Dark comedy works by refusing to look away and laughing anyway. This tag collects reviews of black comedies and what the tone requires of a writer who wants both halves to land.
2010sKilling Eve's pilot rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted a set of novellas into an hour that is genuinely funny about an assassin and genuinely serious about a bored woman who has been waiting…
2000sZombieland (2009) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A road movie with four people, a list of survival rules rendered on screen, and Woody Harrelson looking for a Twinkie. It is very funny for eighty minutes and…
2010sWarm Bodies (2013) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A zombie romance narrated by the zombie, which is a better idea than it sounds and is executed with more wit than the premise deserves. It is also…
2000sShaun of the Dead (2004) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A comedy that works as an actual zombie film, which almost no parody manages, because Edgar Wright shot the horror straight and let the jokes come…
1980sThe Return of the Living Dead (1985) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Dan O'Bannon invented the brain-eating zombie, the running zombie and the talking zombie in one film, and every one of those is now so…
2010sOne Cut of the Dead (2017) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first thirty-seven minutes are a bad zombie film shot in one take, and the remaining hour explains every mistake in it. Made for about…
1990sDead Alive (1992) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Peter Jackson made the bloodiest film ever produced, reportedly using around three hundred litres of fake blood in the last twenty minutes alone, and underneath the lawnmower it…
2000sLittle Miss Sunshine (2006) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six people in a failing Volkswagen driving from Albuquerque to a children's beauty pageant in California. Every one of them has a private humiliation, and the film's…
Book ReviewsA savage satire of consumerism, masculinity, and modern emptiness, narrated by an insomniac everyman drawn into an underground fighting society by the anarchic Tyler Durden. Stylish, violent, blackly funny, and built on one of fiction's most famous twists. A cult…
Book ReviewsThe novel that gave the language the phrase catch-22 itself: a savage, absurdist masterpiece of war and bureaucracy, darkly hilarious and genuinely furious beneath the comedy. Its deliberately disorienting structure rewards patience. A landmark of satire, held from the top…
Crime FictionNot rage and not trauma. Careful logic applied to a false premise turns an ordinary man into a killer. Psychological horror narrated from inside the descent.
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