The Revenant 

The Revenant builds too slowly, and the characters can’t seem to utter a sentence without some variant of “fuck” between every word, which gets tiresome. But writer-director-producer-editor D. Kerry Prior has worked in effects departments on big and small movies since the ’80s, so he knows how to make bloody vomit, splattery gunfights, and disembodied heads look both disgusting and funny. He’s pretty good with actors, too: Wylde has a scruffy wit not unlike a young Michael Keaton, and he and Anders make a winning pair as they tool around L.A., killing gangsters and guzzling booze and blood.

What really helps The Revenant overcome its pacing and dialogue weaknesses, though, is that Prior thinks through his premise—which is traditionally the key to good comedy and good genre films. When Anders first awakens, he has Wylde take him to the hospital, where he describes his condition on his admittance form as “General Malaise.” When a severed head tries to pass on important information, Anders holds a vibrator to its throat to generate sound. At every step in the story, Prior thinks about what makes logical sense, what illuminates the characters, and what’ll get a laugh, rather than just pushing ahead to whatever preordained point he wants to reach. The result is a horror film that progresses organically and unpredictably, even willing to take a turn for the tragic, if that’s what’s inevitable.