| Review:
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In no way an infomercial pitch to afterlife consumers
as might be intimated from the ambiguous title, I Sell The
Dead is a combo zany and creepy old fashioned ghostly gothic
tall tale about two 19th century warped bottom feeder British
blokes who have taken to grave robbing for a living.***
Written and directed with devilish tongue in cheek
by Irish filmaker Glenn McQuaid, I Sell The Dead is a juicy
traditional horror yarn with playfully crafted, delightfully
depraved storytelling kicking in for good measure.***
Dominic Monaghan is young Arthur Blake, a longtime
professional body snatcher, but not a murderer, if you please.
Blake apprenticed in the underground trade as a boy to Willie
Grimes (Larry Fessenden), a cantankerous career criminal
who has just had his head lopped off at the local guillotine.
And it seems that Blake is next in line for execution, but
not before a mysteriously sinister priest Father Duffy (Ron
Perlman) stops by with a bottle of whiskey to pry some confessional
redemption out of the condemned felon, before he departs
this world.***
As Blake opens up about their unscrupulous but intermittently
jolly excapades, the audience is treated to a never-a-dull-moment,
ever more surreal journey through your basic body snatching,
to the surprise exhuming of vampires, zombies, and possibly
even an alien from outer space. Blake also gets to introduce
his co-conspirator to some new-fangled thing called a sandwich.
But the murky body business gets even more complicated when
rival snatchers, the notorious House of Murphy gang shows
up, and runs more than a little interference regarding conflicting
turf privileges.***
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