Burying the Ex (2014)

Joe Dante has spent a career making movies for people who already love movies, and Burying the Ex is the purest expression of that impulse: a zombie romantic comedy assembled from spare parts, shot in twenty days, and released with a shrug. Anton Yelchin plays Max, a horror memorabilia clerk saddled with Evelyn (Ashley Greene), an environmentalist so committed to the cause that she confiscates his car and rewrites his diet. She dies under a bus, returns from the grave, and resumes the relationship. The joke is that death changes nothing about a bad partnership.

The picture's engagement with contemporary social consciousness is glancing and mostly accidental. Evelyn's green crusading exists to make her insufferable, a running gag about compost and bicycle commuting, not a position the film endorses. The screenplay leans hard on the clinging, controlling girlfriend archetype, which places it at some distance from any feminist project. Casting is thoroughly conventional: four white leads, a handful of supporting players of color with little to do. There is no racial commentary, no queer presence, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent characterization, and no economic grievance. The horror memorabilia shop and the ice cream parlor are simply places where people stand and talk.

The result is a filmmaker working cheaply and happily, deploying graveyard gags and a Satan Genie with the enthusiasm of a man who has done this before and expects to do it again. Dick Miller appears briefly, as he always did. The film lectures nobody. It has no thesis about how we should live, which in the current climate reads almost as a novelty. Dante made it for his fans, and his fans, statistically, are already inclined to forgive him.