Resident Evil: Afterlife

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Rating (from metacritic.com): 37/100

Storyline (from IMDB.com):
While still out to destroy the evil Umbrella Corporation, Alice joins a group of survivors who want to relocate to the mysterious but supposedly unharmed safe haven known only as Arcadia.

Source: Netflix

Review:

So, we’re on to the 4th, and unfortunately not final, Resident Evil movie. We start some four years after the end of the world, without any real idea of when that happened. I assume it was sometime after the 2nd movie but before the 3rd, based on what we saw in those movies. We see a zombie outbreak in Tokyo, then the ending from the last movie is wrapped up---with a ton of Alice clones assaulting the Umbrella corporate headquarters (which for some reason is in Tokyo; there is a fun little reference to the original name of the game series, Biohazard.) Maybe my memory is faulty, but I got the impression that their HQ was in Europe somewhere. Anyway, the Alices kick ass, and get to Wesker, at which point we see the real Alice get her powers taken away. Yeah, because they really needed to do that. I’m sorry, but that has been the most under-played part of the series. We see her get these superpowers at the end of the 2nd movie, then they're mostly ignored during the 3rd, and we get only one scene with them at the start of the 4th. I agree with Alice, thank the man for getting rid of the powers you never really used. I’m willing to bet she gets re-exposed in the next movie. Oh, you didn’t hear? They’re making a 5th movie, and dear god, I hope it’s the last one, though I doubt it.

Moving on, after Alice gets in another helicopter crash (kind of running theme with the writer, who happened to have directed this one, too), she goes looking for the survivors she ditched to join her in a game of Revenge Society with Umbrella. She finds a very screwed up Claire, another character not wasn’t used effectively, and takes her along. The pair flies down the west coast of the US, looking for survivors. They enter Los Angeles to find it burning - for years and locate a group of survivors in a prison surrounded by the undead. Finally, characters using their heads in a zombie movie! The group in the prison is full of troupes, with all of them fulfilling their roles and dying for no reason. We are introduced to Chris, a character who should have been around for much longer in my opinion. The zombies learn how to burrow, and some learn to swim---even growing face squids. The survivors have to flee their prison when the ‘Axeman’ shows up and destroys the front gates, letting in the zombie hordes. There’s a bunch running around and some cool fights, with the best use of quarters in the post-apocalyptic world. The writer completely misses what would have been a totally awesome scene, with our survivors zipping through the ruins of LA, driving a STRYKER ATTACK VEHICLE! There are no words for the scene I made up while watching them crawl through some dirty hole in the ground. They finally get to Arcadia, which is some ship that’s been picking up survivors. Hey, another group using their heads to survive the end of the world!

Of course, nothing is what is seems and the ship is really a way for Umbrella to collect humans for experiments. Wait, what? Why do you need to keep experimenting on people? There’s no point. There are no governments to buy weapons, you already have a cure for the virus, and it’s a waste of resources. But, it 's a big evil corporation. Pay no attention to logic! Think only of the cool action scenes and the little scraps of homage we give you. Wait, where are you going? Don’t leave! Buy this movie. You know you really like it!

That is exactly how I feel about the series at this point. Meanwhile, there’s another big showdown between Alice and Wesker, where we find out he’s some kind of horrible mutant, the traitor gets his just desserts (again) and they out-smart the bad guy. Then, there’s the ‘Oh shit, Jill’s back! And they’re doing another one!’ moment at the end.

This movie just couldn’t keep me interested. I’m glad I didn’t go see it in theaters because I wouldn’t have liked paying $20 for the ‘experience’ of seeing it on the big screen. I wasn’t surprised to see that The Rule of Cool reigned supreme in this film, but it was way overdone at some points. There’s also Mila ‘I only use weapons in pairs’ Jovovich giving her usual one-note performance. Look at it, except in the first film she carries two of everything: 9mm pistols, stubby MP5s, kukris, katanas, and shotguns. I hadn’t noticed until the opening of the movie that she has two katanas on her back. Those are hand-and-a-half swords. Holding one in each hand is really hard to do and would be awkward as hell.

It was also annoying to see the Hard-Case Alice get weak for a moment, and the formerly weak Claire have to give her a short reminder. I think if the lines had been reversed it would have worked better.

The plot was thin, the action was lacking and the horror was telegraphed well in advance. Characters die and you just didn’t care. The writer didn’t want to deal with some stuff, so he just went ‘nope, not gonna do that’ and teased us with what might have been. They leave a character behind, flashing back to him for no obvious reason. Oh, and the bombs. I forgot about this. Early in the movie, they blow up a bomb in Tokyo, and it looks like it's imploding rather than exploding. It destroys a large amount of area, too. When they use the bomb again and it explodes, it doesn’t have nearly the same range. Sort of like the movie itself.

Final Thoughts: The movie could have done better, but I felt like it didn’t even try.

It was a BAD movie.

Coming Soon: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

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.