Life After Beth doesn't live up to its potential

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      Starring Dane DeHaan and Aubrey Plaza. Rated 14A.

      The zombie flick is a necessarily self-limiting genre: they’re dead, they’re here, and they want our brains. We get it. For a long stretch, though, Life After Beth manages to subvert the formula with running commentary on suburban conformity and adolescent self-dramatization, providing more laughs than chills even after things get grisly and the inevitable guns come out.

      Things start deceptively, in the indie-drama realm, with an A-list cast of art-house and TV veterans as family members facing a recent death. Teenage Zach (Dane DeHaan, of In Treatment and The Amazing Spider-Man 2) is mourning his girlfriend, who died from a random snakebite. He doesn’t get how his parents (Cheryl Hines, from Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad About You’s Paul Reiser) and security-guard brother (Matthew Gray Gubler) can just go back to life as usual. So he starts spending extra time with her sympathetic parents (John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon).

      Then he swings by their place and gets a glimpse of Beth herself (Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza), who doesn’t seem quite so dead after all. Her folks say she’s been “resurrected, like Jesus”, but he’s not sure. Aside from remembering nothing about the whole dead-and-buried part, she’s easily angered, stronger than usual, and tends to blister in the sun. When she cranks up Kenny G on the car radio, that’s when he knows for sure.

      The smooth-jazz joke sums up pretty much everything that’s both right and wrong with Life After Beth, the directorial debut of Jeff Baena, who coscripted the even more twisted I Heart Huckabees. It’s perfectly executed, but once you get used to the undead’s musical taste, you’re still stuck with Chuck Mangione on the soundtrack. Also, the characters don’t live up (if that’s the right term) to their full potential. Garry Marshall shows up as a posthumous (but still kvetching) grandfather, and Anna Kendrick has a thanklessly tiny part. What’s weirdest is that the inherently funny Plaza, romantically linked with the director, simply doesn’t have enough to do. Would it have killed the guy to take one more pass at his own script?

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