REVIEW: I Sell the Dead (Glenn McQuaid, 2008)

Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead proves that Glenn McQuaid can make a film.  Hopefully his next one will be good.  Not that I Sell the Dead is bad.  It’s not.  I mean, it’s not good, but it’s not bad.  It’s certainly there, and it has stars, and those stars occupy ninety minutes of screentime, during which events happen to them, and sometimes those events are fun.  Other times, not so much.  I don’t regret watching the film.

I don't think.

It’s about grave-robbing, which might make you think of cemetery flicks like The Body Snatcher or I Bury the Living, and the place is Victorian London, and young Arthur, like Dickens heroes Pip and Oliver, is  a young scamp with drab clothes and bright eyes.  However, once he’s employed by ne’er-do-well Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden), the film veers more into TV horror, where each mortuary escapade brings them in contact with some type of beastly monstrosity.  Vampires.  Aliens.  Zombies.

These adventures arrive in flashbacks from the adult Arthur (Dominic Monaghan), who has only hours before he dies by guillotine, which is surprising, since they’re in England, but nevermind.  His memories offer some enjoyable moments, but they rarely cohere into anything beyond individual scenes loosely strung together.  The film makes some effort to pull the episodic narrative together, establishing a villain in Cornelius Murphy, a grave-robbing competitor.  He’s presented as ruthless, but the tag never quite sticks, and his threat never really builds.

 The film’s cheesy composite shots of night skies and trees and the lead actors feel just about right, as do the light performances from Dominic Monaghan and Ron Perlman, who affectionately kid the material with their respective flippancy and archness.  Perlman’s a veteran of these kinds of movies, given his start on pictures like Cronos and The City of Lost Children, and he finds a silly groove here as a very Irish priest who wastes no time producing and consuming liquor.

So the film’s cheery and good-natured and not bad, but it’s also inert and ineffectual and not good.  Is it cheating to say that I have no opinion on the film?  Because I do.  It’s just not a coherent one, and it veers back and forth.  I mean, I didn’t like I Bury the Living, but I didn’t dislike it.  It’s definitely a movie.  It begins, and things happen, and then it ends.  It’s up to you to decide whether that sounds appealing.

RATING: C+