DEAD MEN DON'T DIE takes a bright comic premise and mercilessly beats it into the ground.
Barry Barron (Elliott Gould) is a conceited news reader for TV's "World Wide News," and when he overhears a drug deal going down in the parking garage he figures it's his chance to score with a big scoop. Without telling anyone, Barron sneaks around and discovers that a room in the KWWN building
is indeed being used to warehouse cocaine--but he doesn't live to broadcast the story. The bumbling trio of drug-smugglers catch him and leave his bullet-riddled body behind, where it's found by Barron's equally ambitious co-anchor Dulcie Niles (Melissa Anderson). While Dulcie rushes to grab her
video camera, the corpse is snatched by Chafuka (Mabel King), a voodoo-worshipping West Indian cleaning lady. "I've wanted a zombie all my life!" she exults as she resurrects the reporter. Now he's a pale green, frizzy-haired shambling automaton, incapable of coherent speech without Chafuka's
prompting--but his unsuspecting staff puts him back on the air anyway, where he reads the news with Chafuka's chuckling native patois. When the shocked drug-smugglers spot Barron on TV, they rush back to kill him once and for all. Through mischance, one of the bad guys winds up dead himself;
Dulcie Niles stumbles upon the body; Chafuka dutifully steals it and creates a new zombie; another bad guy bites the dust; Dulcie Niles stumbles across the body; Chafuka, etc.
Six staggering, comical zombies are not necessarily funnier than one, and even with the walking dead popping in and out of doors like performers in a drawing room farce, the second half of DEAD MEN DON'T DIE slips into a comedy coma. Apparently in the belief that dumb cops are intrinsically
hilarious, writer-director Malcolm Marmorstein introduces Jordan (Mark Moses), an astoundingly dim detective whose tiresome antics add very little in the way of entertainment value. Except for an interminable car-chase climax, the action is confined to one building, giving the picture a
claustrophobic, studio-bound atmosphere.
As the anti-mortem Barry Barron, Elliott Gould bears an uncanny resemblance to CBS newsman Dan Rather, right down to a fondness for sweaters. All character development ends there, however; in fact, Gould seems a lot more alive and energetic in zombie form, becoming simply the best thing in the
picture. Using his expressive face and body (plus a great all-purpose basso profundo moan), Gould delivers a fine piece of physical humor. The original Trapper John in M*A*S*H, Gould became one of America's most sought-after actors in the late 1960s and early 70s, and was once classed with
Marcello Mastroianni and Jean-Paul Belmondo in his range and appeal. Recent years have seen Gould in a succession of negligible films, some of them barely released. Although DEAD MEN DON'T DIE does little more than put Gould through schtick, it's a reminder of the talent that's still there.
The zombies displayed herein are the traditional Haitian types--undead slaves rather than the ghastly flesh-eating ghouls spawned by George Romero and his many imitators. Therefore the gruesomeness is minimal, and most of the violence takes place offscreen. (Violence, substance abuse,
profanity.) leave a comment
