Rigor mortis sets in early in Jim Jarmusch’s zombie dead pan, THE DEAD DON’T DIE.

Set at shuffling pace, this poor companion piece to his virtuoso vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive, is amusing to a degree and esoteric to the Nth.

Like Terry Gilliam’s recent The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, THE DEAD DON’T DIE is sort of a film within a film, and like that film, Adam Driver is a lead actor.

A laconic loquaciousness is the franca lingua of THE DEAD DON’T DIE, a down pat patois of repetition and mundane.

Bill Murray plays Sheriff Cliff Robertson, Centreville’s chief of police. Named after the actor who famously starred in the The Naked and the Dead, Adam Driver is his deputy, Peterson, a nod and a wink perhaps to his last Jarmusch collaboration, Patterson, and Chloe Sevigny plays accompanying constable, Officer Morrison.

There’s an assembly of Jarmusch alumni – Tilda Swinton as a Scottish undertaker channeling Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Tom Waites playing a hermit who acts like a Greek chorus, and Iggy Pop plays a caffeine addicted corpse.

Somewhere in this shambolic ramble, Jarmusch targets the greed of society, government and big business with its zombiefying effects of mindless acquisition.

The cause of the reanimation of the deceased is leveled at polar fracking which has resulted in the earth’s axis losing its equilibrium and resurrecting the dead to unleash cannibalistic carnage.

Loose and a little bit lazy, THE DEAD DON’T DIE is set on chill not to chill, with freeze frame photography and editing and a narrative that is glacial.

Languorous as a lumbering Lazarus, THE DEAD DON’T DIE let’s the delightful drollery of the first hour dissipate into the doldrums in the last half, harking Peterson’s constant refrain through the movie, This isn’t going to end well.”

Having said that, you can do a lot worse than forking out your dough on this dawdle amongst the undead.