Also known as Cries in the Night.
A quaint Canadian slasher horror flick about a young woman who goes to stay with her grandma in the country for summer to help her set up a bed and breakfast in the old homestead. She quickly realizes that the ominous cat and the creepy caretaker are bad omens and someone, or something, is making sure there won’t be no returning visitors (because they are dead).
The film waddles about without much plot. It’s very TV-movie coded. Simple shots, simple acting, little of any real gore or blood. It’s littered with flashbacks and memory scenes, building the suspense of who could possibly be the killer. The reveal did surprise me a bit, but mostly because I wasn’t expected it to be so obvious, and such a overt rip-off of “Psycho” (1960).
The slasher genre started with the explorations of the horrors of night accommodations and there was some renewed interest in that trope in 1980. “Funeral Home” (1980) was just one of the films that showed innocent guests being slaughtered by horrible lodging managers. There was “Motel Hell,” with the catchy tagline: “It takes all kinds of critters to make farmer Vincent’s fritters,” and the forgetabble albeit for Barbara Bach’s beauty, “The Unseen.” And of course that indie film, “The Shining.”
All of them were better than “Funeral Home.”
