The Dead Don't Die

"Why does that song sound familiar?"

"Because it's the theme song."

2 cops are driving around a zombie infested town making smug meta jokes. 10 minutes into The Dead Don't Die and the cringe starts. It doesn't stop. I hated this film.

Cliff (Bill Murray) and Ronnie (Adam Driver) are cops in the small town of Centerville. They've noticed something odd is going on. Chickens are going missing. Cows are legging it into the woods. News reports are talking about polar fracking and how it's knocked the Earth's poles askew. The Moon is looking strange in the sky. "Hipster" red shirts from the big city are rolling into town. Disembowelled waitresses are popping up. A weird Scottish samurai / undertaker (Tilda Swinton) is knocking around. Centerville has gone bad.

The above paragraph paints a very entertaining picture of The Dead Don't Die. The above paragraph is actually better than The Dead Don't die. There's nothing here we haven't seen a million times before. Even for a Jim Jarmusch film this is exceptionally dull. If his name and the cache attached to it weren't on the poster no one would care about this one bit. It would be just another zombie flick in an exceptionally overstuffed field. Jarmusch's other sojourns into genre film at least had a reason for being. The extreme grit of Dead Man, Ghost Dog : The Way Of The Samurai and it's clash of cultures and the sheer coolness of Only Lovers Left Alive. Here we get painful humour, action that looked old hat in The Walking Dead a decade ago, plot twists from nowhere and a whole dose of "LOOK WHO IT IS!!" cameos. The Iggy Pop cameo works though, i'll say that. Zombie Iggy and normal Iggy are more or less interchangable.

Tom Waits as a forest dwelling homeless chap called Hermit Bob acts as a kind of one man greek chorus to proceedings. Jarmusch uses him as mouthpiece for his thoughts on modern day society and thinks he's being clever about it but just ends up riffing on ideas George A. Romero perfected in 1978's Dawn Of The Dead. Bringing that masterpiece to mind was never a good idea and only ends up showing this up for the fluff it is. We all know capitalism and technology has turned us into the walking dead. There's no need to beat us over the head with it but if you are going to do it at least make it entertaining. The best horror movies were always a state of the world address as well as everything else. This isn't one of those.

The Dead Don't Die is a horror comedy that's neither scary enough, gory enough or funny enough to be memorable. There's humour in here that wouldn't feel out of place in an episode of The Last Of The Summer Wine and the odd decision to replace zombie innards with black dust robs us of the vicarious thrills provided by the blood and guts of other less squeamish undead movies. I don't know about you but when I go to a horror like this I want bodily chunks flying and black humour splashing around. Here we get punchlines repeated into the ground and Rosie Perez playing a news reporter called Posey Juarez. No seriously.

A great cast can't save this at all. Danny Glover and Caleb Landry Jones look embarrassed. Carol Kane is totally wasted. Bill Murray looks like he'd prefer to be dead. Chloe Sevigny at least tries as the only person in the town with a realistic reaction to what's going on and Adam Driver gets the best line of dialogue in the whole film. One that describes the whole thing perfectly in 2 small words.

"Oh yuck."