The Dead Don't Die ★★★

"The Dead Don’t Die" has (somehow) been branded a comedy/HORROR. Every trailer I’d seen led me to believe this would be a comedy - BUT MAYBE the thought is that simply putting zombies in a movie is supposed to make it scary. I threw out myt back this week and I have had some TIME on my hands. Anyhoo, this got me thinking about why zombies are scary in the first place. This first “modern zombie” movie was George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968. Before that, “monster movies” had vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other beasts (though there is an argument to be made for Frankenstein as a zombie film). Enter Romero; a man bold enough to stipulate that the thing that might be scarier than the worst monsters we could imagine is US.

Cut forward to 50 years later and in today’s movie climate, the “zombie” as a vessel for a metaphor for our own internal fears about our existence is nothing new. Even most cookie cutter zombie films have a similar structure. There’s usually a group of people that learn about an outbreak and spend the next 90 minutes trying to survive. Along the way, we as an audience get to know them and ultimately live through the experience with them. In the best of those films we learn to relate to the characters on screen. We learn about their fears; love, loss, the afterlife, or the meaning of this life. Ultimately a good zombie movie is scary because WE ARE SCARED.

In "The Dead Don’t Die," Jarmusch takes a quick stand by telling us what to be afraid of. We’re consumers. We’re lazy and we’re complacent. The world is coming to an end because of our greed and we couldn’t care less. The problem is that as an audience, we’re comically beaten over the head with this idea so frequently that it gets old before it’s allowed to get scary. The potential absolute dread of this situation is never allowed to percolate because it’s either too obvious or buried by second-rate jokes.

I think there’s no denying the Bill Murray’s deadpan police chief is funny. Adam Driver as the matter-of-fact, self-aware, small town bumpkin police officer is funny. However, it’s a hysterical (and I don’t use that word lightly) Chloë Sevigny and a ridiculous, samurai-wielding Tilda Swinton alongside most of the auxiliary characters that just… don’t work.

Ultimately, this movie was fun to watch and parts of it caught me off guard. The twists were worth a chuckle or two but in the end, they did more harm than good to this film as a whole. If this movie had stretched another hour I would’ve happily sat and watched it but I won’t watch it again.

Reviewed by Max Minardi. Full review on Episode 130 of FHC.