Just when you think you’ve seen every slasher ever made in the 80s, a new one pops up. 

1980’s “Funeral Home” was a low rent, relatively bloodless horror flick. If you know what you’re getting into, it’s fun enough.

Young Heather comes to work with her grandmother in some nameless small town for the summer. Grandma used to run a funeral home with her husband out of the house. Now that Grandpa’s disappeared, she’s making a go of turning the place into a bed-and-breakfast.

But It’s tough to run a business when the guests keep turning up dead.

There are a lot of classic horror motifs present: black cats, inbred farm hands, something in the basement.

I would call Funeral Home “mystery/horror” which is probably my favorite kind of horror. The twist is no surprise and heavily indebted to a certain Alfred Hitchcock film from the 60s. That said, I’m a little disappointed they never turned in a sequel—there was definitely plenty of material to work with.

It’s a Canadian film, supposedly set in the US, and the Canuck accents abound. “What aboot it, eh?”

The actress who played Heather, Lesleh Donaldson, has been referred to as a “scream queen”. The moniker fits, because screaming is all she does in the last ten minutes of the movie.

The film drags a bit, and as I said, is low on gore. An exploding head would have really zazzed it up. (But couldn’t that be said about every movie?)

Best dialogue: “You must never go down in the cellar. Do you understand?”