Police psychic (that's what they did before there was a CSI) Alley Cates (Deborah Rose) has retired from her job and life in general when her old friend/boss Jersey Callum (Ed Nelson) talks her into helping him one last time. Three half decomposed child corpses have been found with a mortician, and Alley is Jersey's last hope to identify them. The mortician tells the police the funniest thing about these corpses. If you believe him, his family has been cursed with keeping the world safe from the Living Dead by feeding them the scraps that the morticionary business provides. The corpses are just "playing possum" now to get to a better and more fun food source.
When Alley, Jersey and his partner Mullen (James Eustermann) make a nightly visit to the morgue, the mad ramblings turn out to be plain truth. It does not take long until a motley crew of survivors is trapped in the sublevel of the morgue with three very hungry undead.
The Boneyard was directed by James Cummins, who mostly worked as a special effects man on films like House. As far as effects people directing films go, he is one of the better ones - ironically enough some of the later special effects look rather hilariously bad and are the biggest flaws in a very entertaining piece of film.
We aren't talking big art, of course, but a likeable piece of horror comedy with equally likeable protagonists - most of them middle aged or older, not pretty and very much feeling like real grown-ups, something much of the movie part of the horror genre avoids like the plague. Understandably enough, since not very attractive people like Alley or Jersey need a certain amount of characterization to be accepted by the viewer, a lofty goal that can only be reached by a costly combination of actors who can actually act and script written by someone who's not the director's ten year old nephew. The script here does just enough to provide the actors with the opportunity to make watching their characters worthwhile and I for my part was very happy with an older, overweight woman as my heroine. That, and the sly humor of most of film, is what makes it worth watching, even when the badly thought out final stretch arrives and we are suddenly treated to some dubious animatronic creatures instead of the very effective zombie make-up of the children, as it seems in an ill-advised go for the elusive giant poodle zombie slapstick comedy fan.
Still Alley, Jersey and the gang are very much worth your time, while poodle zombie and the other thing (you'll know what I mean) may be a bad fit for the tone of the movie, but are certainly funny enough in their unfunniness.
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