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0000017c-60f7-de77-ad7e-f3f739cf0000Arts & More airs Fridays at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.Theme music: "Like A Beginner Again" by Dan Barry of Seas of Jupiter

Review: 'Life After Beth' Should Have Stayed Dead

The Riviera Theatre in Three Rivers will show Life After Beth through November 2nd.

A good zombie is hard to find these days and a good zombie comedy is almost as elusive. So when you see the credentials of Life After Beth, you might expect something special. The movie stars Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza and the supporting cast includes such comic pros as John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Cheryl Hines and Paul Reiser. 

Think of Life After Beth as the bitter flip side of Warm Bodies, last year's hit about an unlikely romance between a human teenager and a lovesick zombie in a post-apocalyptic world. That film aspired to be a Romeo and Juliet for the World War Z generation; Life After Beth is more like a freaky version of Fatal Attraction.

Writer-director Jeff Baena has concocted a tale in which breaking up is extremely hard to do, even after you're technically no longer in the land of the living. Suburban teen Zach, played by Dane DeHaan, is understandably shaken up when his girlfriend Beth, played by Aubrey Plaza, meets an untimely death while hiking. However, the biggest shocks are yet to come when Zach discovers Beth has clawed her way out of her grave and returned home to her parents.

Although Mom and dad try to keep Beth's resurrection a secret, Zach and Beth are soon reunited and it initially looks like the romance will be stronger than ever. But then Zach begins noticing that Beth has developed a vicious temper as well as super-human strength and a really obnoxious tendency toward clinginess. That's only the beginning. Before long, you wonder which will crumble first: the deteriorating love affair, or Beth's decaying body? 

Director Baena encourages everyone in the cast to behave as if they're in one of those French farces in which everyone keeps slamming doors and dropping their drawers at inopportune moments. But loudness and chaos don't always result in big laughs, especially when it becomes clear that Baena is never going to vary his style. You can keep dropping the F-bomb every 60 seconds, but that doesn't mean your movie is going to be a laugh a minute and Life After Beth is not.

So while there are some inspired ideas here and a few amusing situations, there are also many times in which Life After Beth begins to feel like a second-rate Saturday Night Live sketch that's been stretched past its breaking point. Baena's premise doesn't take us anywhere we haven't already gone with Shaun of the Dead or Death Becomes Her, and both of those films were much wittier than this one.

DeHaan and Plaza cook up some engaging comic tension and Matthew Grey Gubler is right on the mark as Zach's tightly wound, gun-crazed older brother. Otherwise, only the marvelous Anna Kendrick, in a cameo appearance as Zach's former girlfriend, manages to make something out of the mundane material. Admittedly, she doesn't have much screen time, but she's one of the rare signs of life in Life After Beth.

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