Dead Souls
Dead $oul$

Supposedly the final feature film from playful iconoclast Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Walker) is a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's novel that updates the setting from early 19th-century Russia to the late Gilded Age of the United States. Cox himself stars as a tall, gaunt man named Strindler (looking like a cross between Angus Scrimm in Phantasm and Hank Worden as "the world's most decrepit waiter in Twin Peaks). Set in the year of the U.S. census, 1890, the smartly dressed stranger arrives in a small town in Arizona offering money for providing the names of dead Mexican laborers. This sets the whole town aflutter. Co-written with Eurowestern star Gianni Garko (Vengeance Is Mine, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, Heads or Tails?), Cox has fun applying Gogol's themes to the American West and shooting in Almeria, Spain—where Sergio Leone shot the iconic Spaghetti Westerns Cox loves so much. The deliberately paced picture starts out great, but flounders by the time it reaches the midpoint. Digressions in dream sequences, a musical number, and an animated flashback by Phil Tippett may delight the Cox faithful who come for the bonkers, but to me they come off as a filmmaker who ran out of ideas for their otherwise satisfying 88-minute movie meditation.