Expiration Date (2006)

Charlie Silvercould III carries around a family curse passed down from his grandfather; death by a milk truck on his 25th birthday. With eight days left, Charlie accepts his fate and starts... See full summary »

Director:

Rick Stevenson

Writers:

Hamish Gunn, Rick Stevenson

Stars:

Robert A. Guthrie, Sascha Knopf, Dee Wallace

18 wins.

Cast

Credited cast:
Robert A. Guthrie	...	Charlie
Sascha Knopf	...	Bessie
Dee Wallace	...	Lucille (as Dee Wallace-Stone)
Ned Romero	...	Old Native Man
Nakotah LaRance	...	Native Teen
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Curt Becker	...	Chunk
Jill Bennett	...	Alicia
Clayton Corzatte	...	Senior
Jan D'Arcy	...	Mrs. Fingerbaum
Meaghan Foy	...	Schoolgirl
Cynthia Geary	...	Funeral Home Representative
Michele Gray	...	Young Lucille
Eric Johnson	...	Animal Control Officer #2
David Keith	...	Wild William
Emma Kelley	...	School girl

Storyline

Charlie Silvercould III carries around a family curse passed down from his grandfather; death by a milk truck on his 25th birthday. With eight days left, Charlie accepts his fate and starts taking care of his unfinished business, like watering his plants and returning his library books and so on. But while he's out casket hunting, he meets a girl who just won't let him die in peace.

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Plot Keywords:

family curse | fate | death | milk truck | birthday | 

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Genres:

Comedy | Romance

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Details

Official Sites:

Official site [us]

Release Date:

21 April 2006 (USA)

Filming Locations:

Seattle, Washington, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Roadkill Productions LLC

Did You Know?

Quotes

Old Native Man: You'll dance for me again, won't ya?
Native Teen: [laughs] No.

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Soundtracks

"Traveling"
Written and Performed by Chris Degarmo and Gavin Hayes

User Reviews

Clever and warm, even when it shouldn't be

So there's this young man, see, and he knows when he's going to die due to an old family curse, and he spends the last two weeks of his life preparing for his grisly demise.

Sounds gloomy, doesn't it? And a bit corny.

Happily, Expiration Date avoids both of these two pitfalls adroitly, and what could have been an 'artsy' bit of gallows humor is instead a very surprisingly warm romantic bildungsroman. It is often cheeky, sometimes hilarious, and never self-indulgent.

After a brief framing narrative (think of the boy-and-grandpa bits in The Princess Bride) we are introduced to our hero, who believes that, like his father and grandfather before him, he is doomed to be crushed by a milk truck on his next birthday, just a few days hence. The preparations he makes for his imminent demise certainly occasion a few obvious bits of black humor (measuring the view from his burial plot by stretching himself out on the grass) but that takes up a lot less of our character's attention than the young woman who has entered his life and who keeps encouraging him, despite himself, to get involved with living instead of with dying. Her performance, sometimes a bit shrill, is the only sour note I felt in this movie, but I was able to overlook it because the lead character is so charming and she is clearly trying to serve as a foil for that.

The plotting is neatly reflexive, with lots of little detailed sub-plots which are brought around later in the movie and wrap the whole bundle up so that it's more allegory than realism. But that turns out to be okay (minus, again like the Princess Bride, the unnecessary framing story), and the leads generally keep things light enough that we excuse the poetic bits. I certainly hope this one finds a distributor. It deserves it.