In short: The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Centerville, an American small town populated by Jim Jarmusch characters played by Jim Jarmusch’s actor and musician friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Zombie Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Selena Gomez and so on and so forth), suffers under the results of slight changes in the Earth’s axial rotation certainly not at all caused by polar cap fracking, no sir. Namely, some ever so slight troubles with electronic devices, the day night cycle, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song to the film, and the return of the deceased as flesh eating zombies. Needless to say, things are going to end badly.

Even among fans of the great Jim Jarmusch’s late-ish – the kind of late that makes a boy hope the director’s gonna live long enough this will actually turn out to be the mid-period of his career – period, this expedition into the realm of the horror comedy (or really, the realm of what a horror comedy would look like when made by Jarmusch), has a bit of a marmite effect. Also, there’s the “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson. It’s great.

It’s no surprise, really, for here, Jarmusch’s typical love for the laconic and the dead-pan turns even deader (which seems curiously appropriate for a zombie movie), exclusively featuring humour so dry, it’s situated in one of the world’s great deserts. This extra dry approach feels pretty hilarious in itself, like an attempt to really dance on the edge where something can actually still be called humour and not just the in-jokey product of a bunch of friends who somehow got paid for farting around in front of a camera. Me, I found myself amused by this approach more often than not, chuckling quite regularly about some of the running gags, even finding myself snorting about the many, many scenes of Murray and Driver trying to out-dead-pan each other (Murray’s winning, of course, because he’s not been moving his face or his voice much for a few more decades than driver), the throw-away side gags, and of course, Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”.

Plus, how many other films do you know in which Tilda Swinton is playing a perhaps somewhat weird Scottish coroner with an old school samurai thing and turns out to be…something spoilerish? Or whose theme song is Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”?


Seriously, I love the film dearly, but I can’t really blame anyone coming out of this with a puzzled and mildly annoyed expression on their face, because that’s just the kind of horror comedy The Dead Don’t Die is.

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990)

Every horror anthology TV show should have its place in the silver screen sun, so the movie gods gifted us with this one, directed by John Harrison. In the framing story, a witch (Debbie Harry with line delivery that makes me cringe) is just about to bake a little boy (Matthew Lawrence, whose line delivery is not much better than Harry’s, but what the heck, he’s a kid). To distract her, little Timmy tells her stories from her favourite book – obviously called “Tales from the Darkside”.

The first of the stories turns Arthur Conan Doyle’s seminal mummy tale “Lot 249” into an EC revenge story. It’s an effective one at that, seeing as it is paced very sprightly (nothing kills EC style horror easier than dragging), does feature a cool looking mummy murdering its victims by bad imitations of the mummification process, and confuses the viewer with what to today’s eyes looks like a preposterous cast for the sort of thing it is – Christian Slater (!), Steve Buscemi (!!), and Julianne Moore (!!!).

The second tale is a (George Romero-penned) adaptation of Steven King’s “Cat from Hell”. An old rich man (William Hickey) hires a professional killer (David Johansen, because someone involved here apparently did like his New York New Wave and Punk scene) to get rid of the cat that killed all of his relatives. At first, the segment mostly recommends itself through the cool and stylish way its (blueish) flashbacks to the cat’s killing spree and the old man relating it flow into each other, but soon, we not just start off on the duel between the killer and a rather small and cute black cat but can also enjoy a hilarious scenes of an obviously fake cat imitating the face hugger from Alien to smother someone before the segment finishes on a special effects bit that is as gruesome as it is absurd – and it’s very, very absurd.

Last but not least, the film comes to “Lover’s Vow”, a segment that doesn’t directly adapt a literary source but places a variation of the traditional tale wherein a man encounters a supernatural creature, is spared his life in exchange for never telling of his encounter to anyone, and then unwittingly marries the supernatural creature in female form in contemporary New York. Usually, they’ll have children, but in the end, the man will tell his wife of the supernatural encounter in the end, most often losing her and only getting away with his life because the wife doesn’t want to rob their children of their father. Because this is Tales from the Darkside, there’s rather more blood involved in the tale, and the ending is pretty gruesome, but otherwise, this effectively puts its old tale into a still grubby New York, using a gargoyle (turning into Rae Dawn Chong) as its monster (and given that it introduces itself with a decapitation, it is a monster), and James Remar as the poor stupid bastard who marries her.


So, even though there certainly are more artfully made horror anthologies (as well as a bunch of very inferior ones), Tales from the Darkside: The Movie is a good time for the discerning horror fan. If nothing else, it is surprisingly well directed given that Harrison is mostly a TV guy from an era when TV directors really weren’t allowed to do much, and that rare case of an anthology film without a weak segment. Unlike your usual bro horror anthology of today that generally has only one segment that isn’t weak.