Llakor

I Sell the Dead is a big, sloppy horror comedy that refuses to take itself too seriously. This has advantages and drawbacks. The 85 minutes of the film breeze by and the film is full of bits sometimes funny, sometimes scary, sometimes gory, occasionally all three at once, but the individual bits are much better than the sum of the film's parts.

The story, such as it is, follows professional grave robber Arthur Blake (played by Dominic Monaghan). Arthur's partner-in-crime Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden) has just had his head chopped off for murder and Arthur has one night left before his own head is forfeit for the same crime. Arthur insists that he is innocent of murder, but there are plenty of other crimes that he is willing to confess to when bribed with Irish Whisky by a Catholic priest (played by Ron Perlman).

Since the movie is a series of grave-robbing anecdotes confessed by Arthur, it becomes a sort of horror anthology - a series of disjointed tales, all linked by a similar cast (Arthur and Willie) and a similar theme (grave robbing). Like most horror anthologies, there is no consistent mythology, because all mythologies are true and happening simultaneously even when they contradict one another.

It probably didn't help that I saw this film the same night as Trick 'r Treat, a horror anthology that avoids all of the traps that I Sell The Dead falls into. In fact, Trick 'r Treat, designed as an anthology, tells a more unified, consistent story than I Sell The Dead which is intended to be a united narrative.

The other problem with the film (and I recognize that this is insane nit-picking) is the way the film plays fast and loose with history. Grimes is killed with a Guillotine. We might be able to stretch a point and say that he is killed by a Scottish Maiden, a precursor to the French Guillotine, but the Scottish Maiden was abandoned in 1709 and this film is set a good hundred years later since Burke and Hare are mentioned and they were executed for murder in 1829. Grave robbing as an industry became obsolete with the passage of the Anatomy Act (1832) so the film must take place before then.

I know that bringing this up is the ultimate in historical nerdiness and we are clearly dealing with a universe where all sorts of dead, undead and legendary dead are possible, but the easiest way to anchor a fantasy, to convince the audience to suspend their disbelief is to use something real and authentic to bounce the fantasy off of. And it's not like the history of grave robbers or body snatchers or resurrectionists (call it what you like) is a boring story.

The most frustrating thing is that writer.director Glenn McQuaid clearly does know the history, especially the good bits. As an example, when Grimes first takes on Arthur as his apprentice he correctly explains to Arthur that as resurrectionists, they don't steal the clothes from the dead, because stealing corpses is a misdemeanor, punishable by a small fine, while stealing clothes is a felony, punishable by deportation or possibly even death. So you would expect Wille and Arthur to strip the corpse at this point (and for the rest of the film) but of course they don't. You could accuse the director of ignoring his writer's script, but not when the writer and the director are the same person.

My point isn't that there should have been a lot of buck-naked corpses in the film, my point is that if you are going to bring up this quirk in the law and make it clear that Willie and Arthur will follow the law no matter how silly it is, than you do have to pursue that thought to its logical conclusion, even if that means that Willie and Arthur wind up chasing a zombie through a graveyard trying to rip his or her clothes off and stuffing them back in the empty coffin, so that they don't get deported for stealing the walking corpse's clothes, otherwise don't bring up the matter at all.

Historical nerdiness aside, I Sell The Dead is worth a rental as a slight but funny horror film that could have been much more.

Trick 'r Treat is a new take on the horror anthology genre. It tips its hat to EC Comics' Tales From The Crypt with its comic-book montage opening credit sequence and with its caption boxes "Later" "Earlier" and "Meanwhile", but there is a sense in which the film seems inspired more by films that were inspired by EC like Creepshow than by the original comics themselves.

You might think that in being an homage to an homage that there would be the danger of being like a blurred photocopy of a photocopy, but instead the distance from the original material allows Trick 'r Treat to take risks and become something completely original.

The danger with anthologies whether in film, books or comic books is that one story will be so strong that it overshadows the rest of the collection (and conversely one so weak that it ruins the whole collection). Writer and director Michael Dougherty neatly avoids this dilemma by interweaving all the separate stories together. The film cuts back and forth in space and time from one story to another with characters from one story bumping into characters from another.

The most common element in all of the stories is a small scarecrow figure called Sam, but all of the stories have some connection with other stories. The connections are so strong that in reviews, people talk about four stories, but I count at least six: the couple returning home from the Hallowe'en parade, the school principal (Dylan Baker) with a ghoulish secret, the virgin (Anna Paquin) looking for a Hallowe'en date, the kids playing a prank on an autistic girl, the story of the school bus crash told by the pranksters and the grouchy old man (Brian Cox) dealing with a home invasion.

Because all of the characters intertwine with one story or another, the film ends up quite accidentally dealing with one of the favourite themes of Tales From The Crypt: the hierarchy of monsters. The Cryptkeeper (and his fans) were always fascinated by wondering whether monsters had a food chain and if so, who was the apex predator. Or to put it another way, at what point do monsters become victims of other monsters? The success of the Saw franchise seems to have doomed this film to a direct to DVD release which is a real shame. It is a spooky, creepy and inventive reminder of why we love the Hallowe'en season and the many superstitions that we have evolved to keep us safe from the monsters that go bump in the night