Joe Spinell's last movie, this film was never released to theatres or to video and the only known copy belonged to the actor best known for his role in Maniac. This was a bootleg for years until Code Red put out a version in 2010 that was padded with public domain footage to increase its length. Vinegar Syndrome re-released it in 2016 without that footage.

Uncle Roscoe (Spinell) attends community college during the day and kills women at night, saving their body parts in his basement, Spinell is, of course, the best part of this movie, acting completely unhinged and making what should be a typical film into anything but just by the ability of his performance.

His nephew Nicky joins Pam, who is one of his professors and her roommate Mandy to figure out what Roscoe is up to. But soon, the hunters become the hunted and pay the price.

Even Spinell at the end of his life, struggling through making this movie, is better than anything most actors will do on their best day. Seeing him cry and try to talk to a corpse is at once heartbreaking and hilarious.

Director Frank Avianca is actually a pseudonym for the following four people: Screenwriter William James Kennedy, cinematographer Richard E. Brooks (the cinematographer for Dark August, Teenage Mother and Creating Rem Lazar) and producers Steve Bono and Frank Avianca (writer and producer of Blood Song) all of whom had a hand in directing this film.

The Undertaker is not very well known to say the least; and I really can't say I'm surprised about that as the film is rather silly and lacklustre. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that this is one of the last films of cult star Joe Spinell, I highly doubt that anyone would remember it at all. As you would expect from a low budget trash film such as this; the plot is not particularly inventive and the writing is even worse. The film starts off with a rather amusing scene that features an attempted rape by a motorcyclist, and it really sums up what you're going to see nicely as the victim must rank as one of the slowest-witted of all time! The plot focuses on an undertaker named Roscoe. He's a sick man and has decided to take his job into his own hands and has begun killing people himself. He slices up his victims and keeps them as his 'friends' inside the funeral home he lives in. Naturally, it's not long before the police find out what's happening and begin to investigate.

Joe Spinell is best known for his role in 1980's Maniac; but anyone hoping for anything like as good as that is liable to be sorely disappointed. This film does feature a handful of murders; but none of them are particularly violent or bloody and mostly we just get to see the killer and his dead victim after the event. I don't know if this was an attempt at 'less is more' or (more likely) the budget constraints meant no gore could be afforded; but either way it's disappointing. As the film is very hard to track down, the copy that I saw was less than great and looks like someone spread Vaseline all over the film stock; but even so it's obvious that the film has a trashy look about it anyway. This does lend itself well to the plot, which is also trashy, but still the film is not very nice to look at. The Undertaker runs for ninety minutes, and even though that's an average running time for films like this; it still feels overlong. The ending is serviceable, but not really worth the wait. Overall, I can't say that this film is worth tracking down, even for hardcore Spinell fans.