Blu Review: I SELL THE DEAD15 – 84mins – 2008
Written by: Glenn McQuaid
Directed by: Glenn McQuaid
Starring: Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden, Ron Perlman, Brenda Cooney, John Speredakos, Heather Bullock, Alisdair Stewart, Angus Scrimm, Joel Garland, Aiden Redmond
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Making light work of some truly dirty dealings in much the same vein as John Landis’ tame-but-tolerable take on a true story Burke & Hare, this low budget grave-robbing period comedy – a promising debut from Irish writer/director McQuaid which pre-dates the Pegg/Serkis vehicle by over eighteen months – throws an additional ingredient into the casket some thirty minutes in when the cadavers start coming back from the dead!!
The supernatural/horror elements aren’t overbearingly dominant, but they settle symbiotically with the offbeat characterisation of immoral-but-good-natured dead peddlers Arthur Black (Lost’s Monaghan) and Willie Grimes (Fessenden). However, a throwaway scene in which a peculiarly frozen stiff transpires to be a little grey man who all too quickly is beamed up to his mothership and disregarded with a shrug does feel like a frivolous step too far for the sake of a mild chuckle.
We join the story in media res (that’s in the middle of the action for all those who don’t speak Latin), with Willie having already been executed for the crimes of tomb raiding and murder. Five hours before Arthur is due to follow suit and kneel beneath the guillotine (despite his assertion that he is innocent – of the murder charge, at least), unorthodox priest Father Duffy (Season of the Witch’s Perlman) pays a visit to the condemned man’s cell and we learn of the grisly business that brought him to this point via a series of fragmented flashbacks.
As endearing as these cheeky chaps are, Arthur’s abridged life story does feel a little meandering at times (time is precious as he nears the chop, yet he considers it imperative to describe an ale-chugging contest at the local boozer to his transcribing visitor), but the alcohol-smuggling Father reels him back on focus by demanding to know more of Arthur and Willie’s clashes with rival band of enigmatic corpse hawkers “The House of Murphy” – for reasons that soon become clear…
The film’s low budget is effectively stretched with a profusion of moody, mist-shrouded moonlit locales which are creepily atmospheric if sparsely decorated, while a neat aesthetic idiosyncrasy sees a number of artistic shots and character profiles morph into comic book-style illustrations. It’s a polished touch which helps accentuate I Sell the Dead’s fundamental tongue-in-cheek absurdity, even if it doesn’t lend itself to any narrative function.
In a CR@B Shell: An affable and distinctive calling card for filmmaking newcomer Glenn McQuaid, I Sell the Dead is a charmingly lightweight post pub time-passer which outdoes Burke & Hare on laughs, even if the zombie horror component could have done with a bit more bite.
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Supported by an ensemble of colourful misfit cohorts (McLendon-Covey, Kemper and McCarthy), Annie and Helen attempt to give Lillian her dream send-off, but their competitive natures often lead to cringingly awkward but laugh-out-loud hilarious calamities which begin to threaten Annie’s friendship with Lillian – and her involvement in the fast-approaching nuptials.
Too many of the sketches feel overlong; favourite characters (such as MacFarlane's wacky “Palpy” and Donald “Turk from Scrubs” Faison's everyman Gary the Stormtrooper) are recycled to death while other more obvious targets (Jar Jar, C3PO, little Ani, the Ewoks) are sidelined to little more than cameos. Yes, admittedly, it would be far too easy to bully the weak, but when Ahmed Best and Anthony Daniels gamely return to voice their career-shaping roles and the boy-who-will-be-Vader is brought to life by none other than Zac Efron, then you can't help but feel like they are somewhat wasted with no more than a couple of lines apiece.
I can’t abide the contemporary assumption that everyone living in the twenty-first century is so darn flippant about who they fuck, therefore I was initially concerned that Ivan Ghostbusters Reitman’s skewed rom-com-minus-the-rom would favour the raunchier aspect of this friends-with-benefits pairing over the deeper issue of why Emma is so adamant that her life is better off without love, but I was pleased that neither character was painted as an immoral whore who slept around with any Tom, Dick or Hairy (yes, that was a purposeful misspelling).
Shifting the action from Las Vegas to Thailand , Todd Philips' much anticipated sequel is otherwise content simply to give its audience more of the same - even down to an awkward scene in an elevator! On an impromptu stag night prior to Stu’s marriage to Lauren (Chung), the self-proclaimed Wolfpack wake up after what was meant to be “one beer on the beach” with a chain smoking capuchin monkey, a severed finger and returning hyperactive gangster Leslie (Community’s zanily irreverent Jeong) in a dirty Bangkok hotel room.
The first 20minutes are the real pace-zapping culprits, dragging the film into a boring lull even bloody carnage can't lift it out of. We are introduced to a group of spectators who are stood out in the desert watching and commenting on the film-within-a-film taking place before them – a film which only some of the “actors” think is scripted and others believe is completely authentic. It’s a supposedly avant-garde comment on people enjoying unrealistic films despite nothing on screen making a jot of sense – except Dupiex forgot to inject his "innovative" absurdity with even an iota of fun.
Rubber basically tries too hard to be daring and experimental – but clearly there’s a damn good reason why there’s never been a film about a killer wheel covering before: it's stoopid! Dupiex’s tongue-in-cheek utilization of the metafiction literary device also fails spectacularly: the on-screen audience initially want to watch the horror unfold through binoculars, but they are deprived of food and water and made to sleep in the desert as if being tortured, before an oddball director's lackey (Plotnik) slaughters a turkey for them to devour, which he has poisoned to kill them all off!! Say WHAT?!
Well the issue certainly isn’t with the cast; they’re all game for a laugh (impish Toby Jones even strips naked to reveal a worrying lack of genitalia), and the homage to retro "swords and sorcery" adventures makes for a remarkably rousing quest as the Prince’s encounter fantastical creatures, traitorous kinsmen, a village of murderous savages and a lithe female warrior (Natalie 
Rescued from the black hole of cancellation and back on an all new channel, this “sixth season” (if we count the four DVD movies as a 16 episode run) has been split in two, with this first volume of 13 episodes being followed in June 2011 by another 13. Spread over two discs, the episodes look fantastic in widescreen format, even in spite of all the much-debated budgetary cuts resultant from a move to a cable network. The scenes rendered in 3D (of particular note a scene from “The Mutants Are Revolting” in which Bender remains static while holding a combustible soufflé as the ship jilts and wobbles around him) look particularly clean and vivid.
Fry’s innate idiocy is once more mined in “The Duh Vinci Code” (no prizes for guessing the inspiration behind that one!), where the Fry and his great-great-great-great-gr.... nephew unlock a secret hidden in the great Renaissance artist’s works which sees them transported to an alien world where the man himself still lives – and is taunted for his relative “stupidity” by a race of gifted aliens. The source reference has long since past its kitsch peak, the story is far too much of a stretch and the plot weak, making this one of my least favoured episodes of the new batch.
Other successful episodes are “Lethal Inspection”, in which Hermes and Bender team up to track down the Bureaucrat who failed to notice a mortal glitch in Bender’s programming, “That Darn Katz!”, in which Nibbler and Amy must try to stop a race of irresistibly cute felines from altering the orbit of the earth, and the aforementioned “The Mutants Are Revolting”, the series' 100th episode benchmark, which sees the crew sentenced to a spell in the sewers – and will have an almighty impact on the future demarcation of the deformed sub-species in all future episodes. 
As her best friend (Alyson Michalka), fanatical chastity groups and teachers turn against her, Olive soon realises that her social experiment of not having sex but saying you are has its drawbacks – namely, she’s not actually getting any sex! And so Olive takes to her web cam (how very twenty first century!) to confess her sins and win back the respect she has spurned, and the affection of the one guy she really does want to wear an “A” for, Todd (Penn Badgley).
So the moral at the end of the exercise is admirable enough, if as obvious as Jack Black discovering beauty isn’t only skin deep, but Hall Pass’s honour is muddied by the wives actively enjoying the freedom their relaxed vows offers them as they party with Fischer’s dad’s baseball team. In fact, Applegate’s Grace comes out of the experience by far the least favourably. I must be a traditionalist to feel decidely uneasy about the “free love” subject matter, but it does come across as somewhat desperate and indecent, especially considering Rick has two young children!
Incorporating all of the footage from the wacky teaser into an even wackier expanded storyline concerning Trejo’s aging vigilante ex-federale crusading against a racist senator’s (gamely hammed up by screen great De Niro) attempts to deport all Mexican immigrants, Machete is a no-holds-barred orgy of bangs, bullets, blades, boobs, banter, bribes, beddings, beheadings and bungled assassination attempts.
You see, Paul has escaped from Area 51 after 60 years of scientific examinations and helping influence some of the film industries biggest names with realistic Martian storylines (this inspires a hilarious flash back to an early ‘80s phone conversation between Paul and a certain Steven Spielberg, who needs some help with a little project called ET). But now the little grey man has out-lasted his usefulness to the government, and he eschews their plan to dissect his brain by doing a runner.
It sounds as corny as a flying pig-shaped weather vane, doesn't it? I will admit that I rolled my eyes at the line “Let's kick some grass!” in the trailer, but rest assured that the army of writers (I count nine – and that's not including Bill Shakespeare as the inspiration behind this quasi-related retelling) raise their game far higher over the course of the animated escapades. Okay, so first and foremost it is a tragedy-averting kid's flick (Jensen's talking frog and Cumming's exotic flamingo being the most obvious panderers to the young demographic), but I was genuinely amused throughout, as the film's tongue stays firmly within its porcelain cheek.
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Far and away the highlight of the season for me was the David Schwimmer-starring episode “Greenzo”, which saw the former Friends star become the face of Jack’s latest eco-friendly campaign as the eponymous green-suited mascot 
