10 Terrible Horror Movies With Amazing Concepts
5. The Dead Don't Die
Are we all ready to admit yet that the great Jim Jarmusch's 2019 meta horror-comedy The Dead Don't Die is just... a bit crap?
A giddily self-aware zombie-comedy directed by one of the most accomplished indie filmmakers of all time and boasting a mega ensemble cast including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Iggy Pop, Austin Butler, and Selena Gomez? How could this fail?
And yet, despite Jarmusch's general consistency as an artist, his screenwriting work here is dishearteningly lazy, the film's close-to-witless meta gags feeling like a half-assed crutch to support an otherwise generic zombie movie framework.
The cast aren't given much worthwhile to work with here, ensuring that Jarmusch's instruction to play the material as deadpan as possible results in a film that feels somnambulant at best - or unalive at worst.
Most filmmakers have at least one clanger project among their oeuvre, and for Jarmusch this is unequivocally it, despite how perfectly suited he seemed for the idea in theory, especially after his terrific 2013 vampiric black comedy Only Lovers Left Alive.