This is a movie I'm already having a hard time recalling, and I finished watching it about four hours ago. It's utterly forgettable. It plays like an hour and a half episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? except with a slightly darker plot.
But it's very tame. I don't think there's any blood in the movie, with the exception of a small gunshot wound scrape. The story relies on the standard cliches of the adults refusing to believe the kids. That's one problem, but the movie suffers from really strange problems with pacing. The last half hour of it is the material that should have been taking up the second half of the movie. The first two thirds of the move are mostly packed with strange character building sequences, establishing relationships and such. The problem is, none of those pay off.
The only thing memorable about the movie is that Dennis Quaid stars in it.
For my own reference - and spoilers below…
The mortician is in the habit of burying his enemies alive. He also has a preserved corpse of his wife, which he's kept in his house for at least two years. Knowing enough about body decomposition, I'll ignore how unrealistic the preservation of the body was.
An addendum. There's a really bizarre little sequence in this movie. While our hero is running from the police in his efforts to save the girl, he briefly passes through a parade. This parade is taking place at night, with lots of glowing lights on participants. It's very strange. The movie takes place in a small town, and I didn't have the impression that there was a Main Street. The sudden inclusion of another setting, a much bigger cast, and the fact that this parade doesn't seem to accomplish anything in his escape makes it a distraction. It actually stuck in my head as being one of the things that was very amateurish about the movie. Maybe it would be acceptable if he had managed to fully lose the police there - or if the parade had been mentioned or advertised earlier in the movie.
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