Running on Empty

Set in Los Angeles. Mort – a repressed, eccentric mortician who lives with his flighty girlfriend, Nicole, is in a rut. Stuck in a numbing job applying cosmetics to dead bodies, and beset by internal fears of getting hurt emotionally, Mort leads a quiet and unsatisfying “lukewarm” life. Things change for him and Nicole when they take advantage of a discount promotion on purchasing their dream house by getting their “Death Dates” analyzed. Doctors in the future can determine within a week the exact time of an individual's natural death. To their mutual shock and dismay, Nicole and Mort learn that he will die in a year. Freaked out, Nicole dumps him and immediately hooks up with someone else. These events send Mort on a journey of self-discovery to find love and meaning in his remaining life. The journey takes him to a sleazy bar where he has an unfortunate encounter with a poetry-obsessed call girl who, unbeknownst to him, has a Death Date that very night. After she dies in Mort’s lap, her psycho pimp Simon begins hounding and shaking him down for an “unauthorized blow job” he thinks Mort received. Anxious to find real love before he dies, Mort joins “Til Death Do Us Part” – a dating service that specializes in matchmaking for people with short Death Dates. However, when all of the dates turn out to be shams, Mort returns to the service demanding a refund. Discovering that the company’s offices are closed on weekends, he makes an unexpected connection with Kate, the funny, but sincere girl who shoots the clients' dating videos. The two hit it off and begin an unlikely romance that awakens Mort’s long repressed emotions. However, trouble soon arrives when Simon reappears and threatens Mort’s new-found happiness.