The zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die may have been panned by critics, but it hearkens back to subversive, absurdist comedies from the early 1990s such as My Boyfriend’s Back.
There’s something about an absurdist zombie comedy that just seems to split audiences, as Jim Jarmusch’s latest The Dead Don’t Die can surely attest. But we’re not here to talk about The Dead Don’t Die, Adam Driver crammed into a tiny smart car convertible, or even the potentially Oscar-worthy way that he says the word “ghouls”. (Although these are all important topics that should be discussed at length.)
Instead, we’re here to pay homage to an equally misunderstood zom-com from the early ’90s: My Boyfriend’s Back.
This little beaut is currently sitting pretty with a solid 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, where one critic from The Washington Post referred to it as “cheaply made, thoroughly cliched and absolutely guaranteed to turn your stomach.” She is both right and also as wrong as it is possible for a human to be: My Boyfriend’s Back is unbelievably dumb, but it’s also a thing of glory.
Johnny (Andrew Lowery) has been in love with Missy (Traci Lind) for as long as he can remember. So much so that he’s willing to take a bullet for her during a fake convenience store robbery gone wrong, and then deny death itself and stubbornly return as a zombie. Which is, you know, a bummer, but what are you gonna do?
To the credit of everyone in his town, they all just sort of roll with it. The film works best when focusing on their completely unfazed reactions to Johnny pulling himself out of his own grave to walk amongst them, no worse for wear except for the whole undead thing.
His mom offers him leftovers from his own funeral about 30 seconds after he walks through their front door significantly less dead than they had all assumed. When he turns up at school the next day, his authoritative English teacher pretty much gives him an, “I don’t care how dead you are, buster, you had better be on time for my class” lecture.
Photo Credit: Touchstone Pictures
And his classmates (chief among them a young Matthew Fox and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is making some choices in his role as teen bully Chuck) seem to skip over being shocked at a human coming back from the dead and instead go straight for weirdly bigoted anti-zombie rhetoric. Matthew Fox, in particular, is very concerned that someone will see his girlfriend hanging out with a dead boy. All of this, I cannot stress enough, is delightful.
Zombie movies have a definite pattern to them, and it’s always fun to see someone set the script on fire. Regardless of the flaws they may have, to subvert expectations with as much reckless abandon as we see in My Boyfriend’s Back and more recently in The Dead Don’t Die is a bold move indeed. With uniquely absurd senses of humor, both films are destined to work for a very limited audience. But where it plays, it plays remarkably well.