Reinvigorating the Dead

Celebrating the revolutionaries of "The Baader Meinhof Complex" and the graverobbers of "I Sell the Dead."

Purely escapist, Glenn McQuaid’s “I Sell the Dead” is kinda invigorating in its own small, psychotronic way, largely because it is so thoroughly unpretentious — it’s a Gothic horror semi-parody that loves its genre and hearkens back to the old Hammer films of the ’60s, but in doing so displays no other ambition. Compare this to “The Wolfman,” or any other recent similarly troped-out American film you can name, and McQuaid’s is a small-boned blast of fresh storytelling air, reliant mostly on oral tale-spinning, and riffing the impact on the 19th-century legend of Burke & Hare-style grave robbers if they were to encounter the undead in their labors. Framed as a gallows confession by a young corpse-stealer (Dominic Monaghan) to a gamey priest (Ron Perlman), the tale involves the lad’s mentor (genre advocate-pope Larry Fessenden) and rival gangs of body snatchers and the eventual (and profitable) confrontation with reanimated corpses.

It’s not the sharpest zombie comedy on the shelf, but it is the only one in which the undead themselves get laughs, and, in any event, the grace of McQuaid’s movie is its ardent decision not to be the best or most of anything, but to just dig the grubby, overacted, antique-y genre iconography, milk it for laughs (while never stooping to anachronism), and nostalgically return to the fake-foggy days of yesteryear moors and boneyards. Made with substantial panache, “I Sell the Dead” may be aiming at a rather narrow demographic — baby boomers who remember Zacherley and The Monster Times and who always wondered why Christopher Lee only appeared in those Dracula films for ten minutes, leaving the plot to supporting characters — but that merely makes it unique in a landscape overridden by zombies.

“The Baader Meinhof Complex” and “I Sell the Dead” (MPI Home Video) are now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

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