Fantasia 2010: Kerry Prior’s The Revenant

The horror/comedy isn’t a tough sell; audiences love to laugh while watching blood spatter and limbs fly through the air. Well, audiences who attend festivals like Fantasia, anyway. The horror part of the equation is easy. It’s the comedy part that usually falls flat or is out of balance with the horror elements. Few entries into the canon over the past couple of years come to mind; after Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, there just haven’t been very many horror comedies with mass appeal. Until The Revenant, that is.

Writer/director Kerry Prior (Roadkill) has come up with a buddy flick that manages to be a touching treatise on frendship while also offering up spot-on social commentary about life in Los Angeles. The fact that one of the buddies is a recently deceased Iraq war veteran who has inexplicably come back from the dead and turned to his best pal for help in figuring things out is almost secondary to the friendship angle. Through some hilarious trial and error, Joey (Chris Wylde, Strip Mall) decides that Bart (David Anders, Alias, Heroes) is a revenant, a sort of sentient zombie who needs to drink blood to slow down the decomposition of his body. Mirth and mayhem ensue as the two best buds set out on a gruesome quest for human blood and quickly realize that they can satisfy Bart’s need for blood while ridding the city of the criminal element through vigilantism.

Prior is well known for his visual effects work, having done films for director Don Coscarelli (the Phantasm films, Bubba Ho Tep), and his expertise shows in The Revenant. As he discussed in the post-screening Q&A, because of the low budget for the film, they had to get creative in order to achieve the effects they wanted, and apart from a couple of obvious green-screen shots, their creativity paid off. Blood and viscera abound, Anders actually looks like the walking dead, and all of this is played for laughs instead of scares. Prior’s script is note-perfect, from the skewering of racial stereotypes in L.A. to the depiction of the relationship between Bart and his grieving girlfriend Janet (Louise Griffiths, The Devil’s Chair). But the film is really all about the friendship between Bart and Joey, and Prior’s witty dialogue mixed with the onscreen chemistry between Anders and Wylde captures the essence of guys and friendship perfectly; and with Wylde as the comic foil and looking like a cross between David Spade and Scooby’s best bud Shaggy, it was hard to actually hear the dialogue for all the laughter in the theater.

At the screening, Prior mentioned that the film was dedicated to five friends of his who died while serving their country and that a lot of the situations in the film were taken from his own experiences with those friends. So while it in no way depicts anything even closely resembling reality, the personal touches Prior has included ring completely true. The Revenant has been kicking around the festival circuit for over a year now and has won many prizes, including several audience awards, so it’s definitely a crowd pleaser. It will probably have a very limited theatrical run, if at all – a shame, because it’s the kind of film that begs to be seen in a large room with a bunch of laughing strangers – before hitting DVD in the coming months, where it will likely quickly achieve cult classic status. Pretty much the quintessential horror comedy, The Revenant‘s only flaws are the aforementioned effects slips (totally excusable, given the almost non-existent budget) and the fact that it runs a bit long at 118 minutes. But don’t let that stop you; if you liked Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (aka Braindead), see this film at all costs.