I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

Movies So Bad They Make You Say "What In The Blazes Did I Just Watch?" 


After.Life (2009)


Okay, let's face it. If anyone wants to see this movie, it's only to see Christina Ricci naked. On a table. For almost an hour and a half. Helpless. So if you watch this, you either like horror movies or you're a teenage boy. Either way you're going to be disappointed. Very disappointed.


Anna (Christina Ricci) thinks her life sucks. Her mom sucks, her boyfriend Paul sucks (another great job by Justin Long), and her job as a teacher sucks. She is so miserable she is on medication. Meanwhile, in another part of the city (obviously) a funeral director named Eliot (Liam Neeson) is preparing a corpse for viewing. But he's being really creepy about it. Not the fondling kind of creepy, but he talks to it as if they're having lunch together, and takes a picture when he's done. Now we're back to the miserable chick and her ineffective boyfriend. In the course of usual movie coincidence, Anna somehow gets roped into taking a student to a funeral. Yeah, that happens all the time. The dead man turns out to be her former music teacher (I SAID this wasn't good) and the corpse we saw getting the royal treatment. It freaks her out. Why? To get the plot moving along and make her more miserable I guess. Skip ahead and she's having dinner with Paul. Paul wants to propose to her and have her move with him to Chicago but because of the plot (and Justin Long's unfortunate duty to always be the clueless guy in any movie he plays) and her becoming more and more paranoid she thinks he's about to break up with her. She panics and leaves. We see her popping some pills, driving off in the rain and, (let this be a lesson for the kiddies), tries to use her cell phone while driving too fast and crashes.

Just lie still...

She 'wakes up', unable to move. Eliot is cleaning a cut on her forehead and tells her she's dead. She protests because, obviously, if she can think, talk and feels alive she didn't die. He just sighs and explains that everybody that comes to his place says they're alive because... well he was a little crass about that but basically they don't accept what's happened. He says he has a gift to help people 'cross over' (oh brother, not one of those) and make them realize that they are dead. Although she's supposed to be dead she keeps trying to move. Eliot keeps injecting her with something that's supposed to 'relax the muscles' but what it does is prevent her from moving. So is she dead or not? Hmmm... do we care? I mean she is lying there, naked. Anyway, Eliot has a ton of these pictures of the dead people he 'crossed over' and you begin to wonder how many beans are rattling around that big head of his. Were any or all of those people really dead? Dunno. The movie's not saying. Paul, who can't accept that his girlfriend is dead wants to see her but by law only family can view the body. We then learn that Anna never was taken to a hospital - she came straight from the accident scene to the funeral home. Is she really dead?

Is my makeup still all right?

Anna tries like hell to get up, move, anything but she can't. Eliot tells her rather callously that she might as well accept being dead since she really wasn't living anyway. Nice guy. NOW somehow she can move and somehow getting hold of Eliot's phone she calls Paul but he can't hear her (of course). To convince her for good that she IS dead, Eliot, once he captures her again, lets her look into a mirror. She looks dead. But as he takes the mirror away we see fog on the mirror from her breath which he quickly wipes away before she can see. Is she really dead?

This won't hurt a bit... okay, maybe a little.

Skip ahead because this goes on for quite a while. There's the funeral and the burial. Anna can hear the dirt hitting her coffin and screams and scratches the inside but can't get out. Is she dead? Really dead? Well, if she wasn't before, she is now. After the funeral, Paul gets really drunk and, of course, gets in a wreck. And he wakes up in... you guessed it. Eliot's place. Eliot tells him he's dead, Paul insists that not only was Anna still alive, so is he. But Eliot quickly fixes that. Or does he? Were either of them truly dead? We're kind of left to wonder, but also relieved that the whole ordeal is over.

My agent says testosterone isn't necessary for my career.