Mortician at the Movies: Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers

Hello kids, it’s me, Your Favorite Mortician, and when I’m not stealing shoes, belts, or money from corpses, I enjoy a night at the cinema. So pull up a casket bier and get cozy for some Funeral Industry insight to the 1989 buddy comedy, Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers!

What do you get when two totally awesome surfer dudes get a job proposition from their mafia connected Uncle Vito to work at a funeral home? A hilarious comedy that makes you question the decisions you’ve made with your life!

Vincent and Freddy are two totally awesome surfer bro brothers who are down on their luck after their recent invention, the Surf-A-Matic 2000, fails to make any sales. Coincidentally, their Uncle Vito needs a few paisanos to keep an eye on the local morticians who borrowed a hefty sum of money from the mafia. Throwing all rational thought to the wind, Uncle Vito makes Freddy and Vincent an offer they can’t refuse: getting summer jobs at the Greener Pastures Funeral Home. Whoa, talk about a heinous predicament!

But what the dude-bros don’t know is Lou, the mortician, and Doc, a gaunt scientist holed up in the basement of the Funeral Home, are working on a serum to bring the dead back to life. Freddy and Vincent come to the realization that they might be on the ground floor of a potentially profitable business and decide their jobs at the funeral home aren’t so bad and start stealing bodies for Lou and Doc to test on for a piece of the body reanimating pie.

Obviously this movie deserves a Nobel Prize for Artistic Achievement, but I’m not here to discuss the merits of filmmaking, I’m here to cram some funeral know-how cotton up the ass of Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers.

The first red flag of inauthenticity raised to this crafty mortician, yours truly, is Lou and Doc are indebted to the mafia because they need money to secretly further fund their body reanimation serum. Yes, I can believe scumbags from the Funeral Industry would concoct some potion to reanimate the dead to cash in and retire, anyone who has ever worked in a funeral home knows funeral home business owners are cheap scumbags! I even knew a guy who dug holes in the marshy woods behind his mortuary to bury bodies in instead of cremating them because he didn’t want to pay the exorbitant gas bill and ended up giving families urns full of cement mix.

Where I call skeptic is If Lou and Doc were really strapped for cash, AND they were already mutilating corpses to resurrect them from the dead, I’m sure they would have no qualms about cutting some corners to get a little extra dough rather than contact the mafia for monetary assistance. But I guess that shoots a hole through a huge plot point in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.

The second issue I had with Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers, since you brought up mutilating corpses, was Freddy and Vincent’s seamless transition from happy go lucky teenage surfer dudes into body defiling ghouls. I have seen my share of prospective apprentices walk out of the funeral home during interviews because they got spooked, and these were people wanting to get into the funeral industry. Freddy and Vincent are in their late teens and don’t want to be working in a funeral home over their summer break in the first place, they even get green in the gills when Lou shows them the cockamamie embalming process, that was as factually accurate as The National Enquirer. But when the duo pick up a body literally in the next scene and let their deranged friend Stu manhandle it, paint it with makeup, and then post it up in the hearse’s window to fuck with a car who cut them off Freddy and Vincent are totally fine with it. For me it was at least a good three or four months before I was taking out my contempt for the living in various forms of violence on the dearly departed, the clearly sociopathic Freddy and Vincent slide into defilement like it was second nature.

The last issue I had with how the death care industry was represented in Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers was the Catholic funeral for Don Carlo at the end of the movie. In the movie, the priest officiating the service is still dressed in his black attire and white collar and begins the service without the casket even being present. Dios Mio, if Catholic Funeral Services were that simple, we’d of all gone broke ages ago!

If anyone has ever been to a Catholic funeral they know it has more pomp and circumstance than the goddamn Super Bowl Halftime Show. Traditionally the priest is dressed to the nines in his best ‘I swear I’m not a pedophile’ outfit leads the casket into the chapel covered by a hideously plain swath of fabric called a pall. For all my secular friends out there the pall is to remind people that regardless of how much you foolishly spent on the casket, everyone dead is seen as equal in God’s eyes-under something that could be mistaken for a tablecloth your grandmother bought in 1959. During the Catholic Mass there is singing, praying for the dead babies, incense, wine drinking, hating fags, cracker eating, and shaking the hands of your neighbor. You can guarantee this charade lasts a solid forty-three to forty-nine minutes and costs roughly as much as a Caribbean Vacation when all said and done.

In my opinion, Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers isn’t going to win and Exemplary Service Awards from the Order of the Golden Rule, but it’s fun to watch a couple of goofball teenagers throw their lives away on an industry that destroyed my empathy but garnered a free wardrobe of clothing ‘lightly soiled’ by blood spatter.

Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.