Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 3:2	Budget Medium

In many ways this is not a five cup movie. But it has Paul Bartel and Mary Woronoff in it, one of my all time favorite screen couples.

As the credits roll, we are treated to the Beach Boys' "Be true to your school" played over some rather amusing illustrations that look antique but the subject matter is much more modern. We are then introduced to Max and Sam Grimm, heirs the Grimm Mortuary fortune they are shown at their current jobs where they are under appreciated (to say the least). Their uncle dies leaving them the mortuary/academy if they can pass the courses and graduate. They enter the school and are introduced to their fellow students who are exactly the type of lunatics you would expect in this type of film. Things become difficult when the current management of the mortuary realize that if the pair fail, the mortuary falls to them. Fortunately for the boys, Paul and Mary are having a parting of ways and as Paul falls for a dead cheerleader, Mary starts to fall for Sam. As Paul becomes more and more erratic and Mary realizes that Paul has been embezzling from the company, the boys become concerned that even if they manage to get the mortuary, they will likely loose it to creditors. Fortunately a rock band is killed in a freak car accident. The bands promoter laments that if they band had stayed alive for just another couple of days they would have played a gig for million dollars. Working feverishly the mortuary staff resurrects the band for one last show using techniques that the National Funeral Directors Association would certainly not approve of. With the influx of cash from the show, the mortuary is saved.

Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov. With something like 18 shared on screen credits, they have to be the B movie couple of all time. Hollywood Boulevard, Death Race 2000, Eating Raoul and Rock and Roll High School. Sigh. Seriously no one else comes close. Paul was probably way too smart for the films he starred in, wrote or directed, but he clearly enjoyed them. To me his appeal was that the worlds he inhabited seemed pretty normal except for one or two really warped themes that no one in the film considered odd. Mortuary Academy is a case in point. When we first are introduced to Paul and Mary, they are engaged in foreplay. Having taken an ice bath in preparation, Mary is lying on a lab table while Paul tells her he has some special embalming fluid just for her. When they are interrupted by the intercom, Mary calls it off not because it is sick and twisted, but because the mood has been broken. Later in the movie when Paul dumps Mary for a new love, no one bats an eye when that girl turns out to be a dead cheerleader. When the couple is caught in flagrante delicto, again no one is all that upset that Paul is bopping a dead girl. Paul plays his character in this movie the way he always did, perfectly straight with great belief that everything his character does is normal and right. Paul's characters always suffered through life's little indignities with peevish self righteousness.

As his better half in several films, Mary Woronov was a perfect foil for Paul. Her tall showgirl figure towered over Paul's rotund frame clearly marking them as an odd couple. Even at 45, Mary is striking in this film managing to be very attractive without being overtly sexy. Unlike a lot of movie starlets who look good until you look close, Mary tends to look better as you look closer. Her wry smile, those intelligent eyes, and her incredibly long legs are devastating when coupled with the humor she brings to most of her sympathetic characters. Her "warden" characters (Prison a go go, Rock and Roll High School) are always on the edge of going right out of their minds, they are not so much fragile as brittle. Like Paul, Woronov is clearly intelligent and aware of what she is doing. The best B movie queens understand that they are never really going to make the A list and have come to terms with it. Mary's first movie credit is in 1966 and she has over a hundred TV and movie appearances to her credit that range from B movie cheapies to small parts in big Hollywood productions.

So anyway, back to the movie. Christopher Atkins and Perry Lang play Max and Sam Grimm without really making them interesting. Despite the fact that these should be the main characters, they have relatively little to do in the film. I suppose that as Paul was the writer, he decided to give all the best lines to his and Mary's characters. Sam and Max tend to just react to things, though Perry Lang's Sam does step up to take control a couple of times. Cheryl Starbuck got special mention in the credits even though she plays a corpse the entire movie. Perhaps a special credit was the only way to get her to do a nude scene with Paul, but she did play the role of the dead girl to perfection.

The movie will not be everyone's cup of tea. Paul's sense of humor is pretty dry and the jokes are played without much fanfare. Movies like "Police Academy" have a straight man; a stand in for the audience who points out the oddities in the film. When Tacleberry goes off on a rant, Mahonney is there to look askance at him. Mortuary Academy does not have a character to measure against the others for weirdness. When Valerie says with a straight face that she has to rush home because her mom's fat friends are coming over and she is worried that her dog will get squashed, no one does a double take or even raises an eyebrow. Later when she shows up with the flattened doggie, again everyone takes it at face value. Part of the intelligence that Bartel brought to B movies was the expectation that the audience would be paying attention. He trusted that they would get the joke without having to make them bolded and underlined. Again, this explains why Max and Sam have so little to do. Traditionally, their characters would herd the others towards some degree of normalcy despite their eccentricities. Bartel just saw no reason to make excuses for his character's oddness. Whereas "Police Academy" showed that outcasts could become valued members of society, Bartel's characters aren't even aware of normal society. They tend to be completely comfortable with themselves and their lack of social graces.

This is not a movie that spends much time in the real world. Paul clearly steals a significant amount of money from the mortuary and even though Mary and the others know this, no one calls the cops. Ditto on the fact that he did not dispose of the cheerleader's corpse properly (or at all really). When Sam is first introduced he is selling used cars. Not so strange except that one of the cars is an odd combination of little red convertible/sex toy. I have friends with cars that have heaters in the seats, this car takes the concept considerably further. When we briefly see the car later, the airbags have deployed and they are large inflatable breasts. Again, we are supposed to be paying attention, Bartel does not provide us with a character to point out how funny these things are. When Max and his potential client are talking about the car, its features are discussed as if they were power windows and fuel injection and not sex toys.

Still the movie is uneven with significant story line jumps and poor acting overall. If you don't enjoy Bartel's droll writing and the sloppy directing, you may not enjoy this. Despite the fact that the word "Academy" is in the title, this is not like the dozens of other "Police Academy" clones that came out after that movie's success.

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