The Cured

Director - David Freyne (Handheld Horror: Take 6, The First Wave)
Starring - Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X-Men: Days of Future Past), Sam Keeley (Misfits, Dublin Murders), and Tom Vaughn-Lawlor (Avengers: Endgame, Peaky Blinders)
Release Date - 2017
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "The cure is just the beginning"
Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) (Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     I've said a few times over the years that I'm burned out with zombie but deep down I still have a soft spot for this overused sub-genre.  I grew up on Romero and other classic zombie flicks so when I come across a new one I may roll my eyes but deep down I'm praying it doesn't suck.  Sometime back IFC once again teamed up with Scream Factory to release a Irish zombie film.  The Cured was released in 2017 and sometime later made it's way to blu here in the U.S.  This is one of the films I put up for review and later lost track of it when everything in my collection was tossed into totes after the fire.  When I rediscovered the film I quickly tossed it in to get caught up.  Thank you Scream Factory for sending it my way.

     The film follows Senan (Keeley) who is one of the many people cured after contracting a zombie virus.  Many that contracted the disease can be cured but those that lived through the zombie outbreak refuse to forgive them for what they did while infected.  Senan moves in with his sister-in-law and her son after she lost her husband during the outbreak.  He tries to become another functioning member of society but people often turn their back on him and before long he is attacked for being one of the cured.  This drives him to join an underground group that wants to bring society down until they start accepting the cured as regular people unknowingly bringing his sister-in-law and nephew into the middle of the chaos when the infected is released from a testing facility.
     I had heard that The Cured was a different take on the zombie sub-genre but the trailer didn't really paint a picture that it was different.  Sure, segregation and racism was prevalent but this was far from the first film to do that with the sub-genre.  Night of the Living Dead was the first to bring us a zombie movie with social commentary.  Hell, even the horror comedy Fido made mention of this.  The Cured may have worked that more into the story but at the end of the day it was nothing knew for genre fans.  The acting in this one is solid but the characters are painfully forgettable and bland.  Even after immediately watching the film I can't recall a single cast member and their characters in the film.  In fact, so many are written so close together that I was getting them confused several time throughout the film.  The story for this one is loosely a zombie film in a sense.  Instead, it focuses more on how society was split between those not infected and the cured with the cured being mistreated and victimized.  This would have worked if the characters had more personality.  Instead, the characters are so boring and bland that you find it difficult to associate with them.  Hell, there is times where I was smiling thinking they were about to die.  The film had an idea of what they wanted to convey but struggled getting there.  Finally, the film doesn't really focus on the zombie aspect of the film so we miss out on the blood and gore associated with zombie flicks until the end of the film.  The effects are great but we don't get a lot of blood and gore.  Most of the death take place off camera.  Overall, The Cured is one of those films that looks good on paper but did not transfer well to film.  The story is an interesting idea but something we have still seen before in other films over the years.  Check it out just don't expect something that reinvents the sub-genre.