Police Academy’s success was so huge, it predictably led to a glut of slob-comedy imitators that could be pitched — and likely were — with the sentence “It’s Police Academy, but [insert training scenario here].” The best of these was arguably the screenwriters’ own Moving Violations (“at a traffic school”); the worst is a distinction among many contenders, including the leaden Mortuary Academy, appropriately late to the game.
Brothers Max and Sam Grimm are due to inherit their deceased uncle’s Grimm Mortuary & Academy (“You kill ’em, we chill ’em”) on one only-in-the-movies condition: They first must graduate from it. Having no motivation, Sam (Jocks’ Perry Lang) has nothing to lose, but Max (The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins) dreams of becoming a doctor, not an embalmer. However, once he’s rejected in short order by med schools and his pretty-but-petty girlfriend (Megan Blake, Eyeborgs), Max suddenly has no other prospects. After all, a premise is a premise!
The hallowed institution is, per the film’s not-aged-well poster, “where the dearly departed meet the clearly retarded.” Per the demands of the subgenre, it’s chock full of misfits! They include Tracey Walter (Repo Man), who “revives” dead dogs with robot technology; Stoney Jackson (Angel 4: Undercover) as the token black character — rapping, no less; and Lynn Danielson (from director Michael Schroeder’s other 1988 movie, Out of the Dark) as a good-girl love interest for Max and superfan of Radio Werewolf, a band I didn’t realize was genuine until afterward. The group’s inclusion is tied to the movie’s “Special Appearance by Wolfman Jack” — the adjective is up for debate.
In charge of the academy are Eating Raoul power couple Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel as, respectively, the nymphomaniac professor and the necrophiliac owner with eyes on keeping the brothers Grimm from taking over. Bartel also co-wrote the script with William Kelman (Beach Babes from Beyond), but the satirically dark touch Bartel is known for (baby caskets, anyone?) isn’t employed nearly enough, drowned out by the easy-lay, low-hanging fruit of sophomoric and scatological jokes. The dialogue can be so clunky, it sounds like the work of an ESL student who hasn’t stuck to the lesson plan: “Your head’s swollen with baby vomit! You listen to me, you toxic vagina!”
At least Bartel presumably penned himself into Mortuary Academy’s one good bit, in which he falls hard for — and gets “engaged” to — a deceased cheerleader (Cheryl Starbuck, Pathology). After taking her corpse to a drive-in restaurant, they have a romantic encounter on the beach à la From Here to Eternity … if Deborah Kerr were dragged out to sea while Burt Lancaster zonked out in a post-coital snooze. —Rod Lott