phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2020

The Dead Don't Die



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 44min
Country: USA, Sweden, South Africa
Language: English
Genre Tags: Comedy, Fantasy, Horror
Plot Summary: The peaceful town of Centerville finds itself battling a zombie horde as the dead start rising from their graves.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: This movie thinks it's funny. I did not find it funny. It feels like a bunch of friends got together and improvised an entire movie based on their own in-jokes. I'm generally a Jarmusch fan, but this bounced off me hard.


Outside Reviews:

Matt Zoller Seitz
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Jim Jarmusch's style is so singular and versatile that if you fall in love with it, as some of us did over 30 years ago with Stranger than Paradise, you'll believe there's no such thing as a bad Jarmusch picture, because you'll judge each new film in relation to Jarmusch's best, not what anyone else might've theoretically done with the same material. The Dead Don't Die is far from Jarmusch's best, but there's something to be said for its zonked-out acceptance of extinction.


A.A. Dowd
Grade: C - Bill Murray and Adam Driver face the end-times in Jim Jarmusch's lame zom-com The Dead Don't Die

It takes all of five minutes for Jim Jarmusch's new movie, the half-assed horror-comedy The Dead Don't Die, to place a vast stretch of ironic distance between itself and its audience. The film's eponymous theme song, a tongue-in-cheek country-western ditty by Sturgill Simpson, has just rolled over the opening credits. Not a moment later, Jarmusch cues it up again on the radio of a squad car. Why does it sound so familiar, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) wonders aloud. "Well, it's the theme song," his deputy, Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), matter-of-factly replies. This kick to the fourth wall, the film's first but not last, is an early instruction not to take any of what follows too seriously, or at face value. After all, it's hard to care much about characters in a movie when they keep telling you they're just characters in a movie.