LUCIDMEDIA

Toronto After Dark - The Revenant

Written by Andrew Skinner Friday, 21 August 2009 09:29

What do we know of this new species? This revenant? You’ll find out as the characters do in this excellent new comedy horror, with no introduction, directed by Kerry Prior. Fortunately for us, we’re not in this Petri dish of congealing slime holding the movie together. Rather than bright red blood the characters will hold your interest and if they didn’t, the movie’s sickening green pallor might get to you.

Bart (David Anders) is a corpse now, killed in Iraq, returned for funeral service in L.A., mourned by his devastated girlfriend Janet (Louis Griffiths) and best friend Joey (Chris Wylde). After a few weeks Bart shows up at the door unsure of his condition. The interplay and chemistry between Anders and Wylde is excellent and funny while they try and figure out what is going on and keeping it from his still mourning girlfriend. Another close friend named Mathilda (Jacy King), with some knowledge of vampires and the occult, insists that the revenant’s head must be cut off to bring this unnatural horror to an end. You can almost smell the rancid flesh of the decaying Bart and it is impossible to want to entirely help him, yet we suspect that he is a better person than the “living” Joey.

Bart is more of a vampire than a zombie, but he has indeed returned from the dead to harass the living. They soon discover that by drinking human blood he may even be able to reverse his decomposition. His deadbeat best friend Joey assists him in collecting human blood to survive by whatever means necessary, praying on the scum of the streets, which leads Joey to begin to seek the “dark bite” for himself because of their growing gunslinger reputation and life as late night partiers.

The die-hard romance with his girlfriend is touching and sad. Joey spills his guts suggesting that Bart has always been sucking the blood of his girlfriend, aimlessly going through life uncommitted to her. It is as if some sacred rule has been broken by his failure to follow through with this union, fallen in a pointless war he has been given another chance. Nature is throwing things at us to keep our species going but he continues just as much the 30’s something slacker as his friend Joey. Maybe this unrequited love is his animator but as usual his “best buddy” gets in the way.

As the plot thickens so does the congealed and rotting moral places that this movie goes to with farcical seriousness. It is all about relations that there are no satisfying answers to: love, sex, friendship, and death, all on the same grimy L.A. block with convenience store thieves in every shadow. The pigment of the cinematography is like looking at the social interplay of lab rats under night lights, in or out of the cage. The movie never loses its sickly parlor but neither does it let up in holding our delight with its “bromantic” characters and shockingly funny situations. But it’s the drama will carry you through this rotting horror.