Watching The Revenant bestows a bit of that original terror I experienced when first exposed to the potential existence of the living dead. For me, it began rockstar zombiemakers like Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson & Dan O’Bannon who cinematically bitch slapped us in the face with The Evil Dead, Braindead (aka Dead Alive) & Return of the Living Dead.

I grew up in a smallish Texas town and found salvation in the form of late night cable horror and VHS rentals based on whatever b-movie cover art looked the best. Hastings, Two Day Video,

The Revenant (2009)

Randall’s & Albertson’s Family video rental…BLESS Y’ALL. My friends would take turns paying the rental/late fees and generously offering their parents houses for weekly late night screenings.

Tapes rewound. Tracking adjusted. Popcorn & Dr. Pepper  in hand. Horror movies, along with the good company of a few friends, saved my adolescence.

Back to The Revenant – an adventure to watch the characters discover a new, difficult-to-classify vampiric zombie lore. Iraq War veteran returns home in a casket and later shows up at a friend’s apartment.  Weird, dark, undead buddy-comedy film gets stranger and stranger. The zombies in The Revenant are unlike all others I’ve seen before. They retain their cognitive abilities (despite decomposition), shoot guns, commit crimes and ingest copious amounts of drugs – which begs the question: Can the dead get high?

Good acting, good gore and comedic moments that stick like superglue. If this film doesn’t get the wide theatrical distribution it deserves, it will nevertheless be a huge sleeper hit at the rental store, Netflix, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.

Four and a half zombie thumbs up for The Revenant & the unafraid filmmakers who build new mythologies from dead scratch.

So I’m thinking: “Why is this movie so goddamn good?”…And ya know what I found? That old Wiki sez:

The Revenant is written, directed, produced and by Kerry Prior, who also supervised the visual effects on the film. The film is co-produced by Jacques Thelemaque and Liam Finn and edited by Walter Murch.

Walter “Maniac Editor of APOCALYPSE NOW” Murch!!! Are you kidding me, Wiki? For the sake of Sweet Zombie Baby Jesus, no wonder The Revenant is so damn good.

EXHIBIT A: Lucio Fulci’s slowmo voodoo zombie flick comonly known as ZOMBI.

It must be noted that human meat post-zombitization must taste like delicious meat popsicles. Similar to the process of curing meat, the undead body becomes like a walking stick of hickory smoked turkey jerky as a human crosses over and becomes a living corpse.

MMMM. That’s scrumptious zombie!

Left unanswered in the film:
How terrifying would a zombie shark be? Pretty damn frighting is the correct answer.

Beyond the non sequitur shark fight, ZOMBI remains awesome.

Still from ZOMBI: Nothing tenser than a slow eye gouging!

Respect to the Italians who saw what Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and grew the horror galaxy with some of the best gore in cinema history  (re: history’s longest anxiety provoking eye-gouge). Not to omit the eye bleeding found in Fulci’s GATES OF HELL. You don’t see a lot of spontaneous eye bleeding these days, and I’m unsure why….like the frequency of maggots used as props in horror movies. ZOMBI contains its fair share of sleepy zombies lumbering around covered with gross-but-benign fly larva.

So to finally end the discuss: Yes, there is indeed a perfectly good reason why a voodoo style zombie and shark would get all caught up in fisticuffs. Zombies are tasty. You’re just too busy running for your life to sample a bite.

So why wouldn’t the zombies just eat themselves all day? Good question. Well, like junk food, undead flesh is delectable but lacks all of the nutritional properties of healthy living human flesh. Guh!

I also have to root for really slow zombies. They’re really working hard for their meal. Keep on crawling, Mr. Torso Zombie, you’ll get there eventually.

Nice music video recut of Romero’s 1968 classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD from high-pitched nerd/cartoon rapper MC CHRIS.