Tommy Snöberg Söderberg 
Charlie (John Scott Mills) works with the dead, and everything around him is dead. With the help of bribes to the local cops, he takes care of suicide victims and addicts who overdose, people nobody would miss anyway. He then drags these corpses along to his hysterical partner Dale (Joe Estevez), for the lucrative organ trade the latter runs. Lonely and in desperate need of love, he seizes every opportunity to let the feeling of infatuation pulse through his body. It is under these circumstances that he meets the great love of his life, a corpse (Dina Osmussen), who he does not want to share the fate of all the others in Dale’s operation, at any price. So he hides her away, and he wants to preserve her beauty at any price. The only problem is that she has been dead for three days…
I think it’s only right that I make clear right from the start that I had sky-high expectations of this flick. I know that it rarely benefits a viewing experience to have that on one’s conscience, but one is only human, after all, and the plot just sounds so wonderfully grotesque, bizarre, and macabre that you almost get goose bumps. Naturally, the film didn’t live up to my expectations…
It doesn’t take the shape of the macabre necrophilia flick I had expected but comes across more as an ordinary love story, albeit with incredibly odd ingredients compared to what one is used to. A triangle drama in which Charlie, a corpse, the corpse’s sister, and Charlie’s girlfriend play the leading roles. Charlie falls in love with the corpse, fools around with the sister, all while the girlfriend yearns for a little closeness and understanding from him. Comparing this flick to Nekromantik, Aftermath, or Lucker the Necrophagous would be enormously inappropriate; here it isn’t about sexualized necrophilia but about loving aspects, and about loneliness.
Acting-wise it isn’t particularly good, and the slow narrative pace would really have required extraordinary talents to help lift the interest initially. Now, the lead, John Scott Mills, as the lonely Charlie, does admittedly improve quite a bit over the course of the journey, but unfortunately the same doesn’t hold true to the same extent for the sidekick Joe Estevez (yes, he’s Martin Sheen’s brother), who overacts pretty much all the time. It isn’t really his fault, I suppose. The character he plays acts totally irrationally and, even though he’s supposed to be the brains behind the operation, seems not to have a clue how things should be run. I place that responsibility instead on the screenwriter and on the director, who should have had more sense. They should have sorted out these details before the filming began.
The film’s best actor, I think, is nevertheless Dina Osmussen – the corpse! Then again, if the truth be told, I was a bit too nasty to the rest of the cast just now, because it’s more in her double role as the twin sister that she performs with bravura. Not that she would in any way be rewarded with an Oscar statuette for her efforts, but she’s solid and manages to deliver a couple of different emotions at least.
Another thing that is really good in the film, and I do mean really good, is the music! It’s a fairly subdued, sparsely instrumented soundtrack that really illuminates, clarifies, and emphasizes Charlie’s loneliness. He really has no one to share his life with. One gets the impression that he would be alone in the middle of a crowd, and the girlfriend he does have means nothing to him. He is completely absorbed in his work and so constantly surrounded by death that he feels dead himself. He hears voices from the corpses and talks back to them. This also fits well with the slow tempo in which the film is told.
The makeup work is also good overall, and even if the decomposition perhaps doesn’t always look entirely realistic (how things really stand in that regard I don’t feel quite capable of judging), it is solid work, and one constantly sees the progress and the artistry as something positive.
All in all, a flick worth watching.
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