The coverbox synopsis for Halder Gomes and Gerson Sanginitto’s THE MORGUE promises an “Astounding twist”. Big spoiler right their guys and also…way to set your viewing audience up for an “astounding disappointment”.

Strange goings on are (ahem) going on at the local, gigantic, marble-walled mortuary. Most of them involve a group of strangers (as the cover box describes them) who mostly know each other. What I mean is that the six main characters are broken down into 3 groups whose lives have intersected in the midnight moonlit halls of this necropolis.

First is Margo (Lisa Crilley)—the Morgue janitor who thinks it’s sanitary to try and clean blood off the bathroom walls with her bare hands. Margo works alone except for the night watchman George (Bill Cobbs) who is drunk and passed out most of the time. Into Margo’s peaceful night a little rain must fall and the deluge of characters who appear out of nowhere include a warring family—lead by BLAIR WITCH PROJECT alum Heather Donahue, her pissed-off husband and bespeckled daughter. Later a bloody and battered pair of friends burst through the office door in search of a phone. It’s clear that this is the liveliest morgue around and made more so by the fact it’s rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a former employee who slit his own throat in the aforementioned bathroom. Now it seems that someone, or something, wants them all dead. But, what’s that twist we were promised?

THE MORGUE has a lot of things going for it and an even larger number of things going against it. The setting and story are pretty solid and even though—outside of a PHANTASM movie—I’ve never actually seen one of the gigantic mortuaries, I believe they do exist and I imagine they must be creepy as hell. The film’s big twist isn’t really that difficult to deduce—especially since the synopsis has your brain actively considering what it could be before the first credit crawls across the screen. Even the acting is up to par for a direct-to-video screamfest. So, what goes wrong? It’s all about the execution. And this time filmmaking got the best of our twin directors.

I’ve never understood the necessity of two directors on a film. I know in some cases one director works the actors and one director works the camera angles and shot composition but who wins in the fight over vision. I know I don’t even agree with my best friends and family over simple stuff like where to go for dinner…and we don’t have thousands (if not millions) of dollars riding on a night at Steak ‘n Shake (did you catch the Heather Donahue reference there…good job). This time the film is just a mess of editing technique and overwrought sound design.

Screaming “first-year film school student” the beginning of the film is hacked up with all kinds of jump cuts, flash edits and black and white insert shots that simple fade away over the course of the movie. None of these cuts contribute to the sense of dread that one might want to convey about working late at night—alone—in a building full of corpses. If anything they lessen the effect. Second, the film has a poorly mixed violin score that might have been proficiently creepy if it wasn’t so damn loud all the time. I swear in one scene it actually drowned out the dialogue. Doesn’t matter…didn’t care what they were gonna say anyway…let’s just kill ‘em all.

Actually the film doesn’t really kill too many people—at least not on screen. But that’s not too bad, and certainly not the worst thing in the film. No, the worst thing in the film is the need, after the twist is revealed, to try and offer the audience some kind of USUAL SUSPECTS/SIXTH SENSE-styled revelation. Designed to make the audience think that the people who made it are just way more cleaver than you—the viewers—are. I didn’t buy what they were selling in the final 15 minutes and I don’t think you will either. It felt tagged on like “let’s see what we can do now to screw with your head”.

It’s too bad that THE MORGUE doesn’t pull off a better film. That better film is in the script. You can see it kicking and clawing at the walls of its celluloid coffin, screaming till its vocal cords bleed to let it out. But, in the end it’s just buried alive by an abuse of technique over storytelling.