Starring Jay Baruchel, Rose Byrne. Written and directed by Chaz Thorne. (14A) 94 min. Opens July 25.
Chaz Thorne, whose script for Poor Boy’s Game included perhaps the silliest climax of all time, makes his feature directorial debut with Just Buried, and the results aren’t pretty. This glib TIFF ’07 leftover concerns a comely mortician (Rose Byrne) and her attempt —?abetted by her bewitched, bothered new boss (Jay Baruchel) — to goose the business for a small-town funeral home by offing the locals.
Call it Coroner Gas, then, but with that show’s carefully sheathed contempt for its Hicksville regulars allowed to bloom into full-on, high-body-count misanthropy. It’s not that serial murder can’t be a topic for farce — recall the Hammer-horror-quoting narrative of Hot Fuzz, with its array of decapitated and squished small-town Brits — but Just Buried doesn’t have any satirical thrust.
Baruchel is less manic but just as mannered as he was in Fetching Cody — another lame homegrown “black comedy” that mistook mean-spiritedness for edge. The only grace notes here come courtesy of Byrne, who invests a predictably “unpredictable” role (at least the end of Poor Boy’s Game came as a shock) with undue commitment.