Horrorthon 2018 Day 23 - He Never Died (2015)

  Maybe it's just because I was really sleep-deprived yesterday but He Never Died might be the funniest movie I've ever seen.  The problem is that it's not really a horror movie.  I mean, it's basically If John Wick Ate People:  The Movie.

At the risk of going off on a tangent, I feel the need to break down why I think there should be a distinction between this and other cannibal movies.  Horror movies with cannibals like Ravenous or Silence of the Lambs are horror movies because they deal in being hunted and eaten.  (Although, really, SotL is about serial killers but still hunting and killing.)   Jack, the main character here, does eat people but that's not the primary focus of the movie. 

Jack (Henry Rollins) is living a solitary life, playing bingo at church, being a regular at a diner, avoiding stress and temptations, and getting his, um, dietary supplements from a med student (Booboo Stewart) until the twin stressors of a previously unknown daughter, Andrea (Jordan Todosey), showing up at his door and a local mob shaking down his cadaver provider combine to knock him off the wagon in a big way.  Jack is forced to confront his past once more in a bloody rampage.

This is a thinly veiled metaphor for addiction in general and specifically the relapse portion of recovery.  Jack struggles with human interaction, partly because he sees humans as a food source but also because he genuinely cannot relate to most people's lives.  Staying clean occupies 90% of his mental energy.  The other 10% is focused on tuning out the internal soundtrack of his past.  His obsession with time recurs throughout the movie

Henry Rollins is phenomenal here, delivering Jack's sparse dialog with the economy and warmth of a bolt-gun but I need to talk about Kate Greenhouse.  She plays Cara, the sweet diner waitress with the world's shittiest luck in men.  Her shy flirting with Jack in the beginning could have been treacly and irritating but she keeps it very restrained, very believable, and then turns in the most relatable reactions when she discovers the truth about Jack. 

I loved this and plan to buy it.  You should check it out on Netflix streaming and I think it may also be available on Prime.

Pumpkin rating:  5/5