Morgue Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.0

Morgue Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 29, 2021

There’s a perhaps unspoken structural conceit to many films that have a purported “twist” along the way, which is that cards should probably be played pretty close to the vest, cinematically speaking, lest pesky “predictor” viewers (ahem) figure out what’s going on before the big reveal. I’m one of those inveterate guessers of denouements, and I have to say my proclivity for “prophecy” has occasionally sullied my filmgoing experiences, notably in such well remembered efforts as The Sixth Sense , which I had pegged from the get go (or at least the segue after the psychologist played by Bruce Willis is shot in an early scene). Unfortunately, Paraguayan filmmaker Hugo Javier Cardozo, whose name shows up in the credits of Morgue about as often as Marv Newland’s does in Bambi Meets Godzilla (and, yes, that’s a joke), pretty much spills the beans early on in this enterprise, and then has nowhere left to go. The result may deliver a few shivers to viewers who dread the thought of death, or at least the facilities that hold corpses, but in terms of offering any surprises, this Morgue is DOA.

Morgue begins with a vignette documenting the arrival of a corpse to the titular facility, a body which, to paraphrase a well remembered moment in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, might be "not quite dead yet". Meanwhile, Diego (Pablo Martinez) is a seemingly nice guy out shopping, indulging in some joking banter with his girlfriend (Maria Del Mar Fernandez) via a cellphone conversation. That cellphone turns out to have a tragic role to play in the story, when Diego drops it on the floor of his car while driving home and then, in a scene familiar to anyone who has ever watched a commercial for insurance and/or phone holding devices for your car, boneheadedly bends down to retrieve it, whereupon he promptly hits and kills a pedestrian. Of course he freaks out and leaves the scene of the crime, but wouldn't you know it?, his new job as the night security guard at the local morgue brings him face to face (or at least face to foot) with the body of the guy he hit. If you need a diagram depicting what happens next, you obviously haven't seen enough derivative horror films.

The "dead guy" is identified only as Drunkard (Willy Villalba) in the credits, and unfortunately his menacing aspect is about as generic as his character name. The film kind of ping pongs back and forth between stasis, where Diego sits around and looks at the newspaper or investigates various patently odd nooks and crannies of the morgue, and what passes for "action", where either the Drunkard or various other interlopers arrive to either play on Diego's roiled conscience or appear as figments of his overweening imagination, depending on how you want to interpret various goings on.

This sort of basic horror setup is obviously not overly innovative, but Cardozo attempts, with intermittent success, to invest the proceedings with a bit of style. One of the big problems, though, is that vast sections of the film play out in almost total darkness, with so little being discernable that any perceived fear factor may in fact be at least partially mitigated. Morgue might have sufficed relatively well as a standalone (short) episode on some sort of anthology show like The Twilight Zone, but it just seems needlessly padded to try to fill out a feature film length story. The first "twist", insofar as there is one, is delivered way too early in this enterprise, and the supposed "final gotcha" is just kind of silly and perhaps even nonsensical.

Morgue Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Morgue is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. There is no real technical data on this film on the IMDb, and I haven't been able to dredge up anything authoritative elsewhere on the internet, despite the always questionable "expertise" of Wikipedia stating the film was number one in its native Paraguay for two weeks. One way or the other, there appears to be intentional degrading of the image at times, at least in terms of elements like supposed phone video chats or other video feeds, but even supposedly "normal" moments can often offer iffy detail levels at times. As mentioned above in the main body of the review, rather long swaths of the film are played out in near darkness, and it is often very hard to even make out what (if anything) is happening in the frame (refer to screenshots 15 through 19 for a few examples, which I've tried to select to offer at least slightly varying lighting regimens). The stylistic proclivities of the presentation are at least occasionally kind of interesting, with Diego bathed in hellish reds and purples, and at times even oranges, as he explores the morgue.

Morgue Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Morgue features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that has both Spanish and Paraguayan Guaraní spoken elements. The sound design here is, as with so much else in this film, far from innovative, with swooping sound effects and bursts of LFE obviously meant to provoke startle responses. Dialogue is kind of tricky in this film, in that Diego is frequently the only person on screen, and so things like telephone calls are utilized. There is good placement of ambient environmental effects, and there's a decently claustrophobic feeling to things that helps to establish Diego's unraveling mind. Optional English subtitles are available.

Morgue Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (HD; 1:24)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the sole supplement has been authored to move on automatically to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

Morgue Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I think if Cardozo had perhaps delayed the reveal of the corpse's "identity" until at least a bit later, and then maybe stayed away from some of the sillier sidebars involving other mayhem, Morgue might have had more impact. There are moments of fleeting style here, but despite the fact that so much of this film plays out in a veritable night that things go bump in, nothing is ever really very scary. The ending will be seen a mile off by virtually anyone with any experience at "twist" laden horror films. Video encounters a few passing obstacles, but audio is fine, for those who are considering a purchase.