I’m pretty sure that He Never Died is going to turn out to be the funniest movie I see in 2015. I hadn’t heard of it before yesterday, but we couldn’t get Star Wars tickets and Heather has a thing for Henry Rollins, so blah blah blah we caught a matinee.
I am sooo glad we did.
It’s a pretty simple setup. Henry Rollins stars as a guy who can’t die. A couple minutes into it he attracts the attention of some violent gangster types. Hijinks ensue. It’s played as more of an action / horror movie with laughs than a straight comedy, but it’s funnier than any comedy I can recall seeing in recent decades.
The humor is absolutely pitch black, but if you’ve got a taste for that sort of thing I can’t recommend it strongly enough. A couple times I was laughing so hard I thought I might pass out.
HOWEVER,
YOU’LL ENJOY IT MORE IF YOU DON’T WATCH THE TRAILER. If Henry Rollins plus lolz isn’t enough for you to make up your mind, you can watch the trailer up to about the 1:30 mark and still be okay. Also the movie isn’t going to be absolutely ruined if you watch the whole trailer, but I do think they gave away too much.
I saw it in the theater, but it’s also available on-demand (amazon, iTunes, …).
For comparison. the last movie I laughed at as hard as He Never Died was Whiplash (2014). That one is more of a serious, Oscar-bait kind of thing about an aspiring jazz drummer and his mentor. If memory serves, J.K. Simmons (the mentor) did, in fact, win an Oscar.
Craig Ferguson’s “I’m Here to Help” standup show (available on Netflix streaming) is damn good too.