The Undertaker (1988… ish) opens the only way a certain kind of late-80s horror film knows how: with a woman in immediate danger, a road that looks like it hasn’t seen a living soul since Nixon resigned, and dialogue so aggressively stupid it feels like it’s daring you to turn the film off

What’s this? She’s got a flat tyre. Of course she does. OH NO! She has no spare. Of course she doesn’t. And then — like a cursed genie summoned by sheer narrative laziness — a biker appears, wearing the kind of expression that suggests his entire performance is going to consist of staring and breathing through his mouth.He delivers the immortal line:

“Do you need a man to help you fix this tyre?”

And just like that, four minutes into The Undertaker, you know exactly what you’re dealing with.

This isn’t subtle horror. This isn’t psychological dread. This is a film that shoves its hand down your trousers, steals your wallet, and then asks if you enjoyed it. It is sleazy, mean-spirited, incompetent, and frequently embarrassing — and Satan help me, I adore it.

No Self-Preservation, No Script, No Hope

Our part-time heroine — and I use the term heroine in the loosest possible sense — displays absolutely no survival instincts whatsoever and agrees to hop on the back of the world’s worst actor’s motorcycle, after he offers to take her to a garage.

He doesn’t take her to a garage.

Or civilisation.

Or anywhere that suggests safety.

No, he takes her to the back end of nowhere, because this is an exploitation film and that’s where women go to die.

But wait! A twist! She fights back. She beats the shit out of him with a stick — a genuinely cathartic moment, if we’re being honest — and runs back to the road, where she flags down a kindly older man. A protector. A saviour. A Good Samaritan.

Just kidding.

The next time we see her, she’s half-naked on a slab, throat slit, very much dead.

That’s the first four and a half minutes of The Undertaker.

If you’re expecting the film to suddenly grow a conscience after that, I have some very bad news.

Welcome to the Funeral Home From Hell

The film revolves around a funeral home run by Mr. Ramsey, played by Joe Spinell, a man who looks like he was carved out of cold cuts and regret. Spinell is best known for Maniac (1980), where he played one of the most disturbing killers in slasher history, and The Godfather and Rocky, where his sheer physical presence made him unforgettable even in small roles.

By 1988, Spinell was in poor health, dealing with heart issues, diabetes, and addiction. This was one of Joe Spinell’s final roles, and effectively the last time he carried a film as the central figure. Watching it now feels less like entertainment and more like witnessing the tail end of a career grinding itself into dust.

Spinell’s Mr. Ramsey is an undertaker with a pathological relationship to death, women, and control. He lives above his funeral home with his mute daughter, a character who exists largely to look uncomfortable while horrible things happen around her. Ramsey is a necrophile. Not metaphorically. Not suggested. Just straight-up, sneaking around and doing shit that would would make Alice Cooper blush.

The film leaves very little to the imagination when it comes to the Undertaker’s fixation on dead women. Everything about it is sexualised, obsessive, and rancid — even when the film stops short of explicitly spelling out every grim detail.

Let’s be clear: The Undertaker does not have anything interesting to say about necrophilia. It doesn’t examine obsession, repression, or power. It uses dead women’s bodies as props, because exploitation cinema has always loved the aesthetics of female suffering without any of the responsibility.

There are long, uncomfortable shots of naked corpses. Not erotic. Not scary. Just awkward and grim, like stumbling into a room you absolutely weren’t meant to enter.

This is one of the reasons The Undertaker has such a rough reputation, even among fans of trash horror. It isn’t fun sleaze. It’s mean, joyless sleaze, the kind that feels like it was made by people who didn’t particularly like women or audiences.

And yet.

And yet…

Why This Absolute Garbage Still Works (Sometimes)

Here’s the thing about bad films: not all bad films are equal.

Some are boring. Some are incompetent in ways that make them unwatchable. And then there’s a special category — films that are so nakedly broken they become fascinating.

The Undertaker sits right there.

The acting is uniformly atrocious. No one delivers a line like they believe it was written by a human being. Dialogue lands with the grace of a corpse falling down the stairs. Scenes start too late, end too early, or just sort of… happen.

The pacing is off. The plot barely exists. Characters appear and vanish like the film forgot they were there.

But underneath all of that is a weird, pulsing sincerity. This film genuinely thinks it’s doing something transgressive. Something shocking. Something important.

It isn’t.

But the effort is there.

Joe Spinell: The Only Thing Holding This Together

Spinell is the glue. A sticky, sweaty, deeply uncomfortable glue — but glue nonetheless.

He doesn’t exactly act in The Undertaker so much as exist aggressively. He mutters, leers, and explodes with sudden rage. There’s no subtlety, but there is presence.

Knowing this was one nof his final performances adds a tragic undertone to every scene. Spinell was a man whose career bounced between prestige films and grindhouse trash, and The Undertaker feels like the ugliest possible full stop.

You can see flashes of what he could do — moments where his eyes go cold, where the mask drops and something genuinely unsettling slips through. The film doesn’t deserve him, but it also couldn’t exist without him.

Direction, or the Lack Thereof

The film was directed by William Girdler… except it wasn’t. Girdler died in a helicopter crash in 1978, a full decade before The Undertaker was released. This alone tells you something went very wrong.

In reality, The Undertaker was cobbled together from footage shot years earlier, reworked, reshot, and assembled by different hands. The production history is murky, which explains why the film feels like it was stitched together from spare parts.

Nothing flows. Visual style changes mid-film. Tone swings wildly between sleazy thriller, supernatural horror, and something that almost resembles a police procedural before giving up.

It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a movie — and not in the fun way.

Exploitation Cinema on Life Support

By 1988, exploitation horror was dying. The golden age of grindhouse sleaze was over. Slashers were burning out. Audiences were changing.

The Undertaker feels like a film made by people who missed the memo.

It’s clinging to the ugliest tropes of the 1970s — women as disposable objects, shock without substance, nudity as punctuation — in a decade that was already moving on.

That makes it feel outdated even by late-80s standards, which is impressive in its own way.

Why I Can’t Look Away

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I love terrible films.

I love films that fail loudly. Films that reach for something and miss so badly they spin around and punch themselves in the face.

The Undertaker is one of those films.

It’s a mess. It’s offensive. It’s badly made. Everyone involved should probably feel fucking embarrassed.

But there’s something hypnotic about its ugliness. Something honest about how little it cares whether you approve. It doesn’t wink at you. It doesn’t apologise. It just exists, fully convinced of its own worth.

And in a landscape of safe, focus-grouped horror, there’s something perversely refreshing about that.

Final Thought: Absolute Shite, and I Mean That as Praise

The Undertaker is not good. At fucking all. It is not misunderstood. It is not a hidden gem. It is a dumpster fire with a toe tag.

But it’s also a time capsule of exploitation cinema at its most desperate, a final, ugly gasp from a genre that had already started to rot. It’s anchored by a genuinely fascinating performance from Joe Spinell and wrapped in enough bad decisions to keep cult fans arguing for decades.

I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.But if you love trash — real trash, the kind that sticks to your boots — The Undertaker might just crawl under your skin and refuse to leave.

And honestly?

That’s more than most horror films manage.