I Sell the Dead: Review By Brian Gallagher

Everybody knows how damn popular those vampire flicks are these days. I won’t even mention any of the titles, for fears of blood-curdling screeches that are heard at the single utterance of the film’s name or even the damn star. While vampires might be big biz these days, it seems that zombies are getting the short end of the stick, but not with the delightful indie release I Sell the Dead, which doesn’t deal with zombies so much as it does with some 19th Century blokes who discover them: grave robbers.

See, Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) and Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden) are two of the scurviest grave robbers ever to hit the European Isles in the 1800s. But, as we see in the film’s opening moments, the pair have seen better days. Willie is put out of his misery via the guillotine and Arthur has been captured by the long arm of the law. While he awaits his death by the very same guillotine, accused of grave robbing, which he’s guilty of, and murder, which he isn’t guilty of, he’s offered a bit of a reprieve from the odd Father Francis Duffy (Ron Perlman). With five hours before the blade comes down on his neck – and with some coercing from a whiskey bottle – Arthur starts telling his tale of how he got into the grave-robbing business, and that’s where the story really begins, full of crazy adventures of their thieving days, their run-in’s with the undead (including a particularly brilliant exchange where they find their first zombie) and their battles with the ruthless grave-robbing gang, The House of Murphy.

The film was written and directed by Glenn McQuaid, who’s making his feature debut, but has a familiarity with this world since the film is based off his 2005 short film, The Resurrection Apprentice. McQuaid does show quite a bit of potential here, with a slick narrative that cuts between Arthur’s flashback tales to him in the jail with Father Duffy telling those tales while they pass the whiskey back and forth. McQuaid does have a rather nice flair for nuanced dialogue that is very natural and doesn’t hit you over the head. However, one of my main beefs is that since this is a period piece using either British actors or actors using a thick accent, a lot gets lost in translation, especially in this unpolished dialect they speak in. Still, for an 85-minute film, McQuaid develops his characters more than films much much longer and he has a very unique flair for humor as well. There aren’t tons of knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud moments, but there’s a very nuanced blend of humor here and, combined with the delightfully awesome score from Jeff Grace, that touches on a lot of genre classics, it’s pretty damn hard not to just be smiling throughout this crazy little film.

For such a low-budget affair, the quality of McQuaid’s writing certainly did help in drawing out a few big names for the cast like Ron Perlman as Father Duffy and Dominic Monaghan as Arthur Blake. Monaghan and Larry Fessenden are just terrific as Blake and Grimes here, a nice little blend of Blake’s younger, more ambitious yin to Grimes’ salty, complacent yang. They make a great grave-robbing team, but you can tell that they both want something different out of life: Blake wants to make a change while Grimes is happy enough to just wait for it to happen. The film mainly revolves around their adventures, but there are some solid supporting turns from Brenda Cooney as Fanny, the apprentice they took on as they became more successful, and who becomes involved with Blake, John Speredakos as Cornelius Murphy, one of the ruthless Murphy’s of The House of Murphy and, while he doesn’t really have a huge role here, it’s nice to see Ron Perlman step into something like this, as an unusual priest.

One of the only other things I don’t like about McQuaid film is that, well, there’s enough material here, but 1) there could/should be plenty more and 2) the film is structured rather oddly. While the flashbacks are all fine and dandy, there really isn’t much of a sense of rising action and climax, like certain events leading to other events. It’s just a tale about these vagabonds who do whatever work they can find. While it doesn’t necessarily have to be longer, I think it would’ve been more beneficial to flesh out the story more and give a better sense of raising the stakes, so to speak.

Overall, though, I’d have to say that I would recommend I Sell the Dead to anyone into screwball horrorcoms. It’s almost like a period version of Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, only with grave-robbers instead of a monster-slayer. It’s not overly scary or hilarious, but it’s a charming little flick that has just the right amount of camp in just the right circ*mstances. This is a film that definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously, but that doesn’t mean you won’t seriously enjoy I Sell the Dead.