Anton Yelchin (the new Star Trek series’ Chekhov) stars as Max, a normal every-guy who works at a horror-themed costume and novelty shop. He loves old horror and cult movies, although his demeanor is one of bland normality; you could walk past him a hundred times on the street and never notice him once. His girlfriend, Evelyn (Ashley Greene, The Twilight Saga), is meant to be a real horror—a micro-managing, eco-obsessed shrew who demands that he eat only organic and avoid anything that isn’t recyclable—but Greene never makes her truly shrill and hideous, which undercuts a major element of the film’s dark humor (I was expecting something more in the vein of Sarah Silverman in School of Rock). When Evelyn is hit and killed by a bus, a promise that Max made to her that they would be together forever takes a horrendous turn when she digs her way out of her premature grave. Her skin is a bit ashen and she smells bad, but otherwise she’s no worse for the wear and ready to pick up where she and Max left off.

Unfortunately, during Evelyn’s stay in the ground Max moved on by taking up with Olivia (Alexandra Daddario), the raven-haired girl who works at a nearby ice-cream shop and shares his interests in horror movies and associated pop culture (they both know the sad history of the ’70s-era breakfast cereal Fruit Brute, which Evelyn can only see as a chemical-laced burden on the body). It is clear that Max and Olivia are meant to be together—they both enjoy watching Night of the Living Dead in a cemetery—which makes undead Evelyn’s presence even more of an inconvenience, especially when she becomes intent on killing Max and making him into a zombie so that they can truly be together forever.

Burying the Ex is, not surprisingly, stuffed to the gills with horror-movie references—some amusing, some just forced—and Dante even manages to squeeze in a cameo from genre regular Dick Miller. The film is clearly, as Dante described it in an interview, intended for his fans. The problem, however, is that it constantly suffers from either too much or too little. In the former department, our chief exhibit is Travis (Oliver Cooper), Max’s slovenly half-brother who, despite his unkempt appearance, crude personality, and lack of employment, is constantly in need of a location to score with the endless parade of women who somehow find him sexually desirable. In the film’s very first scene Max finds Travis sprawled out on his living room floor with two half-naked women, which is meant to be a comical introduction to their odd-couple, but really serves to establish the lazy inconsistencies of the plot (are we really meant to believe that Travis could engage in a threesome right down the hall from where Max and Evelyn are sleeping and no one hears?) and undercuts the idea that Evelyn is a terrible girlfriend (her disgust with Travis’s behavior and using of Max’s apartment is, frankly, quite warranted). In many ways Travis reminded me of Josh Gad’s boorish character in Love and Other Drugs (2010), a similarly clichéd and implausible creation who worked only as a counterpoint to the romantic protagonist.

For every over-the-top scene with Travis there are several scenes that simply lack the energy required to sell the film’s absurdist premise. Max’s response to Evelyn’s return from the grave segues from initial freak-out to resignation with such speed that it barely registers, partially because Yelchin underplays Max too much. On the other hand, Daddario, who recently played Dwayne Johnson’s daughter in San Andreas, plays Olivia’s oddball awkwardness in a way that is endearing, rather than weird. Dante clearly wants to throw in a few shocker moments of gross-out humor, which we get in an Exorcist-inspired moment of voluminous green vomit (embalming fluid, not pea soup) that is pretty much the film’s slapstick highlight and low-point at the same time. The film’s limited budget probably curtailed a lot of potential physical humor in Evelyn’s undead grotesquerie, which is limited largely to cracking bones and taking impossible positions while doing yoga. It’s too bad that Dante, whose last major studio film, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), was released more than a decade ago, wasn’t able to make more of the premise, but the budget and script simply didn’t give him enough to work with. Our wait for the Great Renaissance continues …

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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