Meet suburban zombie Drew Barrymore shes just like another other sun-kissed California girl, except shes got a nasty habit of feasting on human flesh. When we first see her in Santa Clarita Diet, the excellent new Netflix comedy, her real-estate agent Sheila is selling houses outside L.A., living the low-key minivan life with her husband Joel (Timothy Olyphant, of Deadwood and Justified fame) and their sassy teenage daughter. Then one day, something weird happens she starts puking buckets of toxic waste and suddenly gets an insatiable lust for the taste of dead people, not to mention a voracious sex drive. At first Sheila just munches the occasional human foot, sweet-talking the local undertaker into giving her spare body parts. But she transforms into a savage killing machine, devouring her victims and making blood smoothies out of their internal organs; she even gets herself a special kill poncho (its pink). Before you know it, Sheila is complaining, Im almost finished with the guy in the freezer. Its just thighs and giblets!
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Santa Clarita Diet is like a dark modern take on the classic Bewitched template: Heres a nice normal blonde Southern California mom, with a spooky supernatural life she keeps as her little secret. Created by Victor Fresco (Better Off Ted), it also has the suburban-dystopia vibe of Breaking Bad or The Americans, except played for laughs and with the actress butchering dudes twice her size. So much of it comes down to the uncrushable Drew Barrymore charm like her fellow Gen X pin-up girl Winona Ryder in Stranger Things, Drew gets her mojo back with a little help from the twilight zone. And its a strictly pro-zombie series; nobody even wants to utter the z-word. I dont like that word I think its inherently negative, says the geeky kid next door, who has to explain to the family whats going on.
She recruits Joel into helping her slaughter fresh flesh, and hes happy to assist, especially since Living-Dead Sheila is also an insatiable sex inferno. All the neighborhood moms are jealous of her increased pep when they ask how she does it, our fine young cannibal smiles and says, Im just straight-up addicted to these smoothies, taking a swig from her sippy cup full of human entrails. Its a clever allegory of the desperate-housewife Mothers Little Helper theme, right down to the way she has to cope with her sassy teenager Liv Hewson. The daughter freaks out when she finds corpses hidden around the house. The boy next door reassures her, Your mom is undead. Thats how they roll.
Like a lot of Netflix comedies, Santa Clarita Diet takes a few episodes to get rolling, but it takes off as Drew starts hitting her manic bloodthirsty heights, with great cameos from Nathan Fillion, Portia di Rossi and Patton Oswalt. Olyphant is almost unrecognizable without his cowboy hat; he has a striking resemblance to Jimmy Fallon, evoking painful flashbacks of that rom-com where Fallon kisses Drew at Fenway Park when the Red Sox win the World Series. The show is a welcome comeback for Barrymore, the eternally beloved grunge-era wild thing its not just her big move into TV, but her first high-profile performance anywhere in years. In a way, it circles back to the roles she was doing in the early Nineties, playing deadly vixens in flicks like Guncrazy or Doppelganger, a.k.a. The Evil Within.
Sometimes now when she talks in her trademark marble-mouth mumble, she sounds like Broad Citys Abbi Jacobsen doing her Drew imitation after wisdom-teeth surgery. But theres just something essentially lovable about the actress; shes the kind of star you root for whether shes in a project worthy of her or not. So its a treat to see her sink her teeth into something as meaty as this. Bon appetit.
From the kooky cannibalism comedy Santa Clarita Diet to Ricky Gervais mockumentary, here is your guide to the best streaming options of the month.