Recensioni de* critic*

No matter how lowbrow or silly the material gets, everyone seems to be having a good time in Ex, and no wonder: it's the first feature in more than five years to be directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins, Small Soldiers), one of the most fun-loving filmmakers alive... Ex finds the director working with an ultralow budget and a somewhat familiar script, but his good-natured charm still shines through these setbacks.

These horror film cameos (so to speak) create an immediate and obvious intertextuality that is endemic to Dante's work, which is the work of a cinephile whose devotion to the art can't help but infuse his work with such overt, or in the instance of his other films, more subtle, nods to the medium he loves so much. And it's hard not to smile at that.

Its eagerness to ingratiate long-time horror fans, what with its multiple references to obscure films and nods to specialist publications such as Video Watchdog (and yes I am a proud subscriber), actually gets a little irritating after a while. Yes, "Burying The Ex," I thought as I watched, I AM on your side conceptually already. Now could you start being genuinely funny? Or scary? Or something?

The energy is fitful, and despite his low-budget roots as an editor and director for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, one gets the sense that Dante's gifts are better served by big sandbox productions like the underrated Looney Tunes: Back In Action, which allow him to pursue any and every idea.

It is disappointing that "Burying the Ex," Mr. Dante's first feature in six years, finds the filmmaker far from his creative heights. The movie's snap and affection put other recent zombie-related entertainments to shame, and the in-jokes (references to Bela Lugosi and the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles; the casting of Dick Miller, a regular of Mr. Dante's, as a disbelieving cop) are a Dante signature. But the freedom of the director's best work is missing.

If [Dante's] last studio job, the flop Looney Toons: Back in Action, was any indication, his practical effects-driven fetishism of cartoons and B-movies is no longer tolerated. With Burying the Ex, he's in a similar position to his salad days under Roger Corman's watch: got something to prove? Make it fast and cheap. While that should invite a return to form (satirizing and rejuvenating stale genres with a dark sweetness), Dante settles into a laziness his former self would have shunned.

With Burying the Ex (opening theatrically and on VOD June 19), one of the greatest directors of the past forty years returns to the style that made him famous while also striking out in immensely entertaining new directions... Burying the Ex finds Dante at his most playful, but with his precision and intelligence fully intact.

Several of Dante's films, particularly The Howling, his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, and both Gremlins movies, are classics of genre contortion and works of inventive and affectionately vicious channel-surfing id. Which is why it's so surprising, and dispiriting, to watch Burying the Ex as it lurches from one tone to the next, alternating awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.

There is a lot to admire here: Yelchin and Daddario share great chemistry and Greene is tremendous as the ex-ex who couldn't be happier to be unliving ("being dead is the best diet ever!")... Yet it's hard to shake the feeling that this film belongs to another era. For example, are we really supposed to buy young people saying things like "in a jiff" in this day and age?

Along the way are a spare handful of amusing comic riffs... and gross-out gags (none grosser than the oral expulsion of embalming fluid), but at just 89 minutes, there hardly seems enough material to fill the time. Watching two intelligent, attractive women fight to the death (or, well, beyond) over the dubiously worthy prize of Max is about as dramatically compelling as it is socially and sexually progressive.