Remy – The Returned
Only Lovers Left Alive was a new spin on the vampire genre. Cheap Thrills was a new spin on the torture porn genre. Wer was a whole new spin on the werewolf genre, and now The Returned is a whole new spin on the zombie genre. I will admit, I almost shut the movie off in the first five minutes, because the opening felt so cliché and like every other zombie movie ever to me. All I can say is that I am glad I didn’t.
The Returned takes place in a time when the zombie apocalypse has SORT OF already happened, but the world has kinda figured out how to deal with it. You see, it is a disease that slowly turns people in to those things. The catch is that there is a pill that can quell it from growing in you, but, as it would be in real life, the pill is super expensive and super hard to get. I think you can see the story this is setting up.
The movie focuses on Alex and Kate. Alex has the disease. Kate is a doctor and her specialty is working on turning this epidemic around. What’s great is that the movie focuses on so many aspects of what it would really be like if this was happening. The poor get sicker than the rich, and “the returned” (zombies are never name dropped in the film, which was a brilliant touch) are looked at as monsters by some people, and victims by others. It is nice to see a type of story we have seen a thousand times over get told to us in a way that it never has before. In that sense, this is up there with Pontypool for most original non-zombie zombie film.
I won’t tell you much more, except that things get more and more tense across the course of this movie as people slowly figure the world is running out of medicine. It is also, believe it or not, a sweet love story between two people who just want to have as much time together as they can before nature and a fate worse then death tears them apart.
The End.
So what horror movies have you seen this year that deserve more love than they’re getting?
*A special thanks to Remy for stepping in to guest write! Feel free to follow either of us on Twitter for even more insanity and updates:
Matt Donato Follow @DoNatoBomb
Remy Carreiro Follow @RemyCarreiro
Like what you read? Check out our last article where we discuss which “serious” directors we’d love to see take a stab at horror!