In Theaters and Digital

There is something profoundly American about discovering a dead body and immediately wondering whether there might be money in cleaning it up. Dead Janitors Club, the darkly comedic crime thriller adapted from Jeff Klima’s memoir The Dead Janitors Club: Pathetically True Tales of a Crime Scene Cleanup King, rolls around in that ugly little truth with both hands. It is a movie about blood, desperation, illegal entrepreneurship and the sort of terrible decisions people make when rent is due and dignity has already left the building.

Jeff Klima (Felix Merback) is broke, directionless and working for minimum wage at a porn shop when crooked cop Dirk (Jake Busey) introduces him to an unusual side hustle: cleaning crime scenes before anyone with a license, a conscience or government oversight can get involved. There is money in blood, apparently, especially when nobody asks where the mop came from. Their operation begins as a disgusting shortcut to quick cash, but things go violently sideways after Jeff steals a safe from one of their cleanup jobs and learns the first rule of crime: if something looks valuable enough to steal, it probably belongs to someone willing to kill you for taking it.

Directors Kenny Gage and Devon Downs recognize the wonderfully diseased potential of the premise, finding humor in plastic sheeting, bodily fluids and the frightening speed with which human beings can normalize almost anything once it becomes part of the job. The comedy does not come from elaborate punchlines so much as behavior. These people are scrambling through filth, lying to one another and improvising their way around consequences that continue getting heavier, bloodier and significantly more armed. When the movie works, it has the scuzzy momentum of a late-night crime story told by somebody who probably should not be trusted with the details.

Merback gives Jeff enough bewildered decency to keep the character from becoming just another idiot chasing criminal money. He is frequently weak, occasionally clever and always one poor decision away from making everything worse, which makes him strangely easy to root for. His relationship with Kerry (Brianna Gage), a tattoo artist with sharper instincts than anyone else in his orbit, gives the movie something human beneath all the splatter. Their romance does not stop the criminal machinery, but it gives Jeff a reason to imagine a life beyond wiping strangers off walls.

Jake Busey, meanwhile, tears into Dirk with the caffeinated menace of a man who has mistaken corruption for a personality. Busey knows exactly what kind of movie he is in and attacks it accordingly, delivering the film’s sleaze, danger and dark humor without asking anyone’s permission. The appearance of Gary Busey as George, a homeless man with an alarmingly territorial approach to public space, is brief, bizarre and completely on brand. Putting both Buseys in a movie this grubby feels less like stunt casting and more like an inevitable natural event.

At two hours, Dead Janitors Club occasionally takes too long sorting through its own mess. The mixture of crime thriller, romance, workplace comedy and memoir-inspired lunacy does not always combine smoothly, and some of the detours weaken the escalating danger surrounding the stolen safe. The movie is at its best when it keeps Jeff and Dirk trapped inside the filthy consequences of their latest shortcut. Whenever it pauses too long to explain itself, some of that wonderfully disreputable energy drains from the bucket.

Still, there is an appealing lack of polish to Dead Janitors Club. This is not a slick criminal fantasy populated by cool people making brilliant moves; it is a story about broke, reckless human beings trying to stay ahead of their own stupidity while the blood continues soaking through the carpet. It is nasty, shaggy, uneven and often very funny, with enough genuine affection for its damaged characters to keep the ugliness from becoming exhausting. Some messes cannot be cleaned. They can only be spread around until everybody is standing in them.

Dead Janitors Club arrives in select theaters and on VOD August 28, 2026.

MPAA Rating: PG-13.
Runtime: 119 mins
Director: Devon Downs; Kenny Gage
Writer: Jeff Klima
Cast: Jake Busey; Felix Merback; Brianna Gage
Genre: Comedy | Crime
Tagline: Death... Is Always Watching
Memorable Movie Quote: "Your sister was the floor"
Distributor: Blue Fox Entertainment
Official Site:
Release Date: August 28, 2026
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: Pathetically True Tales of a Crime Scene Cleanup King. The story follows crooked cop Dirk (Jake Busey) and his cash-strapped partner Jeff Klima (Felix Merback) as they run a risky, illicit side-hustle cleaning up crime scenes. Things spiral violently out of control when Jeff lifts a mysterious safe from a bloody crime scene, not realizing it belongs to a dangerous drug cartel.