Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Rating (from metacritic.com): 35/100

Storyline (from IMDB.com):
Alice awakes in Raccoon City, only to find it has become infested with zombies and monsters. With the help of Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera, Alice must find a way out of the city before it is destroyed by a nuclear missile.

Source: My personal collection

Review:
First thing first; I’m a fan of the Resident Evil games. I played the first two and loved them. It was because of them that I really understood why people liked zombies, and helped me catch the zombie bug. So, when I heard there were movies coming out, I had a faint feeling of hope, before I remembered this was coming from Hollywood, who seems to be unable to transfer things to the Big Screen without fucking something up.

Before you get all bent out of shape, I do enjoy some comic book or video game movies. But, I think everyone out there can agree that not all of them are well done. For example, you have Alone In The Dark and the Super Mario Bros. Two movies that had almost nothing to do with the games they shared titles with. And, it took two viewings and my friend explaining that The Hive in the first Resident Evil movie was suppose to be the lab we see in the second game.

If you’re wondering why I’m reviewing this movie instead of the first one, it’s because I only own this one, and don’t really feel the need to watch the first one again. I also plan on watching and reviewing the 4th one, and I would rather swallow a running chainsaw than watch the third one again. My review of the 3rd one would be this: This Movie Sucks. And, since I’m watching the 4th one, I figured I should refresh my memory of the series.

This was, so far, the best movie in the Resident Evil series. It’s the Aliens to the Resident Evil’s Alien, as in an action/horror sequel to a horror movie. It also expands the universe by quite a bit, showing just how big, bad, and nasty Umbrella is… Hmm, very much like Weyland-Yunati corporation in Aliens. To follow this thread a bit, both Alien and Resident Evil have strong female leads, in which she’s the sole survivor (or so it appears), and is the only character to make it into the next movie. In the sequels, the female lead must lead a group to survive a disaster caused by the evil corporation, and they end up saving a little girl. Okay, maybe I stretched it a bit, but there are quite a few parallels between the two franchises, including having the third movie that almost killed the franchise…

Okay, okay, let’s do a real review now. The movie picks up shortly after the first one, we don’t know how long, but I guess it’s less than a year. We see The Hive being reopened and things going to merry hell in a handbag. We see that in less than a day, the infection has spread to critical levels. How does this happen? I have no idea, they don’t give us anything to go on. Somehow, Umbrella manages to put up a wall around the city, without any explanation about how they did it, or how they got the approval to do so. Then, they seal the city and everyone inside is left to die. Okay… That’s kinda… Not possible, but it’s a video game movie, so I let it slide the first time I saw it. The really good parts are when Jill and Carlos get introduced, making the people who played the games cheer. I thought Jill was well played, but her character is overshadowed by Alice, played by Mila Jovovich. And, Mila Jovovich is in ‘warrior woman’ form, driving this movie. It’s not Resident Evil anymore; it’s Alice in Resident Evil land. We get the over-the-top video game plot, with Alice having to face-off against Nemesis, the Big Bad Evil Corporate Guy who pulls all the strings and gets his just desserts in the end, and the characters that exist only to die. It’s a zombie movie; we expect a high death toll.

But, there are some good things. The STARS team is well done, even if they don’t live long. I would love to see maybe a short film about how they got from the bridge to the theatre. LJ brought some much needed ‘normal guy in bad situation’ to the cast along with, yes, the comic relief. I really enjoyed the zombies, they felt real, acted ‘real’ and the make-up was well done. They pull this movie up. Two scenes that made this for me was the ‘stairwell’ scene (during Carlos’ introduction) and the ‘last stand’ scene, where the surviving police and Umbrella teams fight to the last man. The stairwell really made you think about what it would be like to be in that situation, being chased by friends and coworkers, fleeing for your life, praying you’ll make it, then the continuing to struggle, even after you’ve been bitten. The last stand showed how we hope law enforcement would act, if it the scene didn’t make a lot of sense. You’d think they would pick a better spot to hold them off, but who knows why they picked that spot. Maybe the remaining civilians had holed up nearby or maybe there was a building full of puppies. Cute, adorable puppies. One other thing was, much like The Walking Dead TV show, they look very generic. No ‘cheerleader zombie.’ No ‘office drone zombie.’ No ‘nerd zombie.’ They all look like normal people that have risen from the dead to consume the flesh of the living. Sure, there’s some kid zombies (which I hate, and I despise baby zombies), and a pair of stripper zombies, these are the exception rather than the rule in the film. The kid zombies were absolutely terrifying, so I’m okay with that. The action scenes are also well done, really making the movie pop. And, the horror follows well with the action, making this a decent action/horror movie, fitting with the action/horror feeling of the game. They also did a good job of making it feel like Raccoon City is a real city; the small touches, like RPD on the uniforms and cop cars, and signs referencing locations from the game. They also showed how pervasive Umbrella is in the city, but it was over done when they put the Umbrella logo on the backs of the bullets in the church scene. (Umbrella is a biologics company, not an ammunition manufacturer.) I will admit they also showed how powerful Umbrella was throughout the film, if it was a bit unrealistic, but it’s a video game movie.

There were a few things that just threw me out of the movie. To start with, we have the ‘graveyard’ scene, where the dead and buried are somehow brought back by the T-virus. No, just no. I’ll accept a virus bringing people back from the dead, provided the people were infected while they’re alive. It may not be good science, but its science. Bringing the dead back to life, when they’ve been dead for a long time, and embalmed, is complete bullshit. It just doesn’t jive with how a virus works, even a pseudo-science one like the T-virus.
Then we have the Umbrella Corporation. I’ll accept a company working on bio-weapons. It’s not realistic; however, with the military-industrial complex beginning to have the weird mix of company and government, I could see a company get involved in bio-weapons. But, companies do not get access to nuclear weapons. Companies do not get the right to seal off a city. And, there’s no way in hell a company is going to get people to believe a video is a fake. I could see the company having elements in the government that are willing to do things for them, but the movie makes it seem like it’s all them. And, it just doesn’t suspend my disbelief.
The ending also just dragged on and on. After watching the very forced battle between Alice and Nemesis, I was ready for the movie to end, and I think the writers were, too. But, then they had to cram the helicopter crash in, and set up for a sequel. Okay, cool. Then, if feels like someone at the studio said ‘no, you need to keep up the whole thing about how powerful Umbrella is thing’ and we have to sit through a bunch of fake news reports. This movie was done as soon as the bomb went off, why did we have to sit through so much extra bullshit? And, someone please explain to me how Alice gets mind popping powers, because that was just lame. (So, so lame.) If you can kill a man with the power of your mind, how the hell can you be controlled or monitored by a computer? I just don’t get it.

Final Thoughts: A good sequel. A decent video game movie. A decent action/horror movie. Not, however, a good movie. Just an enjoyable one at most.

It was a BAD movie.

Coming Soon: Resident Evil: Afterlife

(If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see a poll to see what terrible movie I review for Halloween. Vote for your favorite!)

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Repo! The Genetic Opera

Rating (from metacritic.com): 32/100

Storyline (from IMDB.com):
In the year 2056 - the not so distant future - an epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GeneCo, a biotech company that offers organ transplants, for a price. Those who miss their payments are scheduled for repossession and hunted by villainous Repo Men. In a world where surgery addicts are hooked on painkilling drugs and murder is sanctioned by law, a sheltered young girl searches for the cure to her own rare disease as well as information about her family's mysterious history. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo, she is unable to turn back, as all of her questions will be answered at the wildly anticipated spectacular event: The Genetic Opera.
Written by Lionsgate

Source: Netflix

Review:
Welcome to my humble review of Repo! The Genetic Opera. Now, in case you weren’t aware, Repo is in fact a rock opera, something I have never experienced before. Hell, I haven’t even seen a normal opera, so this was quite the education. I like musicals, so I was able to keep up with the movie, but to see an opera, where almost every line is sung was totally different. I have to say, I’m not sure if I’m a fan.

I was told about this movie by some friends who had really enjoyed it. They said that it was better than it looked and was worth a shot. When I made my Netflix account earlier this year, (yes, I know I’m behind the times) I added it to my queue. Time passed and it finally arrived in my mailbox. I have vague memories of seeing ads for it when it was out, and read a review in a local paper, but I remembered next to nothing about it. I was a clean slate. Which is the perfect state to view a movie like this. From what I gathered, it was an experiment. Did it succeed? Let’s find out.

Starting with the opening; done in a comic book style, it really sets the stage for our trip to the world of Repo! Over the top, exaggerated, and outlandish. Yeah, this is going to be fun. Once the background is done, we start to see what this world really looks like. I have to say, I enjoyed the outfits, the pure grandiose Techno-Goth look. The sets also give you a sense of a world left to rot, outside the ivory towers of GeneCo. Inside GeneCo, however, we find a dark, sterile world where nothing seems to be affected by age. I liked seeing this, showing that the haves and have-nots lived totally different lives. It felt very cyberpunk, which I’m a fan of. However, the movie was a bit of a gore-fest and about ten minutes in, we see a hole in a wall made by ramming a corpse into it (before you start to think about it, no that can’t work), and we piles upon piles of bodies. While not very squeamish, this started my guts rolling. Minutes earlier, we saw a woman get her heart removed in a graphic fashion, so I took a bit of a break then came back to the movie.

As the movie moves on, we see more gore, and pointless death. Mind you, I’m not complaining, but I’m not a fan of horror or gore and our director had just come off from doing Saw 3, so I guess he was still in that mindset. I think it was the singing combined with gruesome death that jarred me, much like my reaction to Sweeny Todd. Unlike most horror movies, the deaths weren’t completely pointless. It very powerfully showed just how little life was valued in this dystopian future, where you can have your organs repossessed.

I do have to comment that the actors did a very good job in presenting their characters. However, their job was made much easier because very few of the characters had depth or were more complex than a jar of mayonnaise. To start with, we have the Largo family; a super rich and powerful family, led by a powerful man. Paul Sorvino nails this part, but this character is something seen in most fiction. To play the cliché all the way into the grave, we have his children who have worked for nothing and have free rein to be crazy. The oldest is a violent psychopath, the other brother a vain, psychotic man and the daughter is an attention whore who gets whatever she wants. The fact that she’s played by Paris Hilton only added to the fit of giggles I had when I saw her for the first time. However, I must say she did a good job, and her performance did add to the film. With a wig and makeup, I didn’t realize it was her for a good amount of time. The real lead, Shilo, played by Alexa Vega was again done fairly well, but how hard is it to play the ‘girl trapped in the tower/castle/laboratory’? I was surprised to see Anthony Stewart Head as Dr. Wallace, but he did a good job. He really had two characters: Dr. Wallace and Mr. Repo Man, which I noticed right away, but he showed with his voice, face and whole body how the loving father of Nathan could become the butcher Repo Man, who seemed to enjoy his work. I’m not knocking the actors, they did an amazing job, but the script left a bit to be desired.

I’ve seen some people complain about the music, but I feel this is where the movie was the best. The songs were very well done, and advanced the story without being too annoying or repetitive. I keep finding myself humming Paris Hilton’s parts of Grave Robber, and I don’t know why. If you want to do a musical or an opera, you have to start with the music, and the creators really did. While I wouldn’t buy this movie, I am thinking about picking up the soundtrack.

There were quite a few things that I just caught myself thinking about, because they didn’t make sense to me. For example, the company sells the organs, right? And, they want to make their money, right? So, why kill people who can’t pay up? Ask your friendly neighborhood loan shark, and he’ll tell you this basic principle of the business: dead people don’t pay. If someone doesn’t pay, you might mess up his face, so he remembers what he owes. Some groups, like the Russians, will kill members of your family to get you to pay. Only after it looks like it’s going to cost them more to get the money from you than you owe, will they kill you. If they’re being logical, and organized crime isn’t exactly the most logical profession, but still. I think if I were in charge of GeneCo, and heaven help you all should I ever get that powerful, I’d have slave labor camps where you ‘work off’ what you owe. Free labor is better than a dead body, in my book. If they said something about being able to harvest and use the other organs, or something, anything, I wouldn’t have had an issue. As a plot device, it was very effective in showing how cheap life was, and turned up the gore factor, but it just didn’t do anything else for me.

One of the other things that bothered me was the painkiller they talk about, Zydrate. In the beginning of the film, they touch on it briefly, talking about how people are addicted and how the ‘street’ version is made from the dead. Well now, this sounds like a subplot I can get behind. You like that idea, huh? Were you like me, thinking that both the legal and street versions were made from the dead? Or, maybe from the fake organs GeneCo makes? If you were like me, you were disappointed when they totally skipped this plot. It was like a tooth that’s about to fall out, and you can’t stop running your tongue over it, making it hurt and thinking about what the Tooth Fairy will give you when it finally drops. You keep thinking about, hoping they’ll talk about it whenever it comes up, but no. Add to this that one of the characters ‘makes’ it by shoving a needle up a corpse’s nose and extracts some glowing blue liquid. That’s it. My knowledge of medical science may not be the best, but there’s something fishy about this. I would think that it’d be common knowledge that if you shove a needle up a nose of a dead guy, you get magical blue Heroin. Come on people, at least give me a reason for this. I don’t care if it’s some bullshit reason like ‘oh, it never really leaves your system when they inject you with it.’ It may be stupid, but sometimes something stupid is better than nothing.

The last thing that started to bug me was the plastic surgery as fashion. Don’t get me wrong, it’s happening now, so I can only imagine how bad it would get in this fucked up future. The issue is a small one, why is GeneCo doing plastic surgery? Don’t they sell organs? I get things like eyes being fashionable, but the rest just doesn’t jive. Add to that the fact that the writers don’t seem to understand the difference between genes and plastic surgery, just makes me annoyed.

In the end, we got an experiment. A rock opera for horror and metal fans, trying to appeal to other nerds. They wanted to be the next Rocky Horror. And they failed. I feel like it tried too hard to be too many things, losing its focus and didn’t seem to care about ‘minor details.’ That said, however, I would watch it again. It was a bad movie, but I could still enjoy the music. If you have a friend with a copy, have them loan it to you.

Final Thoughts: It just tried too hard. I would have read the hell out of a comic of this, however.

It was a BAD movie.

An introduction.

Hello and welcome to Good, Bad, and Ugly Movie Reviews! I'm your host, Captain Pete! In this blog, I'll be talking about movies I watch. Some will be from my personal collection, some rentals and others from friends. Don't expect reviews of new, recent movies, because I don't go to the theater often. The ratings I give movies is totally my personal opinion, and you may see me say a terrible movie as something to watch. Don't like it? Tough cookies, start your own blog! The point of this for me is to talk about the movies I want to see (and maybe a few I don't).

Movies will be sorted in to three broad categories:

Good - These are the movies you should be watching. I'll try to explain exactly why I enjoyed the movie so much, without being a total fanboy about it.

Bad - These movies aren't good movies. They're the ones that just can't make the mark of a well made movie.

Ugly - These are terrible, terrible movies. Avoid them at all costs.

I may also add a plus (+) or minus (-) to the end of a rating, because the movie was on the cusp of being in a different category. Maybe, for all it's flaws, something in the movie was enjoyable, or maybe there was something that just soured the movie for me. For example, McHale's Navy is a Bad+ movie. Yes, it's bad. A Tom Arnold vehicle, it should have died when the script was written. Yes, it's a remake of a TV show that no one in my generation saw. But, it's got a few really good things going for it. Tim Curry and other members of the supporting cast really have fun with their roles and get in some good jokes. That still doesn't make it a good movie.

Not matter what rating I give a movie (except for maybe Ugly), try the movie yourself. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe you disagree with me. Maybe, it's worth a second chance.

My goal is to show people movies that I think should be given a chance, no matter how terrible. Okay, maybe not all of them. I want to show you what I like and why I like it, and what I hated and why I hated it. I also hope to break type and watch some movies that I normally wouldn't and see if there's something worth seeing.

Hope you join me on my adventure.