Blood, Bills, and Bad Decisions

MOVIE REVIEWS
Dead Janitors Club
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Genre: Dark Comedy, Crime, Thriller
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 2h
Director(s): Kenny Gage, Devon Downs
Writer(s): Jeff Klima
Cast: Jake Busey, Felix Merback, Brianna Gage, Jake Holley, Ginger Lynn Allen, Gary Busey
Where to Watch: in select theaters and on VOD August 28, 2026

RAVING REVIEW: After the first few crime scenes, blood stops being something Jeff is horrified by. It ultimately becomes part of the workload, another mess to scrub, bag, and leave behind before the next call comes in. DEAD JANITORS CLUB succeeds from the exploration of that warped normalization, taking a profession most people would rather never think about and treating it like another lousy job occupied by people trying to make rent.

Jeff Klima knows this world better than most screenwriters ever could hope to; the film is adapted from his 2010 memoir, THE DEAD JANITORS CLUB: PATHETICALLY TRUE TALES OF A CRIME SCENE CLEANUP KING, which recounted his experiences working in crime-scene cleanup. Having Klima adapt his own story gives the film an unusual relationship with a lot of the stranger details. The disgusting parts don't feel like they're there just because somebody wanted another gross-out gag. They're connected to the reality of earning a paycheck by entering the rooms everybody else desperately wants cleaned and forgotten.

Felix Merback plays Jeff as someone who doesn't exactly choose this career as much as stumble into it while looking for a way out of minimum-wage work. Dirk, a crooked cop played by Jake Busey, sees an opportunity to make money from an industry with little competition and brings Jeff along for the ride. That arrangement gives the movie an entertaining relationship because these aren't two highly capable criminals executing some clever scheme. They're opportunists figuring things out while surrounded by evidence that someone else's day went catastrophically worse.

Busey’s portrayal of Dirk fits almost too well. There's something slightly unreliable about him even before the parts of the corruption become important, and the performance doesn't waste energy trying to make Dirk respectable. He's greedy, impulsive, and frequently more confident than the circumstances justify. Busey understands that kind of character, letting a broken smile or a questionable idea tell us nearly everything we need to know about the man behind it.

Jeff has to function as the audience's entry point without becoming just an observer standing beside the louder character. He gradually develops the numbness required for the job while retaining enough unease to keep the story from becoming nothing but a procession of bodily fluids and bad decisions. His comparatively restrained approach also prevents the pairing from becoming exhausting. If Busey played at the same frequency for two hours, the movie might become unbearable.

Crime-scene cleanup itself remains considerably more interesting than the criminal plot that eventually grows around it. The early fascination comes from entering spaces after violence happened and already left. The police investigation is over. The body is gone. What remains is the evidence of somebody's death and the unfortunate people responsible for making that evidence disappear. DEAD JANITORS CLUB finds an uncomfortable comedy in how quickly something can become routine once it becomes somebody's profession.

That isn't an easy balance to strike. A film like this can become brutal if every dead person exists solely as the cornerstone of another joke, or too grim if it takes the consequences so seriously that the comedy collapses. Co-directors Kenny Gage and Devon Downs usually keep those sides close enough together that the ugliness remains part of the joke without making death itself the punchline.

The trouble begins when cleaning isn't lucrative enough for Dirk and Jeff. Robbing the homes of the dead introduces another level of moral rot, and stealing a safe that happens to belong to a drug cartel pushes the story away from its workplace comedy and toward more common crime-thriller territory. The escalation makes sense; it just isn't as distinctive as what came before it. A guy cleaning human remains because the money is better than working retail is interesting. A guy being hunted for stealing something from dangerous criminals is a movie trope that goes back forever.

That difference becomes increasingly noticeable across the two-hour runtime. The cleanup business could have supported a tighter dark comedy on its own, particularly with Klima's real experiences providing such bizarre experiences. Once the cartel takes over, DEAD JANITORS CLUB begins working harder to manufacture danger than it ever had to work to make its original situation compelling.

Brianna Gage plays Kerry with enough resistance that the relationship doesn't immediately become one in which a woman exists merely to rescue a reckless man from himself. Their connection helps expose the widening distance between whatever life Jeff thought he wanted and the world he's entering with Dirk. The romance isn't developed with the same specificity, though. Jeff's occupation is unusual enough that nearly every detail tells us something about him, while parts of the relationship fall into more recognizable expectations. Kerry also becomes someone who can be endangered once Jeff's choices begin to have consequences. There's more potential there than the screenplay uses.

Jake Holley and Ginger Lynn Allen populate the darker edges of Jeff's life, while Gary Busey turns up briefly as George. His appearance is exactly that, an appearance rather than a major supporting role, and the movie doesn't pretend otherwise. Seeing Jake and Gary Busey in the same project provides its own novelty, although DEAD JANITORS CLUB is smart enough not to build the entire production around that bit of casting.

The humor won't work for everyone. This is a movie about cleaning decomposing human remains; Gage and Downs aren't particularly interested in making the occupation easier to digest. Blood, bodily fluids, terrible environments, and the mechanics of cleaning them are part of the appeal. Some jokes push past dark comedy into deliberately juvenile territory.

There are also moments when the low-budget sensibility works in the film's favor. DEAD JANITORS CLUB shouldn't look or feel too respectable. These characters operate in dirty rooms, questionable businesses, cheap workplaces, and increasingly bad circumstances. A higher-end production might have created too much distance from the grime that makes the story memorable in the first place.

Klima adapting his own memoir creates an interesting contradiction. The film has access to material weirder than most writers could come up with, then eventually supplements it with the sort of criminal escalation screenwriters invent all the time. I kept wanting more of the first part. The uncomfortable logistics of death cleanup, the people Jeff encounters, the emotional compartmentalization required to keep doing the job, and the economics behind it are enough to carry a movie without requiring drug-cartel danger to make life interesting.

A shorter runtime would have helped considerably. Two hours give subplots and supporting characters room to breathe, but they also reveal how often the film drifts away from the reason its story stands apart. The energy that comes from Jeff and Dirk walking into another impossible mess has to be manufactured once the thriller aspects take control.

DEAD JANITORS CLUB works best when nobody is shooting at Jeff, threatening him, or chasing a stolen safe. Hand him gloves, put him in a room nobody else wants to enter, and let the reality of his occupation do the work. That's where the movie finds something genuinely unusual, funny, disgusting, and occasionally revealing about the things people can learn to consider normal when enough money is attached. The cartel plot gives the film somewhere to go. The cleanup job gives it a reason to watch.

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