The dead walk in movies and on TV

R.I.P.D. (2013) is the Filmed Comic Book in which slightly crooked cop Ryan Reynolds gets murdered by much more crooked partner Kevin Bacon, then gets assigned to work off his sins in the afterlife’s Rest In Peace Department, which means partnering with Old West sheriff Jeff Bridges to down the unclaimed dead wreaking havoc on Earth. This is a stock premise but the results were entertaining enough; Bridges’ sheriff is a role he could play in his sleep but he gets off some fun lines about shoot-outs (“Old West gunfights teach you to watch for the shooter behind the church steeple.”). ”If not for the RIPD, the world would have been overrun with dead people some time in 1954.”

The past few years I’ve tried and failed to make a local cinema’s Nevermore Film Festival spotlighting indie horror films. This year I did stream one of the offerings, THE HYPERBOREAN (2023). This felt very much like a horror take on Knives Out: the spoilt heirs of a whisky tycoon struggle to explain to investigators how their father’s plan to market 170 year old whisky from a ship lost in the Arctic (as if that wasn’t ominous enough, he had to steal it off Native American land, the fool!) released a mummified body from one of the casks that turns out to be not entirely human … The ingredients are there but this hovers awkwardly between a black comedy and horror and doesn’t quite succeed as either. “I assure you my asthma is 100 percent real.”

The British TV series THE FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES stars Sean Bean as Marlott, a 19th-century police inspector shocked that a body washed up on the banks of the Thames appears to be stitched together out of composite parts. Who’s behind this mutilation? Why did they do it? Marlott’s never heard of Frankenstein or seen the stage adaptations but he’s soon going to meet with the widow Mary Shelley and much will be revealed … Similar to The Hyperborean this hovers just below winning me over though Bean’s Marlott is a strong enough character I may be back for S2 (the ending twist is also pretty good). “Would we not defy the laws of god to bring back those we love?”

#SFWApro. Cover by Lucas Marangon, all rights to images remain with current holders.