Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

I Sell The Dead Blu-ray Movie Review

Never trust a corpse…

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater March 22, 2010

Horror comedy I Sell the Dead wears its influences on its sleeve like a bloodstain that sure as hell isn’t coming off in the wash. Mix EC Comics’ macabre illustrations, Roger Corman’s B-movie money stretching, the creaky, fog beset Victorianism of Hammer Films, the gothic soap opera of Dark Shadows, and the ghastly vignettes of Tales From the Crypt—stir well, drain off the gory effluence, and dilute—and you have Irish director Glenn McQuaid’s feature length debut. For a certain breed of horror hound, I Sell the Dead’s shambling, low-budget aesthetic will feel like a comforting throwback to the times when fright films were defined by atmosphere, not their kill counts, when penny-pinching inventiveness was more important than endless screen tests, careful product placement, and dumbed-down scripts engineered to appeal to a target demographic of lowest common denominators. Others simply won’t get it, and will inevitably dismiss I Sell the Dead as a cornball indie horror outing without a single good scare to its name. A third group—to which I count myself as a member—will see and appreciate what McQuaid is trying to do here, but regretfully admit that the execution could’ve been a lot better.

Blake and Grimes

And I’m not talking about the execution that begins the film—the beheading of infamous Victorian-era grave robber Willie Grimes (co-star and producer Larry Fessenden), who was nabbed by the feckin’ coppers for murder after they followed a trail of dismembered body parts to his doorstep. ‘Twas a set up, a frame job, claims Willie’s longtime partner Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan), who sits in a prison cell awaiting his own trip to the guillotine. (An invention that never actually made it to England, but I won’t tell the producers if you won’t.) Whisky-bearing clergyman Father Duffy (Ron Perlman) has been sent to collect the “gallows speech” of the condemned, but Blake gives the thick-jawed padre his entire life story in a series of anecdotal flashbacks that comprise most of the film’s plot. We start when Blake was but a wee lad, saving his mum from a whore’s life of ill repute by apprenticing himself to the bodysnatching roustabout Willy Grimes. From here, we follow Grimes and Blake as they steal corpses directly from wakes— no digging required—get blackmailed by a surgeon (Angus Scrimm) who needs fresh meat for his medicinal experiments, and eventually graduate to nabbing “unusual” corpses for high-paying buyers. Unusual, meaning vampires, aliens, and zombies.

McQuaid has fun with these flashbacks, toying with genre convention and monster mythology, like when he has Grimes repeatedly remove and replace a stake through a female vampire’s heart, reanimating the bloodsucking seductress and then promptly returning her to an undead coma. For all the fog-covered cemeteries and the ghoulishness of digging up rotting corpses, the tone is light and comic—not quite a parody of the z-grade schlock of yore, but more of a playful homage. Structuring the film in confessional, nearly self-contained “episodes” allows McQuaid to keep the pace brisk, but the side effect is an overall plot that seems slight and inconsequential. Though this is well in keeping with the anthology-style horror from which I Sell the Dead takes inspiration—each segment even fades to a single comic book frame, a nod to Tales From the Crypt—the narrative revs in neutral for a good while before gaining traction and moving forward. We finally feel like we’re getting somewhere when we’re introduced to the House of Murphy, a rival grave robbing outfit led by a shadowy patriarch and made up of a trio of miscreants. Cornelius (John Speredakos) is the strongman type, a mean old bastard covered in arcane tattoos, Bulger (Alisdair Stewart) is a beefy bruiser with dog teeth grafted into his jaw, and Valentine Kelly (Heather Bullock) is a burn victim who wears a white mask straight out of Eyes Without a Face. The story shuffles toward a climax as both bands of body thieves head after a shipwrecked cargo of crated zombies.

If not love, there’s at least a lot for horror fans to appreciate about I Sell the Dead, which is so good-natured and well-intentioned—a true scrappy underdog of a film—that I almost feel bad drumming up any complaints about it. Working with the lowest of budgets, Glenn McQuaid has acquired a surprisingly good cast. The comic interplay between Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden gets a few strong laughs, and Brenda Cooney, who joins the pair as Blake’s love interest later in the film, fills the requisite role of bodice-buster/beer wench quite nicely. And then we have Ron Perlman, whose Irish brogue climbs the rainbow into top o’ the mornin’ to ya territory, but who always invests these kinds of bit parts with a certain amount of cult charisma. (What’s with Perlman and these priestly gigs, though? I think this is the third film I’ve seen him in where he’s all decked out in monk garb. If this keeps up, in thirty years he’ll be hiring himself out to perform weddings at renaissance fairs.)

While a tiny budget can buy actors sympathetic to McQuaid’s independent horror cause, it’s unfortunately quite prohibitive when it comes to special effects. Doing things on the cheap in the ‘60s and ‘70s meant creative practical effects and bucketloads of dry ice, but today’s equivalent seems to be Final Cut Pro plug-ins and photoshopped backgrounds hazed with digital fog, neither of which is as charming as their analog counterparts. Along with a tighter, more fully developed script, the effects are the area that could most stand to be improved in I Sell the Dead. I wish McQuiad could’ve done everything on-set and in-camera, but I admire what he’s accomplished on such limited resources, and look forward to seeing what he comes up with when he’s a got a bit more money to blow. A sequel certainly isn’t out of the question—a run-in with Jack the Ripper, perhaps?

I Sell The Dead Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

I Sell the Dead sells itself fairly well on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that looks true to its source material. Of course, since the film makes due with a paltry budget, said source is not the cleanest, clearest, or most vibrant, but the look is better than you might expect. Aside from a few scenes that were actually part of McQuaid's previous short film, The Resurrection Apprentice—which look hazy, overly grainy, and indistinct—I Sell the Dead's stylized aesthetic is easy on the eyes. Yes, the green screen composites are incredibly obvious, a split diopter shot leaves Monaghan's ear oddly translucent, and the digital fog drifting over the photoshopped backgrounds looks disjointed and artificial, but it's all part of the film's on- the-cheap DIY approach. Clarity is actually decent—especially in close-ups, where you can make out a modest but appreciable amount of detail and texture—and the film's bleak color palette, though endlessly tweaked and desaturated in post-production, totally suits the mood. Black levels, which crush and/or go slightly milky on occasion, are adequately deep for most of movie, and aside from the aforementioned digital artificiality, there are no real problems on the technical/transfer side of things.

I Sell The Dead Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I Sell the Dead's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track has one big thing going for it, and that's Jeff Grace's deliriously camp score, which calls to mind the serpentine oboe melodies of creaky B- movie orchestration and sounds excellent here. Harpsichords ring with metallic clangings, trumpets blast and strings swoon, all anchored by appropriately morose bassoons. The music fills the rear channels, where it's occasionally joined by slight environmental ambience, like rippling thunder, creepy bird caws, and a hush of wind broken by a vampiric moan. Still, most of the mix is shifted front and center, where dialogue is buoyant and easily understood. There's nothing here that stands out as impressive in terms of sound design, but it all comes together nicely to support the film's comic horror tone.

I Sell The Dead Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Commentary Tracks
If you enjoy the film, the disc includes two worthwhile commentaries. The first, a solo excursion by director Glenn McQuaid, is expectedly technically oriented, brimming with details on how to shoot a period horror comedy—in New York—on a super low budget. To contrast, Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden's discussion is more of a laugh track, with genial reminiscences and plenty of jokes.

The Making of I Sell the Dead (SD, 1:04:13)
From prop shop to costume department, Staten Island to Long Island shooting locations, this quite extensive making of documentary covers it all, with endless on-set footage and interviews with all the key players, including Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman, and first time director Glenn McQuaid.

Visual Effects Behind the Scenes (1080p, 13:05)
The challenge on a film like this is to get believable effects on an ultra-low budget, and here we see how the producers made it happen, as several visual effects supervisors and CGI animators show us the intricacies of their craft.

Trailer (SD, 1:02)

Comic Book
Inside the case you'll find a 40-page comic book version of the film, which the director apparently used to recruit actors to the project. You're not getting any new adventures of Blake and Grimes, as the book follows the movie's plot almost to the word, but it's definitely a nice addition.

I Sell The Dead Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The idea for I Sell the Dead—a tip o' the hat to Hammer, Corman, and EC Comics—is better than the finished film, but fright fans hungry for something different from the "torture porn" and endless remakes of today's horror films might want to give first-time director Glenn McQuaid's low- budget Victorian vision a rental.