Unfortunately, poor Dick dies. His injuries are so horrific - including rectal hemorrhaging - that the doctor calls in the local sheriff (Janelle Cochrane) to investigate it as a homicide. The sheriff is an elderly woman, walking with a cane, carrying a Thermos of what seems to be heavily spiked pineapple juice. However, underestimate her at your peril. Working alongside her is Officer Dudley (Sarah Baker), an eager new cop who jumps at the chance to work a homicide in such a rural area. Meanwhile, Zeke and Earl struggle to get through the following 24 hours. They both behave in incredibly suspicious ways. Dick's worried wife (Jess Weixler) confronts them both: they were the last to see her husband, and he didn't come home. Is he having an affair? Earl packs up his truck and gets ready to flee town, and Zeke lies - badly - to everyone - including his wife Lydia (Virginia Newcomb) and his young daughter (Poppy Cunningham). The back seat of his car is drenched in Dick's blood, and how Zeke ends up "handling" this is so dim-witted it's almost admirable. The fact that we still don't know what happened to Dick - besides the fact that it was an accident - adds to the free-wheeling maniacal mood. Our minds run riot with possibilities.
This is Daniel Scheinert's first feature flying solo as a director. In 2016, he and his partner Daniel Kwan (known as "The Daniels") directed "Swiss Army Man," one of the weirdest buddy comedies of all time, if you can even call it a buddy comedy. In reviews, critics struggled to come up with useful comparisons, just in order to describe the damn thing. At a certain point, though, all comparisons fell short. "Swiss Army Man" was its own unique thing. A man (Paul Dano) stranded on a desert island uses the gassy body of a washed-up corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) as jet-propulsion to get him back to the mainland. Just hearing the description may have turned some people off, but "Swiss Army Man" was a wacky tour de force, both survival drama and cosmic contemplation of the often-funny human condition.
Unlike "Swiss Army Man," "Death of Dick Long" takes place in a realistic world, a small town in Alabama. The situation is human-sized, and doesn't launch into the fantastical stratosphere like "Swiss Army Man" - but it doesn't need to. In some ways, "Death of Dick Long" is the mirror-reverse of "Logan Lucky." The characters come from similar worlds, rough and rural, and yet the unlucky Logans - underestimated and condescended to - pull off a dazzling difficult heist. Zeke and Earl couldn't bluff their way out of a speeding ticket. "Death of Dick Long" gets so much mileage out of how incompetent Zeke and Earl are, how incapable they are of doing one thing right, whether it's washing blood-stained clothes, dealing with Zeke's bloody car, or lying to the police.
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