The Undertaker (1988)
"He'll love you to death."
Plot
Roscoe is a mortician who abducts beautiful girls, kills them and keeps their bodies to fulfil his perverse desires. Suspicious of his uncle, Roscoe’s college-age nephew reaches out to his anthropology teacher - who recently taught the class about necrophilia - for help. In the interim, Roscoe’s funeral home becomes even more crowded.
Review
This scuzzy and sleazy unfinished slasher from 1988 was cult actor Joe Spinell’s final film. For those who might not be steeped in the history of cult cinema, Spinell was this towering, imposing character actor who had plenty of supporting roles in 1970s films such as Taxi Driver, Rocky and The Godfather (where, in a bizarre bit of trivia, he was the second highest paid actor behind Marlon Brando!). Spinell was incredibly well-liked by everyone he worked with, ranging from Ford Francis Coppola to being one of Sylvester Stallone’s best friends before they had a falling out during the shooting of Nighthawks. But for anyone visiting this site, Spinell cemented himself in the horror hall of fame with his tour-de-force performance in Maniac, one of the Eighties’ greatest slasher films and one of the most controversial films of the decade. He’s mesmerising in it and had the film been more mainstream, instead of a low-budget independent horror, Spinell might have been remembered as one of the great horror villains and really hit the big time. He was a fascinating, enigmatic actor who no one really knew what to do with outside of the stereotypical roles he received.
The Undertaker is something of an enigma too. It was never given an official release in America, and the only copy of the film was in the possession of editor Lorenzo Marinelli, who apparently taped a copy on VHS which was the start of the urban legend. It has surfaced in bootleg copies over the years, never properly finished but existing in workprint form. The first bootlegs released were padded out with stock footage from old horror movies available in the public domain, before dodgy and heavily edited VHS versions made their way onto the market. The original 35-millimeter film was finally discovered in 2012, but it was still missing six minutes of footage which the bootleg workprint had. So, between the original reel and the dodgy VHS versions, every bit of footage known to exist was spliced together and The Undertaker was finally released in the best form possible, turning this film into something of a cult enigma. It’s the very definition of those urban legends about snuff films that may be real or may not be real; a genuine oddity which needs to be cut some slack given its unfinished nature.
What is worse is that Spinell, not in the best of shape or health it must be said as he slurs through his lines here, died a few months after this was finished shooting. Spinell was a haemophiliac and was involved in a tragic accident in his New York apartment where he bled to death after a slip in the shower and cutting himself on the glass. This was his final performance. Spinell was struggling massively with severe substance abuse during the shoot. He was heavily intoxicated on booze and drugs on set to the point where the production frequently had to rely on stand-ins just to physically get through scenes because their lead actor was entirely incapacitated. The blurring of the terrifying maniac persona that Spinell created and his very real-life personal struggles have just become complete at that point. Big-bulging eyes, rugged face, overweight and sweating profusely – Spinell was just an absolute master at playing these skin-crawlingly creepy, deeply pathetic psychos. He wasn't a suave Hollywood monster. He brought this terrifying authenticity to the screen. Spinell's unique approach to playing iconic horror villains was to completely strip away the fantasy element. When you watch standard 1980s horror films, the killers often feel superhuman or otherworldly. Spinell played killers who felt like they could be living in the rundown apartment right next door to you or the guy you avoid in the hallway. Whilst this isn’t up there with Maniac or even The Last Horror Film, there’s something unsettling about not knowing where Spinell is acting and where it’s just him being him.
I mean, that is the absolute crux of the discomfort with The Undertaker. It fundamentally crosses that line. When you sit down to watch this film, you aren't just watching a fictional slasher film about Roscoe; you are watching a dark, unflinching historical document of a real human being losing his battle with addiction. It becomes overwhelmingly sad because the horror is no longer on the page in the script. It's right there in the biological reality of the performer. The lack of control Spinell exhibits isn't some avant-garde artistic choice. It's a medical symptom. It's the breakdown of a man captured on 35-millimeter film. But the breakdown wasn't just happening to the actor, though.
Moving from the tragic decline of the star to the absolute disastrous decline of the production's bank account, you just can't make a film without resources, and The Undertaker simply ran out of them. The money dried up entirely mid-shoot, and consequently, because nobody was getting paid and they couldn't afford equipment or locations, the director, Franco Stefanelli, just couldn't finish shooting the required scenes to make a complete feature. When you watch the film, you can see the desperate cinematic duct tape holding this thing together. The editing is repeatedly jarring and choppy. Entire scenes just cut off for absolutely no reason, not for any other choice outside of lack of money. I mean you are forced to watch a guy parallel park in real time for three straight minutes because the producers desperately needed the physical film reel to hit a contractually obligated feature-length runtime.
At its core, The Undertaker is essentially another take on the Maniac-style misogynist slasher, where a troubled man with issues with the opposite sex takes out his psycho-sexual frustrations in grisly and gory fashion. But the disjointed plot lines reflect a production that completely lacked a singular creative vision. What you have here isn't really a story. It's just a series of disjointed quasi-sexual setups that feel heavily inspired by Italian giallo films. The Undertaker essentially devolves from a narrative film into a sequence of these grim giallo style vignettes because it just lacks the structural integrity to be anything else. The ending, another attempt to copy Maniac, falls badly flat on its face with such an abrupt conclusion, presumably where more missing footage is from or never shot.
Ironically for a slasher film, a genre entirely built on visual shocks, there is a completely shocking lack of gore and special effects. That absence of effects is incredibly telling about the financial reality. The credits of the film explicitly list Arnold Gargiulo II as handling the gore effects, but the effects simply aren't there on the screen in any meaningful capacity. The mechanism of practical effects (fake blood, prosthetics, squibs, etc.) requires materials, and materials cost money. This strongly suggests that entire elaborate sequences involving special effects were either never filmed, because they couldn't afford the latex and the fake blood, or they were filmed so poorly and hastily that the footage was completely unusable, and they didn’t have the money to retry. Everything about The Undertaker gives it the feel of a film which didn’t feel like the Eighties at all – it would have been perfectly at home another ten years earlier.
Final Verdict
The Undertaker is gutter trash at its finest, a mess of a horror flick which serves as both a sad epitaph to Spinell’s career but also a poignant obituary which perfectly symbolised the manic craziness that he brought to his horror roles. I can’t be too critical given the unfinished nature of everything. It’s not a great film, it’s tough to watch but even on a bad day, Spinell somehow manages to get under your skin and stay there.
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The Undertaker Director(s): Franco De Stefanino Writer(s): William James Kennedy (screenplay) Actor(s): Joe Spinell, Rebecca Yaron, Patrick Askin, Susan Bachli, Martha Schoeman, Charles Kay-Hune, William James Kennedy, Francis D. Poeta Duration: 89 mins |  |
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