Reviewed by Zakia Uddin
Stars Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman, Larry Fessenden, Angus Scrimm, John Speredakos, Eileen Colgan, Brenda Cooney, Daniel Manche, Joel Garland, James Godwin, Heather Robb
Written by Glenn McQuaid
Certification UK 18 | US R
Runtime 85 minutes
Directed by Glenn McQuaid
We first encounter prisoner Arthur Blake (Monaghan) on the last night of his life, as he tells the laid-back Father Duffy (Perlman) how he got into the art of grave-robbing. Blake is to be executed. The film becomes a series of flashbacks, with him telling of his long and tempestuous friendship with his recently beheaded mentor Willy Grimes (Fessenden). On one of their midnight jaunts, they stumble across a zombie girl, whose monetary value alerts them to a potentially lucrative new business avenue. Blake and Grimes start searching out the undead for rich clientele, before their greed pits them against the notoriously vengeful Murphy gang of grave-robbers – who put as many bodies in graves as they take out.
I Sell The Dead is charming and bombastic, with director and writer Glenn McQuaid deftly playing with horror and b-movie conventions. The three parts of the film are signposted with comic book art, recalling 80s comic influenced features like Sam Raimi’s Crimewave. The potentially unwieldy narrative of flashbacks and story-telling is handled well, with the film moving at an ADHD pace. McQuaid even incorporates his short The Resurrection Apprentice into the first half of the film. Admittedly, the stringing together of lots of short stories in a Poe fashion means that there is no exciting pay-off – but that’s not the point. Instead, the entertainment comes from the silliness of the dialogue and the characters’ blasé reactions to increasingly ridiculous events.
Though it might seem a petty point given the film’s bravado and slapstick nature, there are a lot of historical inaccuracies which are hard to ignore. The film is apparently set in Victorian-period Ireland, but the first scenes land us in what looks like the medieval era. Even Perlman’s role as the sack-clothed monk is a definite nod to his part in the medieval thriller The Name of The Rose. Confusingly, at one point, an alien turns up in a grave. This would be funny if the film went all-out with the historical inaccuracies, grave-robbing lots of anachronistic b-movie clichés, but it’s just another unexplored idea.
Sadly, it doesn’t really work as a horror, as it is never graphic enough. For example, we are told a member of the Murphy gang has a face so deformed that the sight of it kills her enemies instantly. We never get to see this face. Frustratingly, there are lots of unfulfilled expectations, including short juicy biographies of the Murphy gang, which should have set them up as entertaining comic book villains. Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm appears very briefly as the sinister Dr Quint, one of their mysterious rich clientele, but we never find out why or what he is doing with the zombie bodies.
Nevertheless, the film has a lot of chutzpah and perfectly captures the broad humour and hokiness of Hammer Horror to which it pays tribute. I Sell The Dead won the best independent feature award at Toronto’s After Dark Film Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a genuine big-hearted homage to the 80s straight-to-video culture, with starring roles from horror veterans, gung ho fearlessness, and imaginative use of readymade low-budget atmospherics. The ending suggests there might be more from Blake and Grimes, which hopefully means McQuaid will get a larger budget and demonstrate his undoubted talents with a less frantic follow-up.