The Undertaker (1988)

Trailer: 

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s This About: I’m not typing a whole synopsis out, it’s too much of an undertaking.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

Wait, this is set in New Jersey? If they mentioned that in the movie I didn’t notice.

• A woman gets a flat tire and a biker stops to help he and I think they legitimately pulled a homeless biker (he sleeps under his motorcycle) off the streets for the role.
• Oh big surprise instead of helping her he sexually assaults her. You just can’t trust homeless bikers these days.
• The theme song even has the bell sounds like The WWF Undertaker’s theme. This movie came out in 1988, and The Undertaker debuted in 1990, so you be the judge.
• Anyway, she runs away from the biker to the car of The Undertaker (a.k.a. The Maniac Joe Spinell) and ends up dead. Talk about a bad day. Never did get that flat tire fixed.
• POV shot with The Undertaker breathing hard. Where have I seen that before? Maybe Malvert will show up in this.
• He’s stalking a woman who undresses, puts on a robe, walks to the shower, and takes the robe off. Completely unnecessary and quite frankly I’d quit stalking her after that.
• Great shot of The Undertaker putting a rag over he mouth and injecting her with something without the needle even remotely going into her skin.
• According to the trivia Joe Spinell lobbied hard for this role, but it seems like they would literally have cast anyone who remotely looked like they would pursue a career in undertaking, dead or alive.
• So he’s talking to these two women he killed and this is exactly Maniac.
• Ooh a classroom lecture on necrophilia. I went to a necrophilia convention once, but it was fucking dead.
• I think this is a high school, but this class has more thick mustaches than a cruise ship for Italian grandmothers.
• So The Undertaker’s nephew believes he’s banging corpses (fair enough) and wants the necrophilia teacher to meet him at the funeral home, and she takes this as him hitting on her. I mean, she’s just a teacher, what the hell is she going to do? It’s not like his uncle’s a vampire and she’s a descendant of Van Helsing.
• The Undertaker is following this girl walking home in his car, she gives him the slip, drives past her, is somehow behind her again, then she hides in a bush, and he grabs her from behind, even though Joe Spinell can barely walk. Why do so many of these slasher films feature teleportation?
• I can smell the gin coming off of Joe Spinell through my screen. 
• The Undertaker kills his nephew for snooping, then the nephew’s girlfriend comes around looking for him because she hasn’t seen him since… yesterday.
• I just love how this large lumbering man who breathes more loudly than Darth Vader in an echo chamber is stealthily murdering people like a ninja Michael Myers.

• This movie has to hold the Guinness record for brunette white girls in danger.
• I think my favorite part about The Undertaker is that he keeps calling everyone a moron.
• This 80-minute movie has more padding than Terry Griffith’s jock strap.
• There’s a whole subplot about a theater security guard suspecting The Undertaker of the murders and after several scenes The Undertaker just stabs him in the eye with a knife.
• Two cops come to the funeral home and The Undertaker blames his nephew for all this but ends up killing the cops anyway so that long drawn-out sequence was moot but it made me notice that Joe Spinell is missing several back teeth. Several.
• You know, him being an undertaker doesn’t really have much to do with anything.

• So the necrophilia teacher is going to go back to the funeral home to speak to The Undertaker’s sister for some reason, gets in an offscreen car accident, calls a random person to pick her up, and that’s it for the person who was kind of the protagonist. Her roommate decides to go to the funeral home alone for absolutely no reason, walks through the funeral home for 10 minutes, runs afoul of The Undertaker, stabs him in the shoulder with a pen or something, then a hard cut to The Undertaker sitting in a chair in a robe. Then there’s a couple of very poorly edited scenes, then the nephew, who has been hanging on a meat hook for several days, springs to life and chokes The Undertaker. And then the movie just sort of ends. It’s like they couldn’t actually finish filming it for whatever reason so they just frankensteined this absolute nonsense together. Oh well.

Final Thoughts: I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this. I mean, on a Schlocktoberfest scale. I doubt I’ll ever watch this again in my life, but it had a lot of elements that I love: gore, brunettes, undertaking, boobies, Joe Spinell, short runtime, on-set intoxication, etc. But it does drag quite a bit for such a short movie and completely falls apart at the end, in a totally mystifying way, which is semi-worth seeing for morbid curiosity, just like a naked corpse on an undertaker’s slab.

Score: 5.75 Bottles of Gin Formaldehyde (out of 10)