I Watch 'Em So You Don't Have To

I WOULDN'T WISH THIS MOVIE ON MY WORST ENEMY... BUT YOU CAN IF YOU WANT TO...






The Revenant (2009)

I was really looking forward to this movie. A zombie buddy picture, a horror/comedy about a soldier dying in battle who 'revives' after being brought home in a box, who then joins his best friend to be the good guys. 'Keeping the streets of L.A. safe for the undead' I believe is one way they put it. Massive BS on that. This foul mouthed duo needed to lie down and stay dead. First we have Bart, a soldier fighting overseas in a Country no one seems to agree on - I read in three different places Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Sorry to tell you kiddies, but even I (being geographically ignorant) know that these are three DIFFERENT COUNTRIES FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. So where was he? I had to go back to the film (and I REALLY didn't want to) to find out he was - in the Rumaila Oil Fields, Basra, Iraq. SO THERE, YOU PEOPLE WHO THINK ANY COUNTRY WITH SAND IS INTERCHANGABLE. Whew, sorry but this movie brings out the massive jerk in you. Probably because the two 'heroes' in this movie are massive jerks. They may be friends but that doesn't make them good ones.


Okay, lets find something good to say about this movie. This should take about a minute. The makeup and gore and special effects were outstanding. Just looking at the makeup work on the main two characters made me wince - those contact lenses must've hurt like a bitch and I'll bet they spent half of the day in a chair getting that latex right. 

So what if Bart's facial injuries, scars and even skin texture changed from scene to scene? Did we expect better? Excellent effects sometimes means sacrificing continuity. Watch Evil Dead. Please. 'Cause this movie really, really sucks.

And the basic premise for the story was a good one - a fallen soldier and his friend go against the 'creatures of the night' so to speak to clean up the streets. Groovy.

Now the bad. This is going to take a while. No, you know what? It doesn't deserve that much. Yeah the makeup was good and so was the premise but the delivery, the length of the film (110 minutes), the juvenile language (Geez, do you guys know any words longer than four letters?) and the fact that these two are HORRIBLE people from start to end just ruined anything they did - you just wanted this piece of crap to end.

The soldier, Bart (David Anders), dies because he is a dumbass - an insult to the real soldiers deployed in foreign countries. Adding insult to injury, he causes the death of his squad. This is our hero? Granted, he thought he hit a small child with their vehicle (I'm wondering if that kid didn't start the infection) but when it's dark and you have orders and the lives of your comrades at stake you don't just say 'I'm gonna go out in the dark and see what's out there.' Blammo. Lots of people waiting with rifles idiot. Then for whatever reason it takes a month from the time he dies to the time he's buried. So he stinks. In more ways than one.

Funeral, burial, people drinking in the bar talking about their hero. His best friend Joey (Chris Wylde who I wanted dead in the worst way) 'comforts' Bart's girlfriend by sleeping with her. Nice. That night Bart 'wakes up', gets out of his box and finds his buddy.


Lots of bad language, lots of juvenile stunts, more language, typical zombie stuff like vomiting black goop all over everything, more bad language, both yelling at each other, more vomiting. So they do the natural thing - they go out to party. 


At the liquor store they encounter a stereotypical gangbanger (the stereotypes fly fast and loose in this crapfest) and he and Bart face off, both shooting the other. Bart gets up of course, and finds some quick nourishment feeding off of the dead dude's blood. So he doesn't do the taffy pull, doesn't pull off and chew on legs or arms, just eats blood.

Joey looks this up and decides that Bart is a revenant, a person who has returned, supposedly from the dead. Duh. Zombie. Ghoul. Revenant. Whatever. It doesn't make him any smarter. Although he becomes like the real dead during the day, sunlight doesn't hurt him. And this little tidbit works against this freaking movie later.

After playing like they're in a Tarantino movie for a while (shooting, sucking blood, chopping up the bodies - or not - then dumping them in the river) Joey gets in front of a bullet. Whoops. So Bart 'infects' him. After stinking up the place for, I guess, a month, Joey gets up and now both are sucking (literally and figuratively) and the bodies are piling up.

Small problem. These 'revenants' do not get destroyed as easily as they think. The original gangbanger who they chopped up and threw in the river returns, sewed together, bloated and pissed off. He captures Joey, cuts him up and sends Bart his head. Still um, alive. I'm not going to describe the scene of how he enables Joey to talk but he is asked to kill him so he takes a huge ass piece of machinery and runs over the head. Nice splat and squish by the way. The effects and gore were pretty good. If they could have cut the movie to just show those, they might have had something.



Instead we're tortured with more crap - Bart trying to kill himself which doesn't work, Bart and all the other he 'infected' being captured by the military and prepared for war. In capsules reminiscent of those in The Return Of The Living Dead the revenants are packed (if there's just enough of them to be mobile, they're usable I guess) and they are dropped over Khuzestan Province, Iran. 









That's where this sorry piece of... cinema makes its final mistake. These guys are REALLY DEAD during the day. It shows them being dropped in the daytime - yet we get one last woebegotten glance at Bart as he contemplates his immediate future. Uh, he's not supposed to be awake, remember? No no, don't fix it, just run the credits pretty pretty please...

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