Wake Wood (2011)

So you’re watching a movie and it basically goes like this:

1.  Don’t bring your kid back from the dead, dumbass.

2.  No, I’m serious.  That never turns out well.

3.  You see?  What did I tell you?  Why have no parents in the history of horror ever had as much sense as the ones in “The Monkey’s Paw” who wished their zombie kid away again?  Don’t people have to read that in grade school anymore?

4.  No, I said don’t bring people back from the dead, dumbass who is unable to learn from experience.

5.  And now you’re going to – Jesus Christ. I wash my hands of you, you nutcase.

Quick: which movie are you watching?  Pet Sematary or Wake Wood?

Really, I’d tell you the plot of Wake Wood but if you’ve seen Pet Sematary you’re pretty much familiar.  Eva Birthistle and her gratifyingly hot husband Aidan Gillen lose their nine-year-old daughter to a freak dog attack.  Trying to start over, they move to the small village of Wake Wood.  Strange Goings-On lead them to the discovery that the citizens of the village can bring people back from the dead – but only for three days, so you can say goodbye.  Sadly, they cannot guarantee that the aforementioned dead will return quite right.

Wake Wood is one of the first movies to come out of the resurrected Hammer Studios.  It’s not nearly as satisfactory as one would have hoped from that beloved studio.  The sad truth is that Wake Wood is derivative and unoriginal, offering nothing over the book version of Pet Sematary and nothing over the movie but Aidan Gillen’s glorious ass in jeans.   It doesn’t even have Fred Gwynne getting slaughtered by a toddler.

It wasn’t a bad movie.  It was a little slow in places, but the acting was good and the cinematography was moody and atmospheric.  The ending did not, as endings too often do, let the movie down with  a thud.  It’s just that there was nothing about it that didn’t leave me going “Yep, seen that before.”

So what’s the verdict?  Two stars. If I’d never seen Pet Sematary I probably would have liked it better, though I didn’t like the fact that the harm against animals seemed gratuitous even for the animal-hating horror industry.  It would have been much better if the filmmakers had just photoshopped Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle over Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby and re-released Pet Sematary instead.

I Sell the Dead (2008)

There’s not much to I Sell the Dead, but it’s an entertaining movie, funny in that very strange British way and moderately awesome.

Dominic Monaghan, who once told me my daughter was cute and therefore can do no wrong in my eyes, plays resurrectionist Arthur Blake, whose partner, Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden), is guillotined at the beginning of the movie.  Arthur, awaiting the headsman’s block himself, is visited in his cell by Father Duffy, who has come to write down Arthur’s dying words of penitence.

(Duffy is played by Ron Perlman, who according to his imdb page is set to play Elvis in 2011′s Bubba Nosferatu.  I disapprove of this.  Bubba Ho-Tep is flawless and requires no sequel, but if it did have one, Elvis should only be played by Bruce Campbell.  No offense to Perlman, who did an effective turn as Reinhardt in Blade 2; it’s just one of those things.)

At any rate, Arthur and Willie are fairly run-of-the-mill as resurrectionists go, stealing cadavers for a creepy physician who threatens to turn them over to the police if they don’t keep him in a fresh supply.  Downtrodden, they dig up graves, raid wakes, and generally scrape by until – in one of the most hilarious scenes in the movie – they dig up a suicide at the crossroads and take the stake out of her heart.  That proves to be a bad idea, though the enterprising Willie quickly finds the silver lining and sets the zombie on the creepy doctor.

It turns out, conveniently enough, that selling the undead is more lucrative than selling the dead – but Arthur and Willie’s new career pits them against the House of Murphy, a group of homicidal whackjobs determined to control the undead trade in England.  Soon the two of them are trapped between the House of Murphy and Arthur’s grasping whackjob of a girlfriend, and the poor guys, all they want is to sell some zombies and buy a round at the pub.

So what’s the verdict? Three stars.  Fair warning, this isn’t the fastest-moving film in the world, but there are more than enough hilarious moments if you meet it at its own pace and the ending is all sorts of awesome.

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