a SIFF 2009 review
Lumbering Dead Better Left Buried
With the guillotine hours away from falling upon his noggin, grave robber Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) tells stories of his travails to Father Duffy (Ron Perlman) about his unusual exploits with friend and fellow reprobate Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden). Stories of zombies, demons and other mysterious creatures of the underworld ensue, the mysterious Dr. Vernon Quint (Angus Scrimm) at the center of some of the more nasty ones.
Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan in IFC Films' I Sell the Dead
I Sell the Dead should be a total hoot. Cast to perfection, looking suitably eerie thanks to production designer David Bell and art director Beck Underwood, superbly scored by Jeff Grace (The Last Winter) and lovingly shot by Richard Lopez (X,Y) the film has all the elements in place to be a gloriously gory peon to the horrifically loony early days of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.
Unfortunately, thanks to writer/director Glenn McQuaid’s haphazard screenplay and his lumbering attempts at pacing, this macabre tale of blood and dismemberment isn’t even remotely special. Instead it is actually something of a waste, and by the time it was over I was just happy the almost inert staging of it all hadn’t put me to sleep.
Unfair? No, I don’t think so. Going into a movie like this I want the giddy nastiness of The Evil Dead or the joyous gore-covered absurdum of Braindead. I want to see intestines pour across the floor with the style and fury of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, eager to discover surreal eye-popping putrescence like that found in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.
Instead what we have here is really rather tame. Sure McQuaid crushes some heads and slashes a few jugulars, but it’s all so perfunctory the end result is actually kind of boring. Each of Blake’s stories aren’t that interesting, and even when a truly sinister character like Dr. Quint is introduced it is almost as if the director is just so happy to have thought the guy up he ends up forgetting to come up with something fun to do with him.
I might not have been completely happy with it but Dead Snow at least took this genre on with the right attitude. That film knew how to push a person’s buttons, the filmmakers reveling in their Nazi zombie stew with such gory euphoria their excitement was almost catching. It hit a lot of right notes and sure has heck didn’t skimp on the bloodletting, the visceral kick of watching a ragtag group of skiers tear apart a platoon of the undead one difficult to dislike.
In this case, while the actors do try and the movie does seriously looks fantastic other than a few unexpected moments of blood-splattered genius (there’s a bit on a deserted beach with the two antiheroes, a feminine companion, some requisitely unseemly villains and a couple of crates that’s particularly wonderful) there’s not much to crow about. There’s no energy and little inspiration, all of which makes I Sell the Dead a journey to the macabre better left buried in a forgotten graveyard.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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