Today I’m reviewing the 2019 zombie film “The Dead Don’t Die“. If you’ve read my other Z-film reviews you are well aware that I have a rating system. It works on the Red/Yellow/Green-light colour scheme but with a zombie-film theme….
- Red Blood — Blood can carry infection, that’s bad, keep away
- Yellow Puss — Puss is gross, but not the worst thing in the world
- Green Ooze — There’s a certain kind of freeky-cool thing to ooze if you’re a zombie fan
That said, I’ll get down to the point — I rate The Dead Don’t Die as Red Blood. Just before watching it I saw someone comment about it online. They said that you have to appreciate the writer or director’s style of comedy, or it’s in the form of a certain kind of humor — or whatever — but the film is just a stupid, slow-moving, and 103 minutes of non-funny hyper-deadpan pointlessness.
One would think that this film would be magnificent just by looking at the cast list — Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop, Carol Kane, and others not worth mentioning — but it’s . . . well, anything but magnificent.
I think Bill Murray’s character says it best during the first half of the film …
“I don’t think you want to see this … this is really awful — maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen.“
I tried finding what the budget was for this cinematic sleep-aid. The-Numbers.com gave just about every digit except the budget. Wikipedia would only report that it made $14.9 million Box office — which at movie ticket prices these days that means there are 750,000 people who wished they hadn’t gone to the theater that night. According to The Irish Times , director Jim Jarmusch said that costs were kept down on this film because “… corporate overlords have sucked up everything, and for me to even get financing is difficult … (the cast) were paid in oatmeal. They were not paid well.”
Outside of feeling a bit like early zombie films, there’s no point in seeing this Z-film. It doesn’t go anywhere and it doesn’t show Z-film fans anything new … or for that matter at all interesting. If there was anything that prompted me to expel one of the various types of laugh-responses, it wasn’t memorable. At best, this film belabors the viewer. Fortunately I didn’t directly watch “The Dead Don’t Die” because there are many other banal things I can think of that are better worth doing for 103 minutes of my time.
Also, “The Dead Don’t Die” performed so magnificently that it made my List Of Zombie Films To AVOID.