Classic, low budget, late night film festival fare.

Imagine a film made with a minuscule budget and only four actors playing all the parts. Imagine B grade Hammer horror special effects. Imagine a story of a lonely gravedigger who can’t get a lover because she smells so bad. Imagine what might happen when she works out a potion to reanimate a dead body part.

And so we have Dead Lover, with the gravedigger played by writer director Grace Glowicki, with exaggerated stage make up and a broad cockney accent. It might be set in the past, it has all of the hallmarks of a period drama but the occasional headstone reads 1990. It’s that kind of film.

The two intersecting stories, and we feel an inevitability of the calamity and conflict waiting for us, are the gravedigger’s love for her man and a widow pining for his newly dead buried opera singer wife. And did I mention that the dead lover is the brother of the dead wife?

There is a bucket load of overacting, crazy op shop costuming, hilarious special effects and jokes plenty. There are even copulating nuns.  It has a Monty Python feel, a little bit of Christopher Guest Spinal Tap, and what The Substance might look like if it was made as a student film.

It’s a lot of fun and it makes you want to take a bucket of grease paint and concoct yourself a film. It’s perfect fare for midnight on a Friday at a film festival where you know you should be catching up on some sleep before the next day, but it’s more fun to be like a naughty school child out after dark.