Thirty One Days of Horror: Survival of the Dead

Day Ten: Survival of the Dead

George Romero's universe of the dead is interesting because he keeps generating these fantastic zombie movies, all more or less set in the same universe, a world overrun with slow, shambling zombies. Romero's zombies might have spawned from a satellite returning from an exploration of Venus, or maybe it was a comet's tail we passed through, or maybe Hell is full-up. The thing about the Romeroverse is that the reason the dead walk isn't all that relevant. What counts here is how people deal with it. This being a universe of schlock B-movie personalities, rife with criminals and madmen, you can guarantee that the survivors will be as dangerous as the zombies around them.

Survival of the Dead takes place chronologically sometime around or after Land of the Dead (best as I can tell; its only assertion is that "time has passed.") This film cuts to the chase; the dead are already up and about, and the story focuses on two angles: crusty old madman Patrick O'flynn ad his crew are on a remote island where they seek to put down the undead for good to make the island safe, even if they have to spill some blood to do it. On the other side of the fence is Seamus Muldoon and his posse, part of an eccentric family that has a long history of keeping their dead in repose. The zombies are a chance for Muldoon to insure peaceful cohabitation between the living and his dead relatives; naturally the two come into conflict, which ends with O'flynn being expunged from the island.

In steps Sgt. "Nicotine" Crockett, an awol national guardsman and his dedicated crew of survivors, who have given up the fight of a crumbling nation to become highway robbers and survivalists. Crocket and crew are slowly running out of steam and need direction. After stumbling across a kid that they liberate from a gang which may or may not be symbolic of the rednecks hunting the undead at the end of Night of the Living Dead, they learn from him of a mysterious Mr. O'flynn somehow broadcasting a message over the still-functioning web the promise of an island of safety.

Naturally Crocket and crew run into conflict with O'flynn and his buddies, who have been engaging in some maritime robbery of their own, after which they send the robbed folk packing to the island. Crockett has none of this, and he and his crew make their way to the island. A twist of fate puts O'flynn with them, and when they get to the island the meat of the conflict begins.

After that...bad things happen, but its better not to offer up any spoilers.

Survival of the Dead changes its tune several times throughout the movie, and it is ultimately an interesting case study in how to do a horror film that manages to swing from brevity to grim and dark in a matter of minutes. The film is compelling, and despite having some pretty weak story and character flaws at times it still manages to present what feels like a believable zombie tale (at least until you stop by the fridge later that night and realize its got some weird problems).

Spoilers ahead! Hard to discuss these problems without spoiling them.

First, I was bothered by the opening scene in which O'flynn and co. gun down a woman defending her zombie children. The reason? No one seems remorseful beyond her husband. In some sense I could see why later on, but really, the reason I would have thought they'd give O'flynn for his banishment was "shooting the live woman," as opposed to what he actually did get banished for (shooting zombies).



More over, Muldoon and his crew are supposed to be harvesting zombies, trying to teach them to engage in harmless activity, or eat animals instead of humans. Barring the logic behind it (i.e. so you teach them to eat animals, so what? That's just broadening their palette, and they are already indiscriminate) Muldoon ends up shooting a lot of zombies, at times where he really shouldn't have been. It made for a weirdly contradictory character, but not in a good way.

Another problem: how did the horseback-riding zombie daughter of O'flynn get on that horse to begin with? I can buy the idea in the Romeroverse that zombies ape or mimic behavior they had when they were alive, but...horseback riding? Hmmm.

I like how you can have groups of survivors who, as best can be determined, may have survived for years in their condition, until a film camera gets trained on them, then death comes fast and frequently.

Why did Janet (Kathleen Munroe) let her zombie sister bite her? Maybe she was supposed to be suffering some sort of silly misimpression that her sister was not...hungry...? I don't get it. You don't live several years into a zombie apocalypse by getting sentimental with your sister's hungry corpse.

There are more oddities like this, which I could get into, but the needless bitching would give you the impression I didn't like this movie. In fact I really grew to enjoy it, and the film's strength in carrying the story forward even when the events and characters portrayed didn't always seem to be logical or smart is a testament to the power of the director and his crew.

Ultimately, this movie was interesting because it falls into the same special subgenre that Zombieland does: it's not actually a zombie movie. This is a drama/revenge flick retelling a snippet of the Hatfields and McCoys, but it just happens to have picked a backdrop of the zombie apocalypse.

No zombie fan should miss this. I'd give it an A, but the character oddities and plot questions knock it down to a solid B.

 

AD&D 2nd Edition Reprints plus classic Module Reprints

Real brief, but over on rpg.net (yeah yeah still hanging out there occasionally) cloak n' dagger found the following listings for May 2013 on Amazon for AD&D 2nd edition books. This includes the PHB, DMG and Monstrous Manual (thankfully not the folio-style version). Also listed: the S series and A series modules! A series is one of the few I ran straight up back in the day. Secret of the Slavers Stockade FTW!

Tuesday News: Orbit Books Sale, DDN Playtest Packet #3 and More

First off: apparently this is a thing and I didn't even know it. So I guess I am retroactively participating in the Thirty One Days of Thirty One Horror films!

Orbit Books has a sale of five good novels for $1.99 each to celebrate its five year anniversary. This includes Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (a must-read for SF fans), Feed  by Mira Grant and Brent Weeks' The Black Prism. Also on sale is Soulless and The Killing Moon, although I haven't read either of those so can't comment on them.

One problem with relying on a tablet reader like the Nook: don't misplace the power cord! I seem to have stuck mine in the same place the underpants gnomes live, because I haven't been able to find it for days now, and my Nook is about to die. Very, very agonizing! If I don't locate it tonight, I may be taking a trip to Barnes & Noble to snag another. Which reminds me, of course, that I plan on picking up another tablet soon.

In other news, a new playtest packet (#3 or 4 depending on how you count the last two releases) is out. It looks like it adds magic items, some revisions to monsters, and not much else that I can tell so far.

In the "not news" category I got significant game time in this extended holiday weekend thanks in part to good timing and managed to push my main in Rift to level 34, approaching level 35. Stunning! I haven't been this motivated toward an MMO in ages, and its nice to feel a sense of progress in a medium that is often famous for demanding undivided dedication bordering on compusive disorder style behavior to actually get anywhere.

I have to say, Rift is a very meaty game, and around the time you hit level 30 the range of options on where to go and what to do open up wide. It's a good game when you realize that there's more content available than any one character can ever absorb. I'm thinking of making a PvP-dedicated character to complement my primarily PvE character, for example, and I have a third rogue hunter I plan on leveling to see all the other stuff my main skipped on by in his rise to the top. Good stuff.

Guild Wars 2 has all that too, but what it doesn't have is enough of my time at the moment since Rift has all of it. Eventually I will tire of Rift, and GW2 will get more of my attention, but since it's not a sub-fee game, I can take my time with it. That's definitely a perk in GW2's favor, although a downside too since that means it sits next to the other games waiting in line for me to focus on them (i.e. Skyrim, Dragon Age II and Resident Evil 6, to name a few).

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Thing (1982)

Day Nine: The Thing (1982)

Yesterday I reviewed the newer movie that presented itself as an immediate prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing. Today, we return to the 1982 classic that stands out in my mind as the best horror/SF crossover (next to Alien) of all time.

What can be said about this movie that hasn't been said before? If you've somehow never seen The Thing go find it and watch it. Now. I'll wait, blog will be here when you return. You're in for a real treat: a film which managed to do poorly at the box office on release, but took off when it went to home video, and went from being a cult classic to a recognized top film in its special genre. Hell, it's just an awesome film all around.

Seen it? Okay, spoilers!

Rather than gush endlessly about it, saying things we all know about anyway (at least if you, like me, watch this film at least once a year religiously ...I'm going to list eleven reasons that The Thing deserves accolades for one of the best horror films of all time. We'll do this list countdown style (in no special order):

11. Ennio Morricone did the fantastically moody soundtrack. This was an exception to the norm for Carpenter, who usually did his own soundtracks.

10. It's based on the excellent John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" and is a better spiritual adaptation than the first effort (Thing from Another World, 1952).

9. John Carpenter knows how to do characters really well for this sort of genre. This is important; the building tension and mistrust is easy to follow in this film, easy to see as it percolates to the surface precisely because these characters take on a life of their own with just a few well-done establishing scenes. No, you don't "care" for any of them....but you know who they are, and you can see both how and why they go from comrades doing a job to a mess of paranoid individuals who don't know who to trust.

8. The special effects in this movie were outstanding, most by Rob Bottin. The FX still stand up to the test of time, and in fact when you watch the prequel and compare it is clear that the CGI effects, while very realistic, lack the raw, glistening, bloody reality of what the original film offers.



7. The film has a spiritual connection to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, for while it is not inherently aimed at Lovecraft, the principle of terrifying secrets and dangers to be unveiled beneath the Antarctic ice get their film realization here.

6. Adrienne Barbeau was in this film. She was! She voiced the chess computer.

5. Even watching this film 20+ times you can still have fun trying to figure out just when exactly the various victims of the thing were "changed."

4. Ask yourself why it was easier and more effective for the thing to design a small escape-saucer beneath the old shack, made from machine and helicopter parts. One might wonder why it didn't just...say....repair one of the helicopters, right? So what technology was next on the agenda for its creation? Loot the remnants of its ship? Or was the thing simply so advanced that simple helicopters were beyond its interest or understanding?

3. The Thing did get a prequel, of sorts. There was a video game in 2002 on the PS2 and Xbox. In the game sequel universe MacReady is alive and well and shows up at the very end to kill steal the super-thing boss. I suffered through this game being the Thing fan I am; it was a mixture of good ideas, poor implementation, and  crazy videogame logic, leaving one at once mildly satisfied to see a future take on what happened after the film and also disgusted that this sequel was delegated to a fair to middling computer game.

2. Childs is played by Keith David, who is of course known today as Mass Effect's Captain Anderson. Just about all the actors in this film are either known career actors or go on from here to develop a real career later on. There's almost no one in this film who isn't recognizable from other later works.

1. I loved that dog. How often anymore do you see such a disciplined dog on screen? It must have taken literally hours for them to get the dog/kennel/thing dog scene just right (the one where the Thing, disguised as a dog, is first put in the kennel). Seriously...it's pretty difficult to train a dog to squelch all the behavioral queues that come so naturally to canines in general. This extra bit made the dog that much more believable as being "something else."

So yeah, The Thing: A+++ from the Deathbat!

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Thing (2011)

Day Eight: The Thing (2011)

When The Thing premiered in theaters last year I was busy providing the husband-support role to my wife who was expected to give birth any second, and the idea of starting labor while in a theater or at a fine restaurant was always in the back of our minds. It was our first pregnancy, so we didn't know what to expect. As it turns out Marcus held out for a good month plus, but that did mean we avoided being out in public places for too long, especially theaters. Thus, I did not get to see the prequel to the movie that I generally regard as my favorite film of all time.

On the venn diagram* of horror and SF John Carpenter's The Thing is nestled square in the middle where horror and science fiction overlap. It is arguably the very definition of where these two meet, a sort of apex from which all other media cascades, and only Alien rightfully deserves a spot one step up from it. I, like many others who appreciate this genre, were skeptical that a new movie in the universe of The Thing, despite being something we've all wanted for going on thirty years now, was unlikely to be worthy. For one thing: Kurt Russell is a lot older than he was in 1982. For another thing, any sequel at this point wasn't going to have that special John Carpenter "something" that made so many fantastic movies in my youth.

The new film was written by Eric Heisserer and credits Jown W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" as its source, although technically the movie is an immediate prequel to the original film, and thus both movies are inspired by the same novella. Campbell's original story also inspired a 1951 film, "The Thing from another World," which was a bit looser in its interpretation of the story (though still worth watching for fans of vintage sci fi). The main protagonist of this film is Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a demure paleontologist with access to some very impressive fiber optic equipment for 1982 when she is first introduced. Kate is approached by Dr. Sander Halvorson, a rather righteous and indignant fellow who needs her to help extract something for him down in Antarctica. Yes, it seems the Norwegian research station in Antarctica got the word out that they have found something unusual.

The story moves from there to a fairly familiar retelling (or pre-telling) of the events that are hinted at in the original film, as we see just how the Norwegian station went from "find of the millennium" to dead Norwegians everywhere and a couple guys in a helicopter trying to kill a seemingly innocent dog.

In fact, the film does a remarkably good job of faithfully matching what happens in this film to the horrific detritus that is found in the original movie. I watched them back to back in chronological sequence, and it was actually very smooth, with only one "glitch" I was noticing, and even then it turns out that they had accounted for that. In fact they accounted for things I didn't even remember....and I've seen the original movie at least once a year for thirty years now (it's one of the few movies I watch every Halloween religiously).

Some examples of things that the prequel shows which are artifacts of the original film (spoiler alert, I guess? Has anyone not seen the original? So spoiler alert for the prequel...):

The axe buried in the wall and covered in blood.
The dead guy who slit his own throat (or was murdered).
The reason the storage area with the huge block of ice is in shambles (and how they extracted the Thing so neatly from the ice....or a least, how it got like that).
The twisted two-faced burned Thing body out front that MacReady and Doc haul back to their base in the original film.
The way that the space ship was exposed in its pit of ice (hint: it's not like the original implication that the Norwegians blew it up intentionally....this was the one bit I thought they messed up on, but when you watch the two in sequence it makes sense).
Exactly who the two guys in the helicopter were and of course why they were chasing the dog.



The movie does a competent job of building suspense and portaying the horrific events the Norwegians go through from start to finish. It's got a bounty of characters, most of whom are barely distinguishable from one another, unfortunately, although maybe if I was more in tune with Norwegian cinema I might be more familiar with some these actors. Unfortunately the film suffers for this a bit because while all the actors here are competent, there's no way they could hold up to the range of distinct actors that the original film showcased, and Carpenter's unique style with which he managed to portray the distinct personalities of each on film using subtle but effective "show don't tell" techniques.

The movie is also hampered a bit by the meticulous attention to detail that it engages in as a prequel. While it is fantastic to see every last gory inch of Norwegian base migrate from functional and healthy to frozen and gory exactly as it was in the original film, the transition necessarily means that they had to write a script which conformed to these boundaries. A useful exercise in highly structured storytelling, but of necessity limiting the creative freedom of the script writer. It also means that some of the tension so effective in the original film is simply missing here. These people trust each other a bit too much, through most of the film. Except Lars. Lars kicked ass.

The movie's creators did seem to realize that they needed some unique elements to their film beyond the faithful recreation of carnage. There's a few twists worth mentioning, which stand out (real spoilers here). Dr. Lloyd figures out an interesting way to detect a Thing which was not revealed in the original film but makes perfect sense here: when the thing replicates you, it remakes you perfectly, which means artificial imperfections (like tooth fillings) get pushed out. Later, the film indulges in a bit of exploration in the actual spacecraft itself, something that many of us wondered about from the original movie (which left the question unanswered on whether there was enough of the ship left to explore after it was blown up). I think the movie failed slightly here; for such a macabre quasi-Lovecraftian creature as the Thing, the ship was surprisingly mundane (even the Predator vessel from Predator 2 was more exotic). But hey, we get to find out exactly how they blew it up. Hint: the scene in the original from the Nordic video tapes of them planting charges....those were likely charges used to free up the ice block which contained the Thing itself, and not (as was originally intended) the charges used to free the ship from the ice.

One Fridge Logic moment: if the ship was functional enough to fire up and potentially even take off, then why was the Thing stranded in the first place? Maybe it was pilfering parts from the base to fix the vessel? What on earth could be useful to it to repair a starship, anyway? Probably the same stuff it was using to make the escape craft in the original, I guess (which I'll talk more about next review).

Watching these two movies back to back worked well, and made me appreciate how seamless the transition from one film to the next was. You feel a bit like you're watching one complete story, in which somewhere out there is Kate Lloyd, all by herself in a tractor, trying to make it to the nearest safe spot (and probably failing, unless they make a sequel) in a universe where a young Kurt Russel and Keith David could actually meet with her to make a third Thing movie.

Fun Fact! This was Keith David's third movie and the one which I think kickstarted his career. You may know him better as Captain Anderson in Mass Effect.

I really did enjoy this movie even if it lacked that extra special touch that made the original so staggeringly good. I'll give this one a big fat A. I watched on the same night as Pandorum...it was a good night for horror sci fi!



*On Blogtopia and forumland these days I noticed it is important and very hip, apparently, to refer to venn diagrams without ever demonstrating them.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Pandorum

Day Seven: Pandorum

If yesterday's spin-off theme from Resident Evil was Milla, today's spin-off theme is for her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, for his work on Pandorum. Specifically, Paul was a producer on this movie, which was written by Travis Milloy and Christian Alvert. So the secret to a good story when Paul is around is to let him direct or produce or something....but leave the keyboard alone.

Here's the deal with Pandorum: every now and then I get to watch a film where I think to myself, "Boy, I wish I'd seen this when it first came out, in the theaters." Pandorum is that film for me.

Here's the plot in a nutshell, and you'll understand just why I'm so taken with this movie: Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) is the ship engineer on flight team five, assigned to wake up on a steady two-year rotation with a number of other flight teams who man the immense colony ship Pandorum, the last such ship to leave Earth before...something bad happens. He wakes up disoriented and with amnesia from the cold sleep process. He's sure of only one thing: something isn't right with the ship. It's power is fluctuating, and mostly out; the reactor's surging like its about to go critical, and an automated system tripped his awakening as a last ditch fix. Then his superior, Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid) who is also suffering disorientation and amnesia, awakens. Together they try to figure out how to get out of the shut-down section of the ship they're in, figure out what's happened, where the last flight crew went, and why the engines are about to melt down.

So at this point, if you haven't seen the movie yet telling you any more would be very, very bad of me, so I'm not going to say any more than that. I will say this much: the trailers for this film did a good job of not selling the movie, because I don't remember this film looking all that exciting before. I was interested, but in the end I figured, "Eh, probably another Super Nova-style Alien rip-off." Oh could I have been any more wrong?

This movie reminds me of Brian Aldiss's Starship, or Eric Brown's Helix (for a more modern reference). It reminds me of a lot of grim world-ship adventures gone horribly, horribly wrong and despite being science fiction (and really, surprisingly good science fiction at that) it is also a great horror film.



If you want to see a movie that will inspire you to play Metamorphosis Alpha, or provide a wealth of visual inspiration for your next weird GURPS or BRP sci fi extravaganza, this movie has it in spades. It's got great sets, effects, and even acting. It's got very few holes that I could easily identify, though a few do pop up...but nothing so specific that I was left scratching my head in disbelief.

So how good was it? Well, I really want to see the hypothetical sequel (or prequel) now. It's good enough that when I read some other film critic snubbing it I want to point out that bashing a good film like this is why we don't get more..well...good films like this anymore.

Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect. This movie wallows in the deep pits of action, horror and suspense. Pandorum is not a film dramatizing the adventures of Priscilla Hutchins, to take a random example of a series I'd desperately love to see on film. But for Hollywood? This stuff is surprisingly good for the horror-sf genre. Straight A from the Death Bat!

Thirty One Days of Horror: The Fourth Kind

Day Six: The Fourth Kind

Well, it's not the fifth Resident Evil movie, but Milla Jovovich is starring in it, so I guess there's a consistency so far. Ironically I did not know Milla was in this movie until I started watching it. Milla's performance was outstanding, and the main drive behind this film. She's a great actress regardless of the kind of movie she's in.

The Fourth Kind is a filmed as a mockumentary which tries to pretend it isn't, designed to pretend like it's a film providing a documentary "retelling" of actual events, footage of which is intermixed with the dramatizations included there in. If this movie didn't get a critical reception (and my understanding is it didn't) this may very well be part of the reason. The splicing of dramatized events with the pseudo-real tapes doesn't work as well as it could have, and the film left me wishing it would either do one or the other and stopping trying to be creative.

The movie was apparently shot on a modest budget of $10 million, and had returns close to four times that amount, making it a success, technically. The film itself is pretty skimpy in terms of special effects; it was pretty clearly filmed with an eye for the old notion of "less is more." In this case I think it works fairly well; when strange and disturbing things do happen, the method of delivery focuses on more of a "tell, don't show" approach that works well enough that the viewer is left filling in the gaps or looking for tiny but meaningful clues about what is going on. There are a couple scenes that were extremely effective in this regard.

The Fourth Kind is basically about a hypnotherapist/psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska who discovers a disturbing trend among her local patients to describe the same series of late-night incidents leading to insomnia, including a mysterious owl that shows up. She has a past herself, with a husband who was mysteriously killed and two children, the daughter having developed blindness after the husband perished.

As the story progresses more mysteries compile, accented by cut scenes and spliced scenes of the "original" documentary tapes supposedly portraying the real people behind these events. The overall effect is a build-up to some disturbing events surrounding the possibility that people in Nome are being kidnapped and experimented on by non-human entities, which may or may not be aliens.

Overall I thought the movie did a compelling job of selling me on the idea that it was portraying believable events (at least as the characters in the film understood them), although at first I found it's odd documentary approach difficult to get into. It was about the point where the therapist notices common trends among her patients descriptions of events that it got interesting. The movie manages to cleverly weave a mixture of "pseudo fact" and fiction together into a decent narrative that felt reasonably organic, relying on the "dramatized" component to make it more engaging in a conventional sense while using the supposed actual footage to make the story feel more real.

Okay, some spoilers ahead for those who care. The movie borrows a number of recurrent concepts from paranormal and UFO folklore to help lend strength to its story line. Owls, for example, are often implied to be the culprits behind certain more famous UFO sightings that involve big-eyed little grey men. Owls are also sometimes pointed at as the cause of the infamous Mothman sightings. This movie took that idea and ran with it.

The Fourth Kind injected a bit of the "weirder than normal" as well, going beyond conventional UFO lore and adding in some inferred "ancient astronaut" stuff that also implied the possibility of extra-dimensional visitors who are in fact better labeled as demons or old gods. I won't elaborate, but it's a nice touch and a rare case where nothing in the film specifically violated any actual information on the subjects being used to support the assertion, which in turn was primarily modeled as one man's curious obsession. This lets you as the viewer come to your own conclusions about what it means and what is implied. For me, I think it is telling when by the end they beings are referred to as "non-human intelligences."

There is one thing worth mentioning: the film is shot entirely in hues of teal and orange. If you're unfamiliar with this coloring trend in Hollywood you can read a bit about it over at Into the Abyss. It's not something you might pick up on ordinarily, but I found that once my attention was drawn to it I couldn't stop noticing it. Worse, it gets really annoying once you begin to pick up on how prevalent this technique is.

Anyway, see this movie if you liked X-Files, want some good fodder for a Call of Cthulhu or Conspiracy X campaign, or were a fan of "The Blair Witch Project" as well as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and would like to see those two film styles merged into an entirely different entity with a modest budget.

Dragon Age Set 3 Slated for January 2013 Release

In the realm of RPGs I really love that I can't find anyone to play with, this is exciting news. Dragon Age Set 3 has an official drop date, for sometime in January according to ICv2. Dragon Age uses the AGE System from Green Ronin, which is actually a great game system, and one which they have said will eventually get a proper treatment with its own license-free edition. Some of the seeds for the AGE System are evident in prior Green Ronin games (True20, Mutants & Masterminds) but it is distinct on its own merits.

Anyway, looking forward to this. Maybe I can finally talk some of my players in to trying Dragon Age out...I think a lot of my tabletop cohorts are simply not sufficiently in to the Dragon Age universe as I am, thus why it is a harder sell. Maybe....hard to say! I'll have to bring it up again soon, see if I can generate some interest.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Day Five: Resident Evil: Afterlife

When we left off, Alice (Milla Jovovich) was our resident supernatural horror hero with psychic powers and wire-fu along with the resources of a vast Umbrella research lab filled with a seemingly endless army of Alice clones at her disposal. It was the sort of plot corner you write yourself into for one of four reasons I can think of:

You are trying to kill the series

You are not the writer on the next movie and want to screw over the next guy in charge of the script

You are writing some sort of freaky Resident Evil fanfic that requires dozens of Alices running around

No one else vetted the script for coherence or feasibility

Now it’s possible that Paul W.S. Anderson, being Milla’s husband and all, just can’t imagine having only one of her for his wife (I wouldn’t fault him for such an exotic fantasy). But really….where was he going with this? It’s easily one of the goofiest plot hangers I’ve ever seen.

Topped by one of the goofiest ten minute intros I've ever seen to a movie.

If you thought James Bond films could get weird, Resident Evil: Afterlife takes the cake. In the first ten or so minutes of this film we get to see exactly how the plot is written out of its corner, including the ever-expanding Mary Sueism of Alice, in one fell swoop. Want me to spoil it for you? Read on.

Basically Alice and her army of clones travel somehow to Japan and attack Umbrella HQ in a giant battle worthy of the sort you normally see at the end of a classic Moore-era James Bond film, complete with awkwardly CGI’d multiple Alices running around slashing and shooting everything they see. It concludes with Wesker, now suddenly looking and acting more bad-ass (somebody must have been treated to the cut scenes in Resident Evil 5) escaping and using some sort of singularity-generating explosion/implosion bomb to suck all of the Umbrella HQ in Tokyo down the time-space toilet along with all the Alice clones. I guess somebody in R&D at Umbrella paused long enough to notice they had unlocked the secret of gravity and matter manipulation, good for them.

Then “Real Alice” turns out to be hiding on Wesker’s getaway craft, and he injects her with a magic neutralizing serum that destroys the body-enhancing T-Virus thingies that make her special. Then they crash into a mountain but she walks away okay.

This entire sequence felt like some sort of bizarre dream or vision I might have had as a teenager.

After all that is out of the way, the real movie starts, and it turns out someone wanted to make Alice more normal (i.e. vulnerable) as well as creatively dispense with the plot baggage up to now. Except for one lingering bit: in the last movie, a bunch of survivors go north to Alaska to a promised escape at a place called “Arcadia.” So Alice, having found a small two-seater jumps across the Pacific to Alaska to follow them. What she finds is a mystery that leads her to Hollywood (no irony intended so far as I can tell) and a setup that feels like a classic pull from your typical zombie survival flick, except with more visual moments and creatures pulled randomly from the video games.

If anyone playing Resident Evil 4 or 5 felt a gut-churning moment when you realized that they were going to introduce the Ganados/Majini as just another type of zombie that for no particular reason (not that they need one in the RE universe) likes to sprout four tentacles with teeth from their mouths….raise your hand. If you were equally impressed at their ability to introduce a big due with a huge friggin’ axe into the events without even so much as an explanation (or at least one of the characters present saying something like, “Hey, that’s kinda new, wonder where he came from…”) then raise your other hand.

At least when Wesker returns he is granted all the superhuman traits we see him with in RE 5. However I can safely say his portrayal in RE 5 was more action-packed and cinematically interesting than what we got here.

Despite all this, the core of the movie is pretty decent, if you ignore the parts that jump out and beg to be groaned at. A gang of random misfit survivors in a lockdown prison surviving against the zombies seek a way to a ship that turns out to be the promised Arcadia…and Alice and Claire are here to help. Chris Redfield’s movie clone appears as well, complete with a perfectly senseless sibling relationship with Claire, punctuated by the irony that she suffers from amnesia and doesn’t remember him. Aggghhh rrurughhghdlllll.

Despite the fact that the movie struggles against its own painful plot contrivances and complete lack of direction….despite the fact that I am still trying to figure out how Umbrella still had enough infrastructure left to field dozens of loaded VTOL craft at the end of the movie (guess the new film will reveal all once more), and despite the fact that entire swathes of better and more meaningful lore and characters are lifted in the most haphazard fashion from recent RE games that have long since veered off into more elaborate and interesting territory (leaving zombies entirely behind)….and that the cinematics in the games are of better quality than their “clones” in the movie….it was still an okay film, I guess. Either a B- or C+ depending on whether you pretend the movie starts after the opening act plane crash or not, and whether or not you are still pretending this has anything to do with the Resident Evil franchise outside of the name.

Next Up: review of Resident Evil: Retribution (if I can bring myself to pay money to see it. This may not happen)

Mass Effect 3: Retaliation Expansion

Bioware is making it really hard for me to focus on other games. Retaliation comes loaded with new maps, foes and new character class kits. It's a free download, although that's misleading of course, as you acquire the new classes and models to play by spending in-game currency or buying bioware points with real money. The latter is a bad deal in my opinion; you can make enough in-game currency in an hour of play to unlock a rare or two if you want; I spent $10 on bioware points to see what sort of a mix I got, and while I did unlock a couple classes/models I wanted, I didn't really feel like it was a terribly good investment, given I could have gotten it after a couple more hours' play anyway (and the multiplayer experience in this game is fantastic as co-op goes).