The longterm effects of Hitchcock's PSYCHO on horror cinema could still be felt decidely some twenty years later and among the more successful to pay homage was William Fruet's 1980 Canadian slasher Funeral Home.

Fruet, who had directed the excellent Death Weekend AKA House By the Lake four years earlier, helmed this Canadian production with the lovely Lesleh Donaldson in the starring role.

Heather (Donaldson) has come to stay with her grandmother, Maude Chalmers (Kay Hawtrey) at her house, an old funeral parlor now converted into a tourist home for the summer. The old woman is married to an undertaker who is now missing...and makes fake flowers on the side that she sells in town.

With no one to greet her at the bus stop, Heather is given a lift to the house by Rick (Dean Garbett). When she arrives, Maude happily greets her.

In answer to a question, Maude tells the girl that her husband James (Heather's grandfather) just disappeared all of a sudden one day.

Living on the property is a former caretaker for Mr. Chalmers, the mentally challenged Billy Hibbs (Stephen E. Mille) who now does odds and ends for Maude. The house itself spooks Heather, as it does other neighbors and residents.

Nearby, a farmer named Sam (Les Rubie) calls Rick's brother, Officer Joe Yates (Alf Humphreys) over to his property where he has discovered an abandoned under some hay. It turns out that it belongs to a missing real estate developer who was last seen trying to buy up land in the area.

At Maude's place, there are new arrivals. Harry Browning (Harvey Atkin) and his tacky mistress Florie (Peggy Mahon) check in and meet Mr. Davis (Barry Morse), another guest.

There is one more unseen person in the house. Maude's voice can be heard speaking with a man...who appears to be her husband. He tells her he doesn't want Heather around because she's liable to snoop.

Florie teases Billy by coming onto him and then laughing in his face. When Maude realizes Harry and Florie are not married...she asks them to leave, calling their relationship "immoral." The two are paid through the weekend and refuse to listen to her.

In the evening, the couple goes out for drinks. Intoxicated, Florie suggests they go to the local quarry...where Maude's truck soon comes up from behind and pushes their car into the water below, killing them both.

Returning from a date with Rick, Heather hears Maude speaking with someone in the basement but her grandmother says it didn't occur. By the morning, Heather has noticed that Harry and Florie are gone - to which Maude says "good riddance to bad rubbish."

Maude drives Mr. Davis into town and notices him go into the police station. Meanwhile, Rick tells Heather that her grandfather was a mean alcoholic and recalls the time when he was boy and Mr. Chalmers locked him and a friend in the basement of the funeral home to scare them.

While searching through the garage, they find a Cadillac hearse belonging to the grandfather. It looks like it had been in a wreck. In addition, they find a necklace with the initials "H D."

Later, Heather gets angry with Rick when he says that her grandfather ran off with another woman while Maude was being treated in a mental institution.

And Maude soon finds out the reason for Mr. Davis' visits to see the police. He has been searching for his wife and has reason to believe that she was having an affair with Mr. Chalmers. Maude angrily denies this and Heather overhears the exchange, including his wife's full name: Helena Davis, which matches the initials on the necklace in the garage.

Returning from a boat trip that night, Mr. Davis is brutally murdered with a pick axe and buried along with his wife's necklace. At the quarry, Heather and her friends find the bodies of Harry and Florie, along with their car.

As he inspects the vehicle, Officer Yates takes note of the fact that there is no luggage...which would be unusual if they had checked out of the tourist home.

Billy is killed next. When Heather and Rick discover his corpse, the killer goes after them. Rick is knocked to the ground, whereby Heather discovers a horrible secret: her grandmother's dual personality. She has been keeping her deceased husband alive by speaking in his voice.

Maude attacks Heather with an axe and as the girl tries to escape, she comes upon the skeleton of James Chalmers among a beautiful flower arrangement. Just then, the police arrive and politely take Maude away...

William Fruet's direction is fluid and the handsome production is aided by Mark Irwin's cinematography, simple production design courtesy of Susan Longmire and Roy Forge Smith...and a classy score composed by Jerry Fielding.

A uniformly good cast makes Funeral Home an entertaining house of parlor tricks. Kay Hawtrey is supremely efficient as Grandma, a delightful performance which colors Mrs. Chalmers equally interesting both in her cookie-baking moments of wholesomeness as well as her grande bouts of psychotic twitching.

Of course, genre regular Lesleh Donaldson (1981's splathappy Happy Birthday to Me as well as 1983's haggy Curtains) is charming and natural in her only true starring role.

The actress fills her character with a polite and relaxed aplomb that belies a deeper goal...her Heather becomes an utterly real young teenager aghast at Grandma's horrifying secrets in the bang up basement finale.

In fact, it might be a good time to point out how appropriately Donaldson represents this era. Both beautifully disarming and pleasingly nondescript, she possesses none of the cynicism and sarcasm (that passes for wit) which would so mar the genre in later years. An innocence in hindsight that won't be recaptured.

Indeed unfettered by the dank virus of today's defensive styles, Donaldson is a breath of spring air...a breezy nonchalance that makes her reactions to the horrors she faces in Funeral Home that much more pure.

And therein lies the overall paralleling strength of Funeral Home. Also known as Cries in the Night, Fruet's modest slasher is a simply executed riff on PSYCHO buoyed by solid performances and a likable atmosphere free from self awareness.