MAUSOLEUM

DEMON POSSESSION HAS NEVER BEEN SO BORING

★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It With Fire)

Director: Michael Dugan

1983

Someone worked hard on the monster costume in Mausoleum, but be forewarned, that’s the only real effort put into this movie about a sexy woman possessed by a demon. From wooden acting to special effects that would get any student kicked out of film school (even in the 80s), you’ll be bored and frustrated up to the moment said woman’s boobs turn into two screaming goblins.

The film begins with an aunt comforting her niece Susan at the girl’s mother’s grave. Susan breaks away from the woman and runs through the massive cemetery, and manages to find the one mausoleum out of hundreds that contains an evil spirit haunting Susan’s Nomed family bloodline. Someone from the film crew then sticks a hose in front of the camera to show it’s raining while Susan and the graveyard remain bone-dry, and that’s when I sat back in bed and muttered, “Oh…no.” Susan enters the mausoleum where green lights glow over a mysterious coffin—get used to that green gel—and a possession attaches to her body like a virus, ready to erupt when she’s an adult.

On a side note, I’m a history buff, so I get annoyed when I hear the mausoleum is supposed to have been built in 1682 when the outside shot shows it’s clearly Victorian architecture. But we’re about to watch a woman grow goblin boobs, so who cares, right?

SPOILERS There’s a time jump and Susan's aunt tell her psychiatrist she's very concerned her niece will succumb to the curse like her mother did, despite Susan now being married to a nice man who is not Matthew McConaughey, and living in a mansion. She has reason to be worried. After boogying the night away with her husband at a club, Susan scorches a Dan Haggerty look-alike when he gets grabby with her, and she uses a rake to kill the gardener after having sex with him in the garage. Apparently, having a demon inside you makes you frisky, but her targets aren’t only men—everyone’s in the path of Susan’s wrath with the exception of her husband whose affection keeps her human. For now.

This a lazy story with a pencil-drawn protagonist. There’s no reason to feel bad about Susan’s transformation because she’s devoid of personality; all we know about her is that she has an excellent lingerie collection. The only bright spot in this whole movie is the sorely underused, religious housekeeper, Elsie (played by the legendary LaWanda Page), who wisely observes, “There’s some strange shit going on in this house.”

There’s a threadbare mythology about a diary and a crown of thorns, but by the climax of the film, when the goblin boobs make their debut, you’re half asleep. If Elsie was a main character, this film might have been worth seeing once, but as it is, Mausoleum isn’t even good for a night of bad horror movie watching with friends.

Oh, and Nomed is demon spelled backwards. Take that Troll 2.

GENRES: Body Horror, Diverse Characters, Monster/Creature

NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this website's (nicolinatorres.com) blog posts or publications to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.