3 out of 5

Director: Alejandro Brugués

Its most defining and charming qualities are also what keep ‘Juan of the Dead’ from being more… well, defined.  Starting from its title on, ‘Juan’ is a zombie flick fully fueled by its location of Havana.  We don’t really get much info on the zombies – or, sorry, dissidents – but it’s quite far from the point, as the film is first and foremost a comedy, and then a story about being a human being, and then a social commentary about, I suppose, life in Havana.  Some of this is off-putting to those of us who are completely ignorant of the world outside of our bedrooms, but Juan doesn’t go too far with things, just making it clear that a zombie apocalypse isn’t all that different from daily life, and the newscasters reporting that “everything is back to normal” frequently during the film as something blows up or someone gets eaten is understandable enough.  The title comparison to Shaun of the Dead is also apt, as this sits in a similar genre of humble comedies, but whereas that film stuck to a smaller time window and actually tried to work as a horror/thriller at moments (plus Edgar Wright is a dreamboat director), JotD goes completely human with things – you can walk away from most zombies, or slap them, or walk through a crowd of them – and this blase approach gets a lot of amusing mileage but also prevents the film from ever really getting off the ground.  From our first shoulder-shrugging joke to our last half-hearted hurrah, the tone and story remain in about the same spot.  But it is funny – very funny at points, and while it seems low budget, director Brugues gets a lot of mileage out of tooonnnss of extras and some pretty well done action scenes, all seemingly shot with our completely regular characters.  There’s gore, there’s male genitalia, there’s swearing, but Juan of the Dead is a charming little movie.  The whole vibe of the characters is sort of slackerish, though, so by it’s nature, it can’t affect us too much as viewers.