like a wide ass continually bearing down on a leather wallet in a tight back pocket. Mentally, the responsibilities of a Mortician can cause your mind to become a deep well that’s dark enough to hide any ripple of sympathy, or god forbid - empathy. When morticians snap it’s juicier than any headline in tabloid magazines and darker than any abyss on the earth. 

For example, between 1981 and 1984 Mortician Pat Omsberg of Newport, Oregon decided to stockpile sixteen corpses in his garage instead of burying or cremating them. Some of the bodies were so decomposed forensic dentists had to verify their identities. Before he was arrested Omsberg had recently been overhead by the bartender at a bowling alley complaining about how people were too cheap to pay their tabs at the funeral home. He later tried to sexually assault a woman unsuccessfully and killed himself before police could arrest him. If you shoot yourself in the head wrong your body goes into shock and the person usually dies from inhaling their vomit well before blood loss of brain trauma. 

With all of this tragedy within an arms length, this Mortician likes to take in a night of cinema to bring the madness down to a slow hum. If misery loves company then the movie, The Undertaker starring Joe Spinell, should be considered a theological document.

The Undertaker is a love letter written to anyone who has had their lives consumed by their careers. Joe Spinell plays Uncle Roscoe Holland, owner of Holland Mortuary, and ol’ Roscoe might have had himself a few too many deep inhalations of formaldehyde over the years.  Not only is he overweight, mildly crippled, and has the complexion of cigarette burned bacon, he’s also a murdering necrophiliac - all a result from his inextinguishable love of the death care industry. Uncle Roscoe is a case classic old school mortician who feels he is above everyone, yet still schmoozes and manipulates people of affluence like the local Mayor and Police Officers.  He also loves kidnapping and brutally murdering women to ‘stir up some business’ and utilize their corpses for his own sexual whims. 

The fairytale Uncle Roscoe creates in his head with nude corpses gets splintered into a million frowns when he finds out his nosey nephew, Nick, caught an eyeful of him serenading a corpse one day and decides he must rectify that situation before it gets out of hand or brought to the attention of authorities. Nick does the right thing and doesn’t tell his girlfriend any of what he witnessed and, instead, runs to his sociology teacher Miss Hayes, who happened to be covering the topic of NECROPHILIA in her class that week. Nick tries to convince her to meet him at his Uncle’s Funeral Home to discuss something with her, but leaves it literally that vague with no further explanation as opposed to leveling with her about what he saw. Miss Hayes tiptoes around the potential student/teacher sexual encounter for awhile, gossiping with her frequently nude roommate about it, until she realizes maybe Nick did need help because he stopped showing up for class and isn’t answering his phone. Miss Hayes alerts the police and in wake of the mounting missing persons cases the town is currently being hit with, the police decide to give ol’ Uncle Roscoe a visit. The rest my friends you’ll have to see for yourself because this Mortician realizes yes, we all die, so why bother ruining the good things in life for others. 

As I mentioned before, I think The Undertaker is a fantastic movie that conveys the realistic potential for an epic mental snap from reality people who work in the death industry face. In fact the topic of ‘burnout’ is covered in mortuary schools and once you get involved in this industry you will from time to time hear about colleagues just losing it and deciding a stroll through a rushing river, downing a diazepam cocktail, or listening intently to the barrel of a revolver, was the last right decision they ever made. 

Aside from loving the batshit performance by Joe Spinell, I also really enjoyed seeing some old school mortician aesthetics in The Undertaker. One example is in every scene inside Uncle Roscoe’s preproom where a body isn’t on the embalming table the bare table is draped with a sheet. I know that sounds ridiculous, but if you have ever worked side by side with an old timer that is one idiosyncratic thing they do out of respect for the dead, the art of embalming, and to pacify the shock any potential warm bodies might get if they get a little nosey and decide to take a stroll through the mortuary. Normally I just leave the bloody embalming table out in the open and to hell with anyone wandering around; it could be a lot worse. Another example that Uncle Roscoe cut his teeth before the era of AIDS and the baby boomers Hepatitis explosion is Uncle Roscoe doesn’t wear an embalming gown or any type of personal protective equipment (PPE), he strolls around in his white lab coat. I suspect some of the readers out there in TV Land probably haven’t been splashed with blood or had a hypo injection site back flow formaldehyde straight into your eye, but that shit burns and that shit is SCARY!

So by all means kids, grab a copy of the Undertaker and enjoy because it is a great ride. Just keep in mind there are lunatics out there just like, or even WORSE than Uncle Roscoe and they’ll take great liberty in ensuring the care and safe handling of your family members.  

Your Favorite Mortician at the Movies #2

As before, ignore the intro. 

Hey kids it's me, Your Favorite Mortician, and I'm back at the movies and I assure you I washed my hands before I handled my genitals before I used the movie seat armrests! This week I had the pleasure of watching the obscure porn flick, Necrophiliac, and now I'm ready to yuck it up about a topic that’s always on the minds of the folks in the Funeral Industry, Necrophilia. Necrophiliac, the movie, could be seen as a nice little blurb on the detrimental effects that grief can have over the bereaved.........or it’s just a movie about a guy who fucks a corpse.

We begin in a funeral home, or the set of a funeral home that was built in someone’s garage, where the visitation for a nice young deceased lady is taking place. Enter her grief stricken boyfriend who is not only sad, he’s horny. A very common occurrence amongst the living is the feeling to fuck, a lot, and I've been told it's an internal evolutionary response to death to remind us WE'RE ALIVE! So let's celebrate with things that inflate and things that fold! The grieving boyfriend throws the casket spray atop his dead girlfriend's casket to the ground and rips open the lid - take note future apprentices, not locking the casket for a closed casket visitation is a very easy way to get fucking fired!

With no one around to stop him the boyfriend tilts the deceased’s head back quite easily and thumbs open her mouth, also quite easily. Out comes his purple colored liberty bell and into her mouth it goes. After a few pumps and groans he completely ruins her makeup; that'll be an additional restoration fee please.

But don’t count the boyfriend out yet, he moves on down towards her baby making center, pulls off her undergarments then pinches and pulls at her folds for a while before he reciprocates the favor she just afforded him - talk about hamming it up for the camera up folks! Now I know people think hair keeps growing after you die, but it doesn’t, you've just watched Indiana Jones wayyyyyy too many times! However it seems like the filmmakers wanted to propagate this urban myth because this woman is sporting one densely grown pubic area that looks like it would even give the topiary artistry of Edward Scissorhands a run for his money.  After the boyfriend gets her cadaveric motor humming (Gross!) he hops in the casket, flips the corpse around so her soul can't escape and finishes round two. His orgasm, worthy of Meg Ryan's performance in When Harry Met Sally, and erratic bodily jerks are a little too much and he causes the casket lid to come crashing down on him. The end.

Necrophiliac is rife with issues that makes THIS Mortician, Your FAVORITE Mortician, cringe.  If this was at my mortuary I would be following Mr. Romeo as soon as he walked through the front doors. Rule one: don't let anyone just wander around a mortuary alone, ESPECIALLY a boyfriend of the deceased. These mopey bastards usually have their own ideas on how to pay respects to the dearly departed. These can include putting rambling letters written in pink or purple ink, joints, or condoms into the pockets of the dead - I'm serious! My favorite example of a forlorn boyfriend is showing up drunk to the funeral home, climbing on top of the body then bawling out horrifically lurid details about their sex lives. In that story though the boyfriend chose to do that with the whole family in the chapel. I believe the deceased's grandmother was surprised to hear she got her pussy shaved in a shower by him when they were 'yo we were trippin' on molly.' Other bad habits that people get when they wander around a funeral home alone is stealing a ton of cookies and candy, refilling cup after cup of coffee, clogging the toilets, filling garbage cans with crap from their cars, and thinking of dick head questions to ask as they leave. A few stalwarts I love are 'so do they like ever move?' or 'are you guys like, hiring?'

Now let's address the actual scenario of having sex with an embalmed corpse.  I'm going to take a guess this movie was made in the late 70's or early 80's when embalming chemicals were still a little crude and the outcome was rock hard, gray bodies that had to get lacquered up with a lot of makeup and hairspray.  So I'm a little skeptical on how easy it was to prop the deceased's head back and open her mouth, since that should have been either stitched shut with twine or bolted shut with needle injectors.

Once the boyfriend gets done with her head, he moves to her magenta oven and I find this pretty impractical as well. When bodies are embalmed they can get a little taught; think of trying to fuck a basketball through the inflation hole. When I was slinging embalmed cadavers for medical conferences I had the horror of watching surgeons and anatomists try and figure out if the female cadavers had uteruses or not. This entailed grown men jamming their elbows into the abdomen of dead, little old ladies, in an attempt to push down their uterus into a 'feelable range' for their other hand that was lodged into old Betty's vagina. The bell shape felt on their middle index finger meant they had a cervix and more than likely a uterus.  These gals could then be utilized for certain labs over others.

Now, I feel I'm a crude person by nature - possibly displaying signs of Asperger Syndrome - but this was one scenario I didn't want to partake in and risk having it on replay in my conscious forever.  So I left this task to the professionals. In my protest the Allied Health Professionals told me the cadavers should be checked before they're embalmed because it's basically impossible to feel anything afterwards. Great, I grinned and gave them my business card with an invitation to play bowling ball with any and all vaginas at any point from here on out because there was no way in hell I was going to.........ever. I glanced over to another group surrounding a table with cold Ethel on it and then overheard, 'well these damn gloves don't help either, it's not like in the old days before we HAD to where them.' Think about that before your next checkup kids.

Necrophiliac is an odd 10 minute watch that's good for a laugh and a head scratch. It stars the “high-risk for immune deficiency disease” porn legend Jamie Gillis as the very animated and dedicated boyfriend and the alarmingly square jawed Tina Russell as the movable corpse who can’t seem to figure out that the dead don’t breath.  Both are dead now, in real life, so hopefully they reprised their roles in Necrophiliac when they met in hell.

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!   

OROZCO THE EMBALMER!

By Jimmy Squarejaw

*WARNING*

All movies reviewed for SUNDAY SNUFF contain graphic depictions that may include rape, live animals being murdered, and extreme gore.  None of the writers condone such acts we just watch this shit. 

The funeral industry is an odd little enigma in the United States as well as our exposure and reaction to that little inevitable bastard known as death.  If you look at other cultures and how they treat their dead, how much exposure they get of death, and their beliefs towards death itself you’ll get a very different impression than the way we deal with it in the ol’ North American continent.  This week I’ll be chatting about Kiyotaka Tsurisaki’s documentary OROZCO THE EMBALMER released in the states by our good buddy Louis Justin’s company, Massacre Video.

OROZCO THE EMBALMER is about Froilan Orozco, the local embalmer in the “El Cartucho” neighborhood of Bogota, Columbia.  Kiyotaka does an amazing job scanning the landscape, capturing it on film to really paint the hellish conditions of this neighborhood.  The entire area looks like a bomb went off complete with hollowed out buildings, vast plots of land completely covered in garbage, and ramshackle homes that make Tijuana look like a kingdom.  Kiyotaka also captures a lot of the local flare in footage featuring drug addled vagrants and drug smuggling hookers with explosive tempers.  Once establishing a haunting atmosphere, Kiyotaka begins displaying the central character Froilan Orozco. 

Froilan Orozco is to me a typical Funeralista.  He is crass, blunt, and lacks any real emotion from decades of exposure to the worst shit imaginable.  He has been jaded doing the monotonous work of an embalmer for over forty years and doesn’t really mince words when it comes to complaining about corpses.  Froilan takes great liberty, I assume, calling almost everyone on his prep table a son of a bitch at one point then grabs a dead baby a little bastard.  Being in many a prep rooms with many seasoned morticians myself the gallows humor and rough exterior of Froilan is about as natural as the sun rising.  He looks at all of the corpses that roll through his business as a job that has a start and a finish and to the average Joe watching this that might sound unbelievable.   

From my standpoint, being an embalmer myself, I initially got interested in this movie to see the inner workings of Froilan’s prep room and his technique used.  Turns out he doesn’t really embalm anything, a fact I think is funnier than I can even begin to describe.  My ethnocentric mind immediately assumed there was a few universal procedures of embalming that are shared in some regard or another across the entire world.  What Froilan does is a little different than the typical embalming as we know it.  First he gets the deceased onto his prep table, a long metal table that has iron bars across the top of it so when he cuts open your stomach and fills your body with water he can roll you over to spill all of your guts out.  That’s after he disconnects all of your viscera and deflates all of the air pockets in your intestines of course.  The first time I saw this scene it reminded me that the pressure in your body is higher than the atmosphere, so when you get cut open your intestines pop out like that old gag gift snakes in a can, oh memories!  After he cleans off your guts, Froilan puts them into a bag and jams them back into your body cavity, pours formalin (a solution of water, high amounts of formaldehyde, and methanol) in you, jams some rags into you to maintain a normal looking body, and stitches you on up.  After that he puts cotton on a knife that looks way too big and fills your nostrils and mouth.  If I remember right Froilan explains a basic embalming like that equals about $40-$60 American dollars, and if you’re fat it’s more expensive so lay of the Carl’s Jr. and Arby’s folks. 

Kiyotaka visits with a few other embalmers and of course they all talk shit about each other and the shotty embalming jobs they all try to pass off as skill, just like in real life kids!  One of the other embalmers shows us how he preserves a body that’s about to go to a hot and humid area.  He takes a very big knife, lifts the upper lip and starts severing all of the connective tissue in the cheeks.  Then he switches to the eyes and jams the knife under the skin around the forehead and cheeks as well.  This was insane to watch to say the least but it was necessary to prevent moisture from building in the tissue from the humidity, I guess.  After embalmer #2 gets finished he takes an additional stab at Froilan stating he can preserve a body for 20 to 30 days and Froilan could not.

The film also goes to the scene of a few deaths where authorities arrive to investigate or lack there of.  A body dead in the street or wedged against a house is an everyday occurrence and in every scene all of the locals crowd around and watch the deceased get rolled around, stripped, and investigated for the cause of death.  Even little kids get a front row view, all of who look like they’ve seen the same scene hundreds of times and aren’t too disturbed by it, unlike all of the whimpering pussy 8 year olds we have in the United States. 

OROZCO THE EMBALMER could’ve been 3 hours long and it would have captivated me the whole way through.  The story is interesting and the filmmaker does an amazing job capturing a complete picture of the aging embalmer, the shit hole he lives in, and the daily activities he dutifully performs.  Do yourself a favor and pick this up at www.massacrevideo.com

Some additional insight to the movie and Froilan can be found here, http://www.orozcoelembalsamador.com/public_html/en/contents_who.html

      

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Realistic Gore: 5 out of 5, it’s the real deal kids.

Rape: 0 out of 0.

Animal Death: 0 out of 0

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0, but if you look at the above website there is a monetary figure for this.

Torture:  0 out of 0, the dead feel no pain.

Overall Movie: 5 out of 5, this movie was incredible!