Human remains become office supplies surprisingly quickly in Dead Janitors Club. Jeff Klima stares at blood, tissue, and rooms nobody wants to enter, then gradually learns the same lesson every miserable worker eventually learns: once something becomes part of the job, disgust has a clock-out time.
Directed by Devon Downs and Kenny Gage, the film adapts Klima’s memoir about his years working in crime-scene cleanup. Felix Merback plays Jeff, broke and tired of minimum-wage work at a porn shop, when he answers a Craigslist advertisement from Dirk, a crooked police officer played by Jake Busey.
Dirk sees an industry with little competition and smells easy money. Jeff gets the gloves. That arrangement gives the film its best idea. Crime-scene cleanup is horrifying from the outside and almost mundane from the inside, where somebody still has to scrape, disinfect, bag, and invoice.
Another Terrible Day at Work
The early cleanup scenes find a strange rhythm between revulsion and routine. One job involves brain matter falling from a ceiling. Another leaves Jeff facing the physical evidence of a life that ended badly while Dirk treats the whole operation like an excuse to drink, disappear, or chase whatever pleasure happens to be nearby.
The comedy works when the camera stays close to that disconnect. Jeff recoils, adjusts, then gets on with it. Each new room becomes slightly less shocking than the last. Merback sells that progression quietly. His performance does not ask for sympathy through speeches. You can see the adaptation happening in smaller reactions, particularly when horrible sights stop producing the response they once did.
There is also a sharp economic joke buried under all the bodily fluids. Jeff enters this profession because ordinary work barely keeps him housed, and crime-scene cleanup initially fails to do that either. He gets evicted before Kerry, a tattoo artist played by Brianna Gage, gives him somewhere to land.
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Business finally improves after Jeff and Dirk’s operation is mistaken for an established cleanup company. Their success feels appropriately accidental. These are not master entrepreneurs. They are two men discovering that competence is optional when everyone else desperately wants the room cleaned. The uglier shift comes when they start searching dead people’s homes for valuables. Cleaning tragedy is one thing. Looting it changes what Jeff is becoming.
People You Probably Shouldn’t Trust
Merback gives Jeff enough restraint to stop the movie from turning into two hours of shouting inside contaminated houses. His relatively calm presence works especially well beside Jake Busey, whose Dirk behaves like a man permanently convinced his next terrible idea is the first stage of a business empire.
Busey certainly fits the material. Dirk is lazy, greedy, impulsive, and perfectly willing to let Jeff handle the disgusting part while he enjoys himself somewhere else. The performance can feel strangely detached, though, especially when the story needs Dirk to generate dramatic pressure instead of simply sleazy comic energy.
Jeff and Kerry are easier to care about. Brianna Gage brings warmth and resistance to their scenes together, and her chemistry with Merback creates brief spaces where Jeff seems capable of choosing a different kind of life. She helps him after his eviction, jokes with him, pushes against his stupidity, and becomes one of the few characters who can make the chaos feel personal.
The screenplay eventually gives her less to do once Jeff’s mistakes start spreading outward. Kerry shifts from participant to potential victim, which feels like a loss after her stronger early scenes.
The supporting cast lives at a far stranger frequency. Jake Holley’s Chris is a stoner whose sexual interests provide some aggressively juvenile comedy, while Gary Busey appears briefly as George, a homeless man connected to Kerry’s neighborhood. These bits establish how proudly lowbrow the film wants to be. Sometimes that looseness is funny. Sometimes the sexual gaze toward women makes the jokes feel stuck several developmental stages behind the rest of the movie.
The Safe That Changes Everything
Jeff and Dirk eventually make the mistake that reshapes the film: they steal a safe from a crime scene and discover it belongs to a drug cartel. The problem is almost emotional rather than purely structural. Watching Jeff clean human remains has a peculiar tension because every call asks him to normalize something most people cannot imagine seeing. Watching Jeff run from criminals feels familiar. Once gunmen, threats, and the stolen safe take control, the movie loses part of the discomfort that made its first half memorable.
That change also hurts the pacing. At roughly two hours, Dead Janitors Club has enough time to wander through supporting characters, romantic detours, crude jokes, cleanup jobs, and criminal escalation. The final stretch feels heavier because the cartel storyline needs increasingly elaborate trouble to maintain momentum. A late twist lands with less force than the buildup wants from it.
Downs and Gage do find value in the film’s rough production texture. Dirty apartments, cheap workplaces, dubious businesses, and improvised equipment belong to Jeff’s world. A polished surface would probably work against the grubby intimacy of watching somebody turn death into paid labor.
The film keeps finding its pulse whenever Jeff walks into another contaminated room and has to figure out where to begin. Give him a stolen safe and the story becomes another crime caper. Give him gloves, disinfectant, and something unspeakable dripping from the ceiling, and suddenly Dead Janitors Club feels like itself again.
Dead Janitors Club is a dark comedy crime feature released in 2026. The story follows a crooked cop and his partner running an underground crime scene cleanup service who draw the wrath of a drug cartel after lifting a mysterious safe.
Where to Watch Dead Janitors Club (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Dead Janitors Club
Distributor: Shadow Magic Studios, Girls & Corpses Films
Release date: 2026
Running time: 2 hours
Director: Devon Downs, Kenny Gage
Writers: Jeff Klima
Cast: Jake Busey, Felix Merback, Brianna Gage, Jake Holley, Ben Whalen, Ginger Lynn, Brandon Kirk
The Review
Dead Janitors Club
Dead Janitors Club is funniest when Jeff is elbow-deep in a room everyone else wants erased from memory. Felix Merback gives the chaos an unexpectedly human center, and the crime-scene cleanup material finds humor in the strange routines people build around unbearable work. Once the stolen safe and cartel chase take control, that specificity fades into familiar crime-comedy machinery. The crude sexual humor and uneven third act make the rough edges harder to forgive, yet there is still a strange little movie here worth digging through the mess to find.
PROS
- Distinctive crime-scene cleanup premise
- Felix Merback’s grounded performance
- Strong Merback and Brianna Gage chemistry
- Effective workplace black comedy
CONS
- Familiar cartel subplot
- Uneven sexual humor
- Overlong two-hour runtime
- Weak late twist
- Kerry becomes underused
