[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #7: Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

When the first trailer for this reboot of the Resident Evil film series was revealed, the reception was kinda split, and i guess it was in part because over time people learned to enjoy the crappy Paul W.S . Anderson films for what they were, liked their brand of cinematic cheese and overall embraced their “so bad they’re charming” nature.

And i do agree that there’s something comforting, especially in retrospective, about them, for all the flaws and plots that had barely anything to do with the ones in the Resident Evil videogames themselves, they did manage to faithfully recapture the B-movie feel of the games (itself borrowed from many zombie B-movies) in their own way, while hindsight confirm they were products of their time indeed, in this case from an era where film adaptations of videogames had a bad reputation about them, quite different from today’s perception, with an Uncharted movie released and a Gran Turismo film that at the time of writing is just a month away from hitting theathers.

Times have indeed changed, so it’s not that much of a surprise to see Capcom (itself a different company from the confused and “appeal to the west” driven mess of back when the Milla Jovovich led film series was still going) opt for a reboot film instead of trying to follow up from a film that indeed was called Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and indeed served as closure. Kinda.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #6: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

“Funny” story: this is actually the second RE movie i watched, and the only one i ever watched in theathers. I wasn’t that interested at the time in the film series, so i just picked up on DVD years later the first Resident Evil movie, but didn’t bother with the sequels.

But since it was gonna be the final installment, i was a bit curious, so i went to see at one of my local cinemas, and turns out it wouldn’t have really mattered much if you saw all the sequels or none at all, because The Final Chapter will forever remain in my head as one of the most embarassing final bouts for a film series, or movies that somehow end up being distributed to big cinema chains.

An istance where i could realistically see people asking for their money back at the end of the movie, where i would agree with their anger and supplement them with rotten vegetables, so they could aim for the distributors and anyone involved outside of the poor employees, because it’s not their fault, so instead of littering the floors, give them a rotten leek so we can all stick it up Sony’s picture (via their Screen Gems’ hole, specifically), or throw a tomato at the HQ of Costantine Films.

Jesting aside, i’d be embarassed to release a movie like this, personally, even if – truth to be told – it’s not as bad as i remember it being, not “if your eyes could puke” bad, it’s still incredibly badly edited, so choppy that it’s a miracle you can actually tell what’s going on in almost half of the action scenes that involve melee fights (and some others too), where you can barely see things happening, mostly thanks to some occasional slow mo, but still, it’s almost a “blink and you missed it” type of deal, so badly edited is more than a good 40 % of the action scenes.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #5: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Not even waiting the 3 years between sequels anymore, as the well is running dry and instead of filling it with blood of the scribe, we’re making these even faster as we approach the penultimate chapter, with Retribution following upon the twist reveal at the end of Afterlife, with the Arcadia surrounded by a lot of black Umbrella helicopters that captures the original Alice and brings her to a remote underwater location in the Extreme North section of Russia, used for testing the T-Virus, from where she has to escape alongside both old and new faces, including many other characters from the videogames that Paul W.S. Anderson couldn’t cram in the previous script, like the fan favourites Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and Barry Burton.

So, if the keyword of Afterlife was “clonatron and mind control robo-scarabs taken from RE 5”, Retribution also adds to the vocabulary salad “simulation” and “diorama”, showing off obvious inspiration from Westworld with Umbrella creating sets and clones to populate it before they die in it, because fuck any attempt of constructing more setpieces when we can literally redo the previous ones like it’s a rematch of previously beaten bosses in an older Zelda game.

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Devil’s Third WII U [REVIEW] | Big Mouse Strikes Again

It’s the spooky-ooky season, so it means nothing but it’s a good enough excuse to review some shitty videogame of fecal magnitude, or ones that were so bad they made many “worst of year” lists, and come with some depressing and-or absurd history to them. For indeed, “the horror!”.

And Devil’s Third definitely fits the bill, being one of the many titles that confirmed once again that sometimes you should just quit when you’re ahead, or before tarnishing your own legacy due to boneheaded behaviour in mismanaging projects that languish for years due to an accolade of deals falling through, changing engines and platform targets, only to eventually release and make one realize that maybe you can actually lose talent over time.

And as they do, stories like this just highlight how even successfully rebooting the Ninja Gaiden franchise for the original X-Box… won’t stop your career from having a “Tommy Wiseau of The Room” moment, highlighting that sometimes these legendary creators might have actually needed the company they supposedly left to do whatever they wanted, not the other way around.

Especially when the finished game had to basically receive a “pity publishing” deal from Nintendo, as no one else wanted to publish this one for years (including Nintendo Of America), so it became a Wii U exclusive because we were already in the death years of the system, and i guess Nintendo could use an action game that look like it could be on PS3 or 360. Or a game, stat.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] 4#: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.

And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.

We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #3: Resident Evil Extinction (2007)

3 years after Apocalypse, we’re back with the Adventures of Alice in Resident Evil spin-off cinema land… but she wakes up as she did in the first movie, has some flashbacks, faces some traps, then dies and she’s retrieved by scientists?

Yep, considering the finale of Apocalypse and the opening act leading to a reveal of a mass grave of Alices, it’s not that surprising that we would eventually see the series go hard on the clonatron, upping the ante by explaining that Umbrella didn’t contain shit, and the epidemic spred all over the world, eventually turning the globe into a post-apocalyptic barren, withered zombie wasteland.

The Alice clone that survived/was let go now roams on a motorbike, alongside other survivors as they try to escape the zombies by moving to Alaska through the Mojave desert.

And stopping by Las Vegas, nominally for fuel, factually because its Las Vegas, where they don’t actually stay much, despite the marketing for the movie emphasizing the “Vegas trip”.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #2: Resident Evil Apocalypse (2004)

Last time we left Alice waking up in the hospital of a zombie infested Raccoon City, grabbing a shotgun and heading for the ruined streets for sequels’ sake.

So obviously this was setup to loosely mirror the plot and setting of Resident Evil 2, while keeping the Alice and Red Queen subplots, meaning you could expect Alice to wander around Raccon City and tag along canon named characters called to intervene on the pandemic situation of the city and trying to escape it when they hear of Umbrella’s plan to just nuke it all.

And you would assume correctly, though it’s made a bit confusing as she’s instead joined by Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera, the protagonists of RE 3, and they’re followed by the Nemesis mutant of RE 3 as well, which is even odder when you remember RE 3 is basically taking place at the same time of RE 2, let alone that RE 3 was originally conceived as a spin-off entry.

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[Resident Evil Live Action Film Retrospective] #1: Resident Evil (2002)

Its 2002. The latest mainline Resident Evil games are RE Zero and Code Veronica (plus Gun Survivor 2 released the previous year), and the remake of the first RE game was coming a week later, but something else related debuts, and it’s the first feature lenght, live action film adaptation of the franchise, produced by Constantin Films via Sony’s Screen Gems label, with direction and script by Paul W.S. Anderson, previously known for the 1995 live action Mortal Kombat movie, and cult sci fi horror film Event Horizon.

So he already dabbled in the early wave of videogames films for the big screen, and fittingly enough the Resident Evil live action film would be his legacy, for the most part anyway, enough that eventually Capcom would collaborate with him again to make another film based on one of their IP, in this case one that started as a niche title but launched the popularity of “hunting games” and eventually became one of their biggest franchises, Monster Hunter.

But back to the zombies with what is now the first of the Resident Evil live action film series, and not even the only RE film series, as we looked upon the CG animated one some years ago.

In terms of what “Resident Evil 2002” it plucks from the games…. let’s consider the first one for reference, and it clearly a case where people from Capcom had a list of things that had to be in the movie to make it Resident Evil”, but never specified how and why these things should exist in this new continuity, because Paul W.S. Anderson clearly had little interest in making faithful adaptations of the games’ plot, and did its own thing, playing fairly loose with the videogame canon, which was reviled as it’s often now but was less lamented upon, at least compared to modern standards of backlash, “outrage” and rampant reactions from the internets.

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A Resident Evil live-action film retrospective has risen from the grave

Starting about now, a retrospective about all the Resident Evil live-action films released so far!

[EXPRESSO] Zombie 100: Bucket List Of The Dead (2023) | Cross-Z Shark! Are you ready?

Given the success of the live action adaptation of Haro Aso’s Alice In Borderland manga, it’s no wonder Netflix also ordered a live action movie based on one of his other works, the zombie comedy Zombie 100: Bucket List Of The Dead, also adapted into an anime TV series that started airing this July.

The premise sees Akira, a young man working for a japanese “black company” , bullied by his boss, working non stop like a robot, sleeping in the office… until a good ol’ fashioned zombi apocalypse happens. So finally free, he jots down a list of 100 things he wants to do before death (or “undeath”) catches up with him, eventually finds his best friend and encounters other survivors….

Yeah, this is a fun and – almost – novel twist to the over-explored (both for drama and comedy) zombie apocalypse mold, the spin here is quite fun and light-hearted, making for a slice of life episodic narrative that…would have simply worked better as a series instead of a 2 hour movie feeling like episodes of a TV series stapled together, making me wonder if this was the compromise to avoid having both adaptations cannibalizing each other.

Thought this live action film is far more “sanitized” compared to the manga, i guess to make it feel akin to the Netflix Alice In Borderland adaptation that mostly eskwed fanservice or sexual content (though gore is abundant and far from hidden), but honestly it feel longer that it needs and characters are likeable enough but fairly stock.

Though it also features a mutant zombie shark that’s already better than the entire film “Zombie Shark”, fought in sentai style because the lead actor played Ryuga Banjo in Kamen Rider Build.

So, overall, it’s decent enough, very cute, for what it is.