Thirty One Days of Horror: the Resident Evil Games

Starting October 1^st and going until I run out of oomph or actually complete my goal: thirty one days of horror reviews in both cinema and game! I’m going to kick off the week with a look at the Resident Evil franchise…

Day 1: Resident Evil – the original games

Sometimes the scariest thing about a horror franchise is what its owner does with it. In this case, Capcom has managed to take what was a 1996 classic adventure/action title that single-handedly put survival horror as a genre on the map*and over the course of the next 15 years has managed to take that title on a whirlwind survival adventure of its own. From game to film to book, Resident Evil is its own entire domain now, with so many spins and takes you’d think it was suffering from vertigo.

Where am I going with this? I plan to review each of the Resident Evil movies, but to talk about them, I first need to discuss the games. The games set the foundation from which all was to come, and reviewing movies which carry the Resident Evil title requires a look at the games and my interpretation of them, first.

The original game was released in 1996, first as Biohazard in Japan and then under the odd but apparently distinct title we know it as in the United States and elsewhere. This game has a special place in my “personal history of gaming.” It was the first title I purchased for the original Playstation and also the game which motivated me to try many, many other games trying to recapture the lighting that Resident Evil embodied in mood, atmosphere, story and (for the time) game play. For myself, like many others, it was the first time anyone had really experienced a truly frightening and engaging game experience and was key, I often feel, to the early success of the Playstation.

Writing in retrospect about the games is hard, because the gameplay that I found so compelling 16 years ago does not hold up well today. This has led to an interesting problem for fans of survival horror, for as you may have noticed the genre has taken a nosedive according to the consensus of most game journalists and fans. Notable exceptions pop up on occasion (such as Amnesia, Penumbra and the recent wave of Slender Man games) but the apparent prevalence of the genre seems to be absent…..at least, for the franchise which started the genre.

Resident Evil spanned three titles on the original Playstation. I’m not considering spin-off titles here, focusing instead on the core games, the ones which seem to provide the underlying narrative. Resident Evil started the story of a remote mansion in the Aklay Mountains, under investigation by a group of agents belonging to the Special Tactics and Recon Squad (STARS), featuring Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, the first two heroes of the tale. It progresses to Resident Evil 2, in which the zombie outbreak of the mansion has spread to neighboring Raccoon City and eventually we get to Resident Evil 3 which completes the trilogy, all set in the same region and centered on the same events, portrayed here as happening in 1998. The next proper title in the franchise doesn’t show up until some time later on the next generation of consoles, featuring a new series of tales and foes that take place several years after the Playstation One games.

The original Resident Evil has been revised on more than one occasion, with a Director’s Cut edition followed by a remake on the Gamecube, as well as a “Resident Evil Zero” which served as a Gamecube-exclusive prequel to the original game. To the best of my knowledge none of these titles have been released in a modern HD edition or compilation, though you can get some of them on the Playstation Network for download. I have them, but do not have a PS3 or a PSP on which to play them right now.

If this is a review then the question to be asked is: are they worth your time? The answer is tough, because while the franchise and original games are monumental in what they created, after 16 years they have aged poorly, and may not be suited to everyone’s tastes anymore. The control scheme in particular, as efficient as it was back in the day is potentially nightmarish to someone who has spent too much time with modern day games. Some people mistake the clunky control scheme for being one of the charming traits of survival horror (especially as it was common to see that type of control scheme in other similar titles, such as Silent Hill). Make no mistake: it as a necessary artifact of the era, a crude work-around to the limits of console and PC technology back in the day.

So if you are an old vet, or you have a high tolerance for archaic control schemes, the games might indeed be worth your time to mess with, especially if you can get them on the PSP, where the tiny screen provides the illusion of better graphical fidelity in a land made of very low polygon counts. If you can do this, and you are willing to overlook the graphic limitations of the time, then you have a treat in store. Resident Evil had a lot going for it, and it introduced several key concepts that I feel are extremely important to defining survival horror as a gaming genre, and even have importance in films. Specifically, a countdown on all five defining elements:

Player (Un)controlled Pacing

If you’ve played Resident Evil you’ll remember when you meet the first zombie, or when the dogs show up. In fact, you’ll never forget. Even if you go back and replay it, finding the scene to be mildly amusing now thanks to the quality of the graphics , the memory of that first experience from back when it was all new will always stick with you. I sound snobby dissing the graphics, but I’m not, really…it’s just things have changed so much in terms of graphic quality its impossible to ignore. The fact that these moments in the game are so memorable is a testament to the pacing of the game, and the way it employs slow moments with sudden surprises and unexpected events.

These scenes work because much of the time spent playing Resident Evil is slow paced. You walk all over, you turn slowly, you need to aim carefully when you do fight things and you spend a lot of time looking for exotic and not always obvious clues. You do a lot of adventure game stuff, basically, minus some of the pixel-hunting. And then, suddenly, a giant snake shows up, or dogs, or Wesker or who the hell knows what and the game throws you out of “adventure game” mode and deep into action-holy-crap-what-do-I-do territory. This was a common feature of all the Resident Evil games up through Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

Scenery Porn – Horror Style

I think it goes unrecognized too often, but while the polygonal characters of the original games may not look that exciting now, the static backdrops through which you traversed the game were pretty amazing and still look fairly decent. Resident Evil was one of many games to employ the static backdrop for design, and it did a great job of it. Modern adventure games still employ this technique, and it’s actually a fairly easy way to evoke mood and a sense of disquiet, exploring haunted and evocative locales as you search for clues and answers. This element is what sometimes helped the films along, too. Resident Evil in particular employs a distinct aesthetic, which is tantamount to “baroque research labs gone wrong,” and when the films stick to such environments it does well. More on that later, though.

Sense of Isolation

Resident Evil employed the concept of being alone really well, even when you weren’t (and frankly there were a lot of STARS members running around that mansion in the first game). Limited processing power prevented the first few games from deploying more than a handful of characters in screen at any given time. Younger gamers may find it hard to believe, but there was one a lost age of gaming when people discussed ways of technically rendering more than four creatures on a screen at once. Those days are long gone, but they were a key reason that you never see more than a few zombies in old Resident Evil games at any given time, and it took the later generation of consoles to start to break these limits.

A side effect of such limits was the fact that it forced the writers and designers for these games to build the plot and story around the idea that you met very few people (i.e. remote Mansion near remote mountain town), and when you did they tended to go away conveniently at the end of cut scenes (looking at you, Ada Wong). A downside of this of course meant that ambitious titles like Resident Evil 2 couldn’t often present elaborate sets filled with zombies and survivors. Another downside came later, with the neg-gen wave of titles (Resident Evil 4 and 5 specifically) in which the option to add extra characters changed the story dynamic, and not always for the better. But for the original games, it worked well.

Resource Management

This has been in almost every game, ever. In real life military personnel don’t go off on a mission that may require 4,000 bullets without—you know—taking 4,000 bullets with them. In video games you find ammo lying around. In Resident Evil you find mysterious herbs and mix your own poultices. You find all kinds of stuff lying around, but you try to carry all of it in a fanny pack, apparently, for the scope of your inventory. This is a deliberate game play feature, of course, but it also contributes greatly to the suspense and helps to enhance the horror element, especially when you realize you need to start counting bullets. Later additions to the franchise got away from this a bit, and some wannabe titles ditch it entirely, and often to deleterious effect.

Mystery Unexplained

By this I mean, “Lots of mysteries, and you don’t know if you’ve figured it all out by the end.” Sometimes this is because the writers didn’t bother to explain something, or maybe the localization missed some subtle detail in translating the game to English (ala Jill, master of lockpicks). Sometimes its because this is a game, after all, and for all the story elements needed to string events along it’s occasionally necessary to include something which borders on the nonsensical in any in-universe explanation, until a later sequel figures out a way to use that errant bit of data.

Not all enigmas in Resident Evil are good: chess piece keys and that guy who follows you around selling weapons in Resident Evil 4 are two painful examples of immersion-testing nonsense. However, many things which go unexplained in one game lead directly into the rather more robust canon that emerges in later sequels. Resident Evil Zero and Code: Veronica are both instances where the whispered hints of the Umbrella deviancy in the first game are magnified into full-blown Machiavellian plots for later titles. Wesker, creepy guy on the take in the original game emerges as a godlike test subject for evil by Resident Evil 5 (and apparently has a son in the forthcoming Resident Evil 6).

But the important thing, of course, is that for every mystery you resolve or every Umbrella facility you blow up by the end of the game, the implication should be that there is so much more your protagonists has barely scratched the surface on.

Summary

This is mostly an overview of the games (especially the original three), and I may write more about specific Resident Evil titles later in the month, but this overview helps set up the framework for the forthcoming movie reviews. For now, remember the following key features that I feel help define the special subgenre of Resident Evil: horror scenery porn, unexplained mysteries, methodical and slow (player-driven) pacing interrupted by sudden shocks and over-the-top action, resource management, and an overwhelming and tension-inducing sense of isolation. There’s no one to back you up, and if there is, they might be out to get you, too.

Next: Resident Evil (the movie)

*It didn’t create the genre, but it did make it a “thing.” Alone in the Dark was, near as I can tell, the progenitor of this style of game, but RE put the survival into the horror.

A Brief And Very Late Review: Resident Evil Village

 

Long time followers of this blog know I have written a lot about the universe of Resident Evil games, books and movies in prior years. Like....enough that it may surprise you to know that it took me approximately 4 1/2 years from the date of its release to get around to playing (and finishing) Resident Evil Village....and I haven't even started Resident Evil 4 Remake yet, either. It took me a good year or two to get around to playing and finishing the RE 2 and 3 remakes as well. 

Part of the problem with writing about the RE 2 and 3 remakes is that, well, they were kind of decent and managed capture the feel and style of the originals in a more modern play experience without bringing over any of the wonky or janky bits. In fact they were both rather fun games to play, and as such the most I could say about them was "Thumbs up, would play again!" Also, these are stories that, even if modified a bit, are well known to me, having played the originals multiple times....so not quite as exciting as entirely new content. 

Resident Evil Village is a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7, which was the first in the series to break with a third person perspective, and also leaned into a lot of tropes that had become common in horror games around when it came out, including helpless protagonists (you eventually do get weapons and the game at some point begins to feel like a Resident Evil game, but not for a while), overwhelmingly villainous monsters who hold a clear power advantage, and for at least the majority of the game it is entirely unclear how it relates to the plot of the bigger Resident Evil universe. It eventually opens up with the (SPOILERS!) discovery of a beached Umbrella research ship, and the incredibly late game appearance of Chris Redfield, now working for a reborn Umbrella Corp, this time as an organization dedicated to cleaning up the mess of its predecessors, but until those moments the story is basically about a guy named Ethan Winters looking for his girlfriend who went back to see her weird family in the Louisiana Bayou, and they it turns out are all horrific mutant monsters that, you eventually learn, are being genetically modified by exposure to a mysterious mold that Umbrella was studying.

Cut to the sequel, in Resident Evil Village Ethan and his now wife Mia have had a child named Rose and moved to "Europe" (somewhere in or near Romania, it is presumed), where they seem to be living a normal and happy life, although Mia is acting a bit weird. Protip to young 'uns out there, its not really that weird, many moms act a bit off post-pregnancy, so if you ever find yourself there, trust me, she's just being herself, she is not secretly a Resident Evil monster. Almost immediately this is interrupted by Chris Redfield and his team of crack assassins murdering Mia and trying to spirit away baby Rose and Ethan without any explanation afforded; Chris Redfield is turning into a bit of a creepy black ops villain, it seems.

If you have seen any of this game's images, videos and discussions over the last years then you probably know this is the game with the big scary mommy-dommy vampiress, Lady Dimitrescu. As it turns out, this is only the game's first boss, as Lady Dimitrescu and her three "daughters," who are each creepy vampire-fly women are but the first stage of a much longer battle with the progeny/creations of Miranda, the actual real boss of the game and the actual reason this remote community in Romania is completely screwed up.

I played REV in the late-game DLC added third-person mode, so my sense of the game's creep factor was probably lowered by that fact a bit, but I really do love the over-the-shoulder third person perspective more than first person mode for horror games, its just the sweet spot I find most entertaining. That said, my son said he preferred the first person mode because it made the entire game creepier and more visceral, and he is not wrong; he plays all of these the day I buy them FYI, so just in case you think I'm buying a game and sitting on it four years....yeah I totally am, but the rest of the family (or those that care) have already played them to exhaustion immediately. 

The multiple bosses in the game that come after Lady Alcina Dimitrescu (as well as the vampire herself) are all transformative battles, which is a staple of Resident Evil games.....you meet the villain, who is usually normal-ish looking (or horribly mutated, but still in a "normal" way such as with Moreau) and then you eventually push them too far, they take some damage, and the familiar "Now I begin mutating Akira-style out of control into a beast ten times my size" event happens and you get to have a fun boss arena fight. This is only broken by one encounter, with the doll-maker Beneviento, a woman who can manipulate the mind through hallucinogens and uses the mutating effects of the mold's source to control her dolls. That entire sequence strips you of weapons and forces you to deal with her horrifying hallucinations without a means of defense until the very end, and its actually done incredibly well, leading to the creepiest mid-game moment where you still have agency. Many other encounters are creepy, but handled as cut scenes; the evil doll's sequence is masterfully done and is the one part of the game that most closely reminds me of the earlier RE7 game. Dimitrescu's Castle is also fairly close, as you can't really harm her or her minions without using the right environmental tactics, so much of the castle sequence is spent running and hiding, as well. But the Beneviento Doll maker? This is probably some of the best stuff I've seen in any Resident Evil title, right up there with the first Tyrant encounters in the original trilogy and the opening creepy house sequence in RE7.

Around 75% of the way through REV I began to get a sense of tedium. I admittedly had been almost 100%ing the game, finding all of the special treasures and looting everything I could, but there came a point when I realizes I had depopulated the entire village and surroundings, and all that remained was to go after the semi-final boss Heisenberg and then Miranda herself. Ethan Winters had graduated from survivor to true monster hunter, and by this point in the plot it was clear he himself could very well also be a monster, just one that didn't appear to be ready to mutate. Around this point I have to say that I began to feel like the DNA of REV now felt like a blend of the high octane action of Resident Evil 5 and 6 more than RE7; the game had firmly established that it was most definitely in the Resident Evil universe. 

Right before the final boss Miranda we find her secret lab where there was an insane level of information dumping. Lots of clues existed in the rest of the game, but the final lab neatly tied up everything in a bow, including explaining the Umbrella Corp./Dr. Spencer connections to the mysterious region and its mystery mutating mold monsters. The exposition dump was appreciated, but I really wish there had been more clues and details to be found more gradually; the end-of-game exposition dump felt if not a tad contrived, it might have been nicer to have it slightly more spread out, at least.

Similar to the RE7 DLC, but now part of the core game experience, you get a chance to play as old grizzled veteran Chris Redfield who must be like in his late 40's at the time the game takes place. Redfield gets a fun sequence where you are effectively given all the ammunition you need to fight hordes....literal, vast hordes of every lycan and other beast that has been a serious threat to Ethan up to this point with the firepower necessary to make short work of them. Before you rejoin Ethan following more blatant exposition dumps (and a final, grand explanation for his inexplicable healing powers) Chris manages to collect the goods, rescue Mia and plant the bomb (a surprisingly small bomb, but it does the job of wiping out the entire vale) before we return for Ethan's final showdown to save Baby Rose from Miranda. Miranda's fight is...fine....but perhaps not the most inspired as boss fights go. Not great, but at least not frustrating. If you had been maxing out your weapons and hoarding ammo, you will find this fight to be fairly easy, or at least not difficult.

I haven't played the Rose DLC yet. My son missed that the DLC released and wants to watch me play it. It sounds like it will be typical RE bonus content that is okay but not great; we'll see. The main game was well worth it, but I was surprised at how much REV shed it's RE7 vibe for more conventional RE style horror....but with the concession that maybe that was inevitable, playing in the third person mode.

If you, like me, somehow never played this game, but enjoy good survival horror, then I would give it a thumbs up for you! If you haven't played RE7 you really ought to play that one first, though. Solid A- from me, mainly because I was, toward the end, feeling like the game could have ended at about the 70% mark and I would have been content.....but to its credit, there weren't too many areas that felt like a drawn out slog (maybe tiny bit with The Factory at the end, which was tense and interesting but also easy to get lost in). But all of the locations and bosses of the family were in general well realized and different enough that the game kept providing new and interesting stuff at every step, and it really was only in the late game when I began to feel like  Ethan was the Real Monster here that it felt like it was time for the story to end (but I still had to defeat Heisenberg and Miranda by that point!) 

Now to play Resident Evil 4 Remake before Resident Evil Requiem comes out! I have pre-ordered Requiem, and am determined to play it on day of release, none of this multi-year procrastination again!

What's left to say.....hmmmm....how about, "Hey Capcom, when's Resident Evil Code Veronica getting remade????"

One final thought: what was up with Duke? Your resident merchant is never explained, and chooses to be enigmatic right up to the end. I was expecting some sort of reveal that he was cousin to Dimitrescu or something. My son says there's a connection to the arms dealer in RE 4 but he also hangs out on fan-theory forums so its hard to parse out what is real and what is just redditors pulling nonsense out of thin air.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil 5

Day Sixteen: Resident Evil 5 (PC Edition)

Can you tell I have a thing for Resident Evil? I've tried to touch base on the movies and key games, but so much more remains. Today we'll take a retrospective look at Resident Evil 5. I didn't actually play through this game until just a few months ago, actually; it took me a while to be in the right mood to engage with it, and I waited to secure a cheap copy on Steam. This proved to be a good strategy; I might have been more annoyed at this game if I had paid $60 for it.

Resident Evil 5 picks up in the near-now much as RE 4 did with Leon Kennedy, this time focusing on the current-day antics of Chris Redfield and his new partner, Sheva Alomar, both now employed by the Bioterrism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA). There are a few layers of "plot" going on here: first, Chris has been busy pursuing Wesker, ne'er do-well from the original games and former stooge for Umbrella. Turns out he's been heavily experimented on, and is basically turning into an "Alice," except in the RE game universe. He's been very naughty, too, kidnapping poor Jill Valentine and experimenting on her using mind control, among other things.

In the midst of all this a local South African province in the town of Kijuju is being terrorized by an outbreak of what was previously called Las Plagas and is now known to create majini, which are basically an extension of the same viral outbreak, creating weird parasitic entities which possess the host and make them go axe-murderer on everyone.

Before the end of this game you will have burned, blasted and bashed your way through half of South Africa....or it will certainly feel like it. This game ditches much of the series trademark puzzle solving and slow pacing for a much faster, more action-oriented over-the-top cinematic adventure. In fact, the cinematics in this film are pretty good, noticeably more interesting than the same stuff you'll see in the movie Resident Evil: Afterlife, which took direct visual inspiration from RE 5.

In the game's defense it does have moments that feel very much like the Resident Evil that we all came to know in the original trilogy of games (plus Code: Veronica). However, the game veers away from much of that to focus heavily on gunplay, "maps" which you move through to clear out, and a general focus on action over tension. This works against the title, and ultimately is why RE 5 fails where prior games succeeded. The tension, the dread of what lies around the corner, the prospect of sudden shocks and thrills...the risk of unstoppable opponents; these are all features of the older games, largely discarded now in favor of vast waves of enemies coming at you in elaborate set-piece maps that, while pretty, start to feel more like arenas that you need to clear before the next gate opens (and indeed that's usually how you proceed). There's little in the way of puzzle solving, story pieces are sparse and often little more than interesting fluff you can otherwise ignore, and the game's main showcase revolves around key boss battles and events which, while impressive, are not enough on their own to sustain the game over time.

I really found that whole hydrofoil/swamp sequence tiring, to take an example. You get a swamp boat, a fan-powered craft you must take from point A to three other points, each of which has a switch you need to hit, basically, but to do so you have to survive waves of zombies...er, majini. The areas you go to are all more or less alike. The sequence of actions doesn't vary much, and few distinct plot threads pop up worth noting.

It becomes painfully apparent at moments like this that the gem devs are giving us busy work. Busy work happens in almost all computer games, but the trick is making it so that the player either doesn't notice or doesn't care, because they are having too much fun. RE 5 has some spots where you do not feel engaged enough to be having fun, and the thin veneer begins to wear off, revealing the gruesome underbelly of a grind beneath. Not a good thing.

There's no tension here; in some ways you could replace "majini" with zombies, or russians, or nazis and you'd find yourself in any number of other games. When the thing that makes your franchise distinct is missing, you have a problem.


The game also saddles you with a permanent NPC partner who's primary job is to get in your way and swipe useful stuff before you can. In my final completion playthrough I got pretty good at managing her, but for a single-player game it was an entirely needless extra feature, not one I'd complain about much, though, because Sheva added a bit to the story and made for an interesting character in the cut scenes. If you get a chance to play this multiplayer, it is worth it, and while I would agree with most that playing co-op drains some of the isolation and tension away, don't worry; RE 5 already got rid of all that for you.

Resident Evil 5 does try to deal with the problem of RE 4's impressively adept gunrunner. Rather than having you occasionally stumble across a guy selling guns, you simply go to a loadout/purchase screen between mission chapters. Oddly, this has the effect of being slightly less immersion breaking, I guess, although only because its employing a fairly generic approach used by many other action games. It would have been better to integrate these moments in a way that made more sense (i.e. finding occasional weapon drops that let you open the purchase screen) but there's no way around the fact that someone has strewn a ton of cash and valuables across the South African landscape, and you are pilfering all of it to buy your equipment, since the BSAA appears to be badly underfunded.

Sigh. I hate it when gameist elements bash their way into a title known for its sense of immersion and coherence (even if in a campy fashion).

Personally, I'd love to see what the team behind Spec Ops: The Line could do with a franchise like Resident Evil. Imagine the possibilities; Spec Ops had no supernatural elements as such, and yet it was considerably better at managing the tension, isolation and horror of its subject. Hell, you had two NPCs with you in that game and they actually contributed to the feeling of growing horror by virtue of their presence. Amazing stuff.

If you don't mind that RE 5 is basically a slightly more sophisticated modern on-rails shooter that just dolls itself up with the co-op/NPC feature, slightly more interesting levels and swaps out zombies or russians for majini, then you will find this is a fun game. If, however, you want more than just a story continuation of the Resident Evil plot and would also like the Resident Evil Feel, then you're likely to face disappointment here.

I'll give Resident Evil 5 a C+, chiefly because the stuff it does well stands out...it's just not very Resident Evil at this point. I enjoyed playing it, but I was disappointed that someone had scrubbed too hard and washed away the stuff that made this franchise distinct.

I've heard Resident Evil 6 takes RE 5's action over tension focus and ups it a notch. As of the time of writing I'll be picking that one up next, so I can see for myself. Maybe a review soon...

Reading Resident Evil: Umbrella Conspiracy and Zero Hour by S.D. Perry

Drinking from the Resident Evil fire hose for the last couple months has been fun. This is a franchise that's a roller-coaster of quality, focus and interest across the board, from movies that appear to be whacked-out psychedelic trips through Alice in Zombie Land on down to the original adventure games full of weird puzzles and the current crop which is high-octane cinematic adventure that, like the films, sometimes requires leaps of logic too vast to span. And then there are the books...

The Resident Evil novel series started many years ago and I recall trying to read them and being unimpressed. I have also learned that almost any opinion of literature (fun or serious) that I had during my nebulous "Seattle years" spanning 1996-2005 is suspect, because during much of that time I was running on empty, literally; I worked a night-shift type job for most of those ten years and rarely got more than 3-4 hours of sleep every night, sometimes for months on end without reprise. I was in a strange relationship with my ex-wife and I often was too fatigued, worried and generally stressed to focus properly on anything. It's a miracle I was able to get anything done during this era.

As a result of this, I've often found that books I tried reading and discarded as too derivative, banal, uninteresting or annoying for whatever reason end up being much better now, in my "nicer years," where I get like...6 whole hours of sleep each night, I have a comfortable 7:30-4:30 PM type job, weekends always free, a wife with whom I have excellent synchronization and a son who is a total joy to raise. So yeah, I sometimes find books that I once dismissed to be actually rather fun.

The Resident Evil novels (not to be confused with the movie novelizations) were written by S.D. Perry and focus on actual adaptations of the original games up through Code: Veronica. There are seven books in the series. S.D. Perry is/was a master at the licensed adaptation, and did a very good job of writing engaging, suspenseful but otherwise lite-reading tales of the Resident Evil universe. I've gotten through two of them so far, will review more as we go along.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy

Umbrella Conspiracy starts with a direct adaptation of the events in the original game. it's a bit rocky, as you might imagine a tale of mercenary cops wandering in a haunted mansion full of zombies solving obscure adventure-style puzzles relying on adventure-game logic might be. We are treated to a bit of "pre-game" lead-in, explaining a bit about who the Special Tactics and Recon Squads (STARS) are, a sort of international mercenary outfit (think Blackwater, I guess) that is employed by Raccoon City to supplement and assist the local police department and is ostensibly also there at the request of Umbrella Corp, the pharmaceutical company that pretty much made Raccoon City what it is. We meet Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Barry Burton, as well as the ever-evil Albert Wesker in the few moments we get to know him before he flips his evil switch on.

This was S.D. Perry's first attempt at a novel outside of her work on the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. It's a bit rough, and she does an admirable job of trying to recast the events of the game in a way that works for fiction. When I originally tried reading this I remember being annoyed at specific details, or just how the story was framed relative to the game, which was much fresher in my mind at the time. Today it's been so long that I'm just impressed that the tale is detailed enough to invoke memories of specific events, locations and characters or creatures from the original! So in that sense it's quite a success. Indeed, if you ever wanted to know what the original was about, but didn't have the endurance, dexterity or temerity to find and plow through the game, this book is more than suited to the task of getting you up to speed.

The most amusing bits about this novelization are the pieces which don't quite "fit" with later canon. Wesker here does indeed go evil somewhere along the way, although his motives and complicity in the process aren't as exaggerated or obvious as they later become in retrospect. He also doesn't technically live to the end....but that's a suitable reveal for when he comes back in the future. Other moments, such as Rebecca Chambers and her experiences in Resident Evil Zero aren't entirely in sync with this novel. But as always one can imagine that a fiction like this is an amalgamation of bits and pieces inevitably corrupted by the unreliable narrator if you wish to reconcile the book with the setting canon.

Still, I enjoyed it. This is light reading, and you could easily give this to your younger reader to enjoy; there's little or nothing in the way of purely mature content that I noticed, while an adult looking for something fun to read over a series of lunch breaks (as I did) will be entertained, if not provoked.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour

Technically Zero Hour is the seventh book in the series, but chronologically it happens just before Umbrella Conspiracy, being an adaptation of Resident Evil Zero, which tells about the fate of Bravo Team, the STARS unit that went in to investigate the mysterious cannibal attacks around the Spencer Mansion just a few hours before Alpha team followed. This is one of the Resident Evil games I didn't play all the way through, for various reasons having to do with my horrendous work schedule, troubled marriage and lack of general time during my years in Seattle, so reading it was a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my RE lore.

Rebecca Chambers is a child genius, who graduated from college by age 17 and was hired on to the STARS as a chemical specialist due to her incredible credentials. Presumably she had interesting aspirations for a teenage girl, or maybe the STARS just pay really well...either way, she is the focus of the tale, along with the wanted criminal and accused murderer Billy Coen, recently escaped from a military police transfer thanks to the freakish luck of passing through the remote mountains right when some serious zombie smack-down starts off.

Zero Hour is focused on explaining a few lingering plot threads from the original tale, namely what happened in the first place to cause the outbreak of the T-Virus. If you thought this was fairly evident (if not exactly spelled out) from the first book/game, then you would be right: until Zero Hour the general assumption was somehow, perhaps due to industrial sabotage or sheer ineptitude the virus was released, causing a lock-down at the Spencer Estate and, as it turns out, a previously unseen Umbrella retreat and research compound.

After Bravo team crashes (no helicopter can survive a Resident Evil tale), they spread out to look for evidence as they wait for a rescue from Alpha team. While Rebecca finds evidence of a private transport train to the compound (coming from Raccoon City, presumably) that's been massacred by something spreading the T-Virus, Billy Coen runs into her and they settle into an uneasy truce to survive against the mysterious horrors that are crawling all over the place. As the two explore the train they find evidence of mutated leeches that seem to cooperate like a hive mind, connected somehow to a mysterious stranger. When the train starts up they find themselves deposited at the Umbrella Retreat and Compound, driven to escape the maddening complex by an unseen foe who is bent on helping and hindering them.

Zero Hour is the seventh book S.D. Perry wrote and it is actually very solid, a better read than Umbrella Conspiracy, despite being subject to the pacing and approach of the game's story line. The net result is a more coherent read, and a chance to see what Rebecca was up to prior to her arriving at the Spencer Mansion and running into Chris Redfield. It also helps to set her up for further adventures in the next novel, Caliban Cove (which I shall review next week). I definitely suggest reading it immediately after Umbrella Conspiracy, and not before, despite it being a prequel; it meshes better this way, as the inconsistencies in the timeline caused by Capcom's monkeying with jamming this story line in to the mix are more tolerable with a retrospective approach than trying to reconcile them after the fact. Put another way; Umbrella Conspiracy makes for better reading if you follow up with Zero Hour rather than the other way around. Zero Hour is definitely an improvement all across the board, and worth checking out.

Next up is Caliban Cove, the second novel in the series, and an original story which takes place between Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead (the adaptation of Resident Evil 2). I'm halfway through it right now, but S.D. Perry's chance to shine with an original story is already my favorite. But I shall save details for another batch of reviews next week!

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil 4

Day Thirteen: Resident Evil 4 (PS2 edition)

Resident Evil 4 was the game which jumped ship on zombies, trading in for the sexier, weirder and more Cthulhuesque Las Plagas and the creepy rural Spanish villagers called the las ganados. RE4 was significant for a number of other reasons as well, including the way the game plays and feels.

RE4 heralds a shift in the series from events surrounding 1998 and the spin-off events centered around what happened at Raccoon City and Umbrella Corp. to more modern focus on survivors from that event, now employed as special agents of the U.N. (iirc) specializing in unusual situations which may or may not also involve horrendous monster-generating biochemical weapons. In RE4 the hero is Leon Kennedy, former cop from Resident Evil 2, who is sent into to a remote European town (implied to be somewhere in rural Spain) to rescue the president's daughter, who has been kidnapped by cultists of a group known as the Los Illuminados.

The game fundamentally changed the core dynamic of how Resident Evil plays and feels. This was a necessary change; the franchise had lagged behind other titles in the genre and both it and Silent Hill were the only two persistent survival horror franchises left that were employing this technique (which people grudgingly put up with). RE4 managed to pull it off fairly successfully, although other more subtle changes would herald a shift from "survival horror" to "action horror" over the course of the game. This would have unfortunate side effects for Resident Evil 5 (and RE6 by the look of it), but the shift in RE4 was subtle enough to blend well with the more traditional feel and focus of the series.

Moving the series from a focus on T-virus generated zombies and monsters to the mysterious Las Plagas was a smart move, although arguably this choice came right as zombies were about to bust out of their niche corner into a multimedia phenomenon (and RE6 is getting back to ordinary zombies, it seems). The plot also shifts focus (slightly) from evil corporate warmongering to weird cultists an dterrorists using the detritus of Umbrella Corp. to create a new army of evil.


RE4's biggest issues boil down to three things for me:

First, a fair percentage of the game is spent hauling the president's daughter around. This, as you might guess, is effectively a lengthy escort mission. It is sometimes very painful dealing with subpar AI that likes to take some bullets for the monsters as she is prone to getting in your way, often. She likes to die, a bit too much.

Second, what the hell is up with the weird gun dealer who follows you everywhere? I grew increasingly dismayed that Leon Kennedy didn't simply grab the guy and make him lead Leon through the secret maze of easy-access tunnels that was obviously present, because there is no other way this guy could have gotten ahead of Leon without having either a master key set or an intimate familiarity with all the other secret byways that no one else obviously knew about. Also, why the hell was he there in the first place? This bit felt to me like the sort of thing a Japanese script-writer would include in the plot as a necessary but believable gimmick if you come from Japan and think that Europe is rife with remote, inaccessible locations filled with evil cultists and craft gun runners.

Third and most obnoxiously, the game starts to shift more to action events that feel more like the game developers were aiming for cinematic film than gameplay. This led to two problems: the tighter and more maneagable controls were still inadequate for a lot of actions (the age-old problem of third-person controls requiring almost inhuman levels of precision at times) and the introduction of quick-time events (QTEs for those of you who don't read a lot of gaming sites). QTEs are painful ways of making a player feel like he's engaged in a cut-scene. No they aren't. They are painful ways of taking a cut scene and forcing the player to hit random buttons unexpectedly. Do game developers not realize that the cut scene is supposed to be a reward, where you can take a moment to breath and relax, watch some cool story bit, then limber up for some more action? When the game suddenly demands I start tapping a button furiously, or a combination of such, I don't come away elated or satisfied that I dodged the boulder, ducked under the monster's feet and shot it from behind...I feel annoyed that I had to tap B, then X, then Y repeatedly and sometimes for many, many retries before getting it right. I can't pass this point by skill, so why make me play a weird little "Simon Says" minigame instead? Can't I just watch a damned cut scene in peace???

Griping aside, Resident Evil 4 is a fun game, and a worthy successor to the franchise. It demnstrated that Capcom could grow beyond its initial scope on the series, and still tell a weird and convoluted horror tale. The survival horror elements are all still here, and the game feels more modern. I found my frustrations detracted from the experience only a bit, so I'd rate this as an A-.

And then Resident Evil 5 came along.....

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Retribution

Day Thirty: Resident Evil: Retribution

Oh my Zombie Gods but do I have a lot to say about this movie! I'll get this out of the way real quick: SPOILER ALERT. Spoilers all over the place. Spoilers, Spoilers, Spoilers. SPOILERS!

You know what the difference is between bad movies thirty years ago and bad movies today? Bad movies today can (and often do) look like damned good movies, and are often still fun to watch, especially if you watch them drunk, or while suffering a mild concussion or something.

Resident Evil: Retribution manages to be a movie that infuriated, annoyed, confused, irritated, excited and thrilled me all at the same time. I was simultaneously flabbergasted at the movie's brazen and highly tenuous train of logic (yes, even after marathoning the first four last September! Even after watching Deep Space!) and still enjoying this movie like the action movie porn it truly is. Resident Evil: Retribution, despite a couple brilliantly horror-like moments, has all but shed its horror roots and embraced a world of high-tech post-apocalyptic zombie action super hero adventures. It is arguably beating the video games in terms of sheer, unadulterated brazenness. And I just finished the Leon Kennedy campaign for Resident Evil 6, too.....

I remember a time when video game inspired films were pathetic in their poor embrace of the admittedly loose source material. Now we have video game inspired films which make the video game designers look like boring, unimaginative people who need to learn to think outside the box.

(That might be a bit harsh...RE 6 has some moments that make the movie logic look downright spotless comparatively, but more on that in the RE 6 review...heh....)

Okay, enough general exposition! Time to talk about this movie and it's...uhhh....plot?

When we left Alice at the end of RE: Afterlife she had liberated a secret Umbrella ship called Arcadia from the tyrranical grip of Evil Wesker, with the help of Chris and Claire Redfield. Then a literal army of VTOL attack craft loaded with umbrella goons led by a mind-controlled Jill Valentine show up to crash the party.

Cut to RE: Retribution! We open with a slow-motion reverse of the first minute of the conflict, followed by a lengthy and rather elaborate narration by Alice which serves little purpose other than to remind the casual viewer of what the hell happened in the last four movies and how it may or may not relate to what the viewing audience, like test rats, are about to be exposed to. Then it opens up on the neighborhood from Dawn of the Dead (the remake) complete with fast zombies and everything. In fact, I have to say that the zombies get faster and faster with every RE movie. Alice is apparently waking from a bad dream in Raccoon City Suburbia, married to the Umbrella agent from Resident Evil: Apocalypse and with a daughter who is deaf. Then zombies attack and Alice does a fairly good job of escaping, aided by her friend who appears to be a civilian version of Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain from the first movie. Then Alice wakes up, sort of, in a very large and extravagant Umbrella torture/interrogation chamber.

We're about ten or fifteen minutes in here, just so ya know.

So Jill Valentine, still being controlled by a red gem-thing on her chest (which, for what it's worth, is as inexplicable in the games as it is in this film) interrogates and tortures Alice. Actually, I think she's trying to brainwash her into being an Umbrella agent again. Actually, I am not sure what they want from Alice, but I do know that the real purpose of this scene was to demonstrate yet another semi-nude scene of Alice in a two-piece smock just like she wore in the first two films.

Rule 34 dictates that somewhere someone is selling "Resident Evil Umbrella Medical Gowns" online and people like me are risking dismemberment by asking their wives and/or girlfriends to wear them

So after a bit something odd happens; security goes down, Alice's weapons and black body stocking Death Agent of Umbrella uniform appears, and she finds herself escaping...first from yet another reprisal of the laser grid trap from the first movie. My complaints about how in the hell this trap works in the review of that film seem quaint compared to the Escher painting logic that subsequent movies have taught me to expect. But that's neither here nor there....she escapes and finds herself in Tokyo, right before the imminent zombie apocalypse is about to trip, exactly as it appeared at the start of RE: Afterlife. Then of course the zombie apocalypse hits and Alice gets a'killin.

Before long, the game...er, the movie throws its first major twist in: it may not seem like a huge twist to people who have not played the game, but trust me, if you're a fan of the games this is HUGE: Ada Wong shows up! That's not the twist, though. Nope, the twist is: Ada Wong explain everything. Well, almost everything....but she effectively outlines exactly what's going on and why; she provides more plot dialogue, exposition and explanation in a few minutes on film than she has ever done in in 15 years of video games. In fact, Ada's main job in the game universe has been to show up and confound the plot. Here she serves primarily to help make sense of things. Holy crap!

Macho Women With Guns

Ada explains she's here to bust Alice out of Umbrella's aquatic kingdom of evil ruled by the evil computer the Red Queen herself (or maybe a copy of her, since she did blow up in a nuclear firestorm in RE: Apocalypse). It seems Alice is once again very important....and Ada's external ally is ...get ready for it!.....Evil Wesker!!!!! Except maybe he's not evil now. I miss evil Wesker (fear not, he's just feigning not-evilness, luckily). Instead, the Red Queen is the evil one, engaged in endless experiments on clones with monsters to find increasingly more devious ways of destroying all humanity.

So Ada, directed by Wesker (who's video-phoning in his part of the plot) explain that an ancient aquatic North Pole Soviet Military station that was purchased and repurposed by Umbrella Corp. as a distributor of biowarfare weapons as well as a place to demonstrate them by....wow, I can't believe I'm not making this up....by cloning armies of civilians, populating entire replica domes of major cities across the world with said clones, and then breeding and releasing various monsters that are then used to test their overall effectiveness on these vast numbers of clones (that are embedded with flash memories) in the simulated cities. You know- to help establish product placement for out-of-control biogenic weapons that do everything from create zombies to spontaneously mutate said zombies into tyrant super soldiers and more. That's hard to demonstrate without a super-secret James Bondian underwater super lab, apparently. Hoo yah.

I apologize to the mad scientist from RE: Extinction at this point; clearly he was more in tune with the Red Queen's goals than the rest of Umbrella.

Anyway, Ada has allies. It turns out one is Barry (lifted from Resident Evil 1....I still can't say for sure if he is canonically alive in the video games or not), another Luther West, one of the survivors from RE: Afterlife (but in keeping with tradition all characters not directly taken from the movie except for Alice die in the second film they appear in), and then there's Leon Kennedy (not that I figured this out until late in the movie when I heard him called Leon). So Leon's Mirror-Alice-Universe twin finally gets some screen time. At least he's in a film with both Jill (who he doesn't seem to know here) and Ada (whom he's got a thing for).

Take note that at no point do we find out where Chris and Claire Redfield went at the end of the last film. So Luther West somehow survived and made buddies with Leon, Barry and "unnamed destined to die" guys, but Chris and Claire? Who knows.

The movie proceeds to burn along at a fearsome pace as Ada and Alice try to escape one simulated city full of clone victims and monsters after another, while the guys (some of whom are unfortunate enough to be there only to die, of course) do the same, including having an encounter with the Las Plagas. The tentacle-faced monstrosities, you say? No! The Las Plagas, as if their existence wasn't already muddied by RE: Afterlife's inexplicable introduction of the tentacle-claw face-sprouting zombies (as well as the Really Big Dude with an Axe) wasn't confusing enough, these Las Plagas are actually an army of zombie-soviet-Nazi-soldiers complete with suits, armor and gear that looks like more Soviet-purchased surplus. Or something.

Luckily I have very, very little hair or it would be easier to pull out. Oh my god. Seriously. Here they had a chance to explain or at least rationalize the existence of the Los Plagas and the unmentioned G Virus in the RE-Mirror Aliceverse and instead somebody says, "We need something that can have a cool shoot-out with Leon, Barry and Luther. How about umbrella goons? Naw, we've been shooting a hell of a lot of them, and they're the ones duking it out with Ada and Alice over here...I know! Zombie soldiers with guns!"

Indeed, not only has Alice found the simulated Raccoon City zone (because on the list of major locales to simulate for purposes of bioweapon sales I'd put Raccoon City right next to New York, Moscow and Tokyo) but she's found yet another victim clone of herself, and a daughter she never had but now decides to fiercely protect. Actually this is a pretty good plot twist, second only to dropping Ada in as a center of plot exposition.

Cloned versions of the entire Umbrella crew from the first movie then show up, led by Evil Jill, and a lengthy shoot-out ensues. At this point I am loathe to spoil too much more, if only because the majority of the film at this point is one long scene-changing gunfight, mixed with a few bizarre moments (which I will happily point out!). In order:

A major Resident Evil monster reappears, this time in a deluxe super-size edition: the licker is back, and he's damned big.

Barry dies toward the end, so in the Aliceverse we know he's dead. That makes Barry the first official "named" character to be extracted messily from the games who is actually dead in Aliceverse.

Alice finds yet another clone processing plant, and this time it's not just mass-generating clones of her, but of her brand new deaf foster daughter and 48 other flash-cloned souls that I guess the Red Queen took a liking to. Luckily the super-licker chases Alice here and she is forced to blow it and all the clones up with official Umbrella grenades. Not so luckily I kept wondering why the goal of the movie was the assisted escape of Alice when siezing the facility and freeing a vast number of clones who, while still clones, could in theory do a fine job of rebooting the decimated world popuation....but as I've learned from the other movies one does not overthink how the Aliceverse works.

Next time Jill should avoid shopping at Jared's of Umbrella Corp. for jewelry

We do finally get A showdown between Jill and Alice. Alice almost loses this one, sort of. Jill is finally released from the control of the Red Queen, which is a good thing I guess, although I have to admit, Jill's relevance to the plot outside of just sorta "being there" is a bit difficult to fathom.

We also get a showdown between Leon and Luther vs. whatever clone edition of Rain this is....this is a clone of Rain from the first movie who's much more effective at being an Umbrella goon. She pulls out an injector with a Las Plagas parasite (bwuh?!?!?!?!) and injects it (an impressive feat since the needle looked kinda small to inject the bug in the syringe.) As is traditional in both the game universe and the Aliceverse the virus works near-instantaneously, except here it just makes Rain really, really badass.

What....

Michelle looked and acted like she was here for the money throughout this movie

Okay, so everyone fights a lot and in the end Alice and crew escape, to live happily ever after, right? Hah!

 The real surprise at the end is just how they close it out with whatever new, spanky insane ending will set the stage for the next film. If you still want some semblance of surprise, stop reading, because I have absolutely got to spoil it:

They fly to Washington D.C. to a White House under siege (looks like the one in Modern Warfare 2...or was it 3?) and Alice is allowed to enter the Oval Office. At this moment I was expecting them to rip off Resident Evil 6 with an appearance by Zombie President, but No! They did one better! It's EVIL Wesker!!!! He's the president now....or something....and he injects Alice with the T-virus, again, explaining that he needs her hopped up on T-Virus mojo so she can help deal with the last stand of humanity. Cut to the scene outside, as Wesker, Jill, Leon, Luther, little girl and Alice all gather to look out on an insane scene of full military action as the US Army barricades the White House in against a vast, unending army of darkness, led by the Red Queen to exterminate all humanity. RE: Extinction apparently exaggerated how far long the extinction process was, I guess.

The forty-one year old Me was simultaneously apoplectic at how nonsensical this movie was while the thirteen year old Me was ready to drop golden bricks in sheer excitement at how Freakin' Awesome this movie was.

I don't even know what the hell to make of this series anymore, and I can't even think about the plot or the point of it all without feeling like I bruised my brain. I do know that I will see the next one, and I do plan to be mildly inebriated when I do so I can enjoy it a bit more without wanting to wave my fists like a lunatic madman at the screen!

B+ for the sheer spectacle and over-the-top action porn. Giant freaking F for coherence, but who cares anymore? This movie's Alice is well and truly down the zombie rabbit hole!

Review: Resident Evil - Caliban Cove

Resident Evil: Caliban Cove by S.D. Perry

The second published novel in the Resident Evil series (and third in chronological order) is also the first original tale S.D. Perry got to pen in the weird Biohazard universe, serving as a sort of filler between the events of the original Resident Evil (presented in Umbrella Conspiracy) and Resident Evil 2 (novelized in City of the Dead, which I am presently plowing through). Caliban Cove gets a unique opportunity to break away from the video game restrictions on the story and elaborate on a few bits and pieces that are otherwise missing from the games.

Rebecca Chambers (the perky young genius biologist who was a fresh recruit into the Special Tactics and Recon Squad-STARS-stationed in Raccoon City) gets to be the focus of this tale as she and the other STARS survivors of the Spencer Mansion incident are now being hunted by Umbrella hitmen while the press and local investigators dance to Umbrella's publicity department and place suspicion and blame for whatever the hell went down at the Spencer Mansion squarely on the STARS' shoulders.

Rebecca gets an opportunity to do further investigating when David Trapp and his aspiring team of STARS agents from another district step forth with rumors of an accident at another secret Umbrella facility in the unfortunately named Caliban Cove in Maine. David is a handsome British gent which means we get to hear about flashlights being called torches for a while.

I'm glossing over some of the surprises, should you wish to read and enjoy this book spoiler-free, but here's the gist of it (spoilers): Caliban Cove is the reclusive haunt of a gaggle of mad scientists who were working with the deranged evil genius Nicholas Griffith, a man who's vision of what the T Virus can do led to a perfection which both allowed him and his team to organize zombies into armed "tri-squads" and also to create true zombies, with a sort of "muscle memory" of their intellect but totally lacking free will. And Griffith, being quite mad of course, has taken advantage of his co-workers to set about his own special plans of zombie-driven world domination.

Luckily, the STARS, always gifted with an impeccable sense of good timing, arrive on scene to disrupt things, suffer horribly, and triumph in the end.

Because the book is not following any sort of game-directed script it deviates slightly from the pacing and style of the other novels, and we get a lot more setup and exposition than is normal, perhaps even too much of it (we're sixty plus pages in before anything evil-lab and zombie related starts hopping). The disaster at Caliban Cove, while suitably appropriate for the series, is also toned down a bit...we get some good, creepy moments, some action bits, and so forth, but its all more measured, more subdued than the novels ripped directly from the games. S.D. Perry does introduce a measure of puzzlers into the story, however, in keeping with RE tradition.

This book wasn't quite as good as, say, Zero Hour (which was written much later) but it's definitely a fun read and adds some background to the setting, as well as providing a great framework in the first half of the tale to explain just what the heck sort of an organization the STARS are, and how deep their membership is in Umbrella's pockets. It also demonstrates how the core conceit of the Resident Evil universe -that of a world in which evil Pharmaceutical Companies generously sprinkle secret bioweapons test labs in the dark corners of America, to be found by daring law enforcement mercenaries- can sustain itself rather well outside of the video game environment it was birthed in.

Review: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

This is a good week to be a Resident Evil fan. We have a new entry into the game series (RE7) that is genuinely amazing....more on that one later....and also the final movie in the "Alice's adventures in Umbrellaland" series of Resident Evil films starring Milla Jovovich.

I've had a great deal of fun with both the films and games of Resident Evil over the years, and always appreciate that the first RE game marked my foray into "modern" gaming on the Playstation 1. Prior to that, it was a wasteland of suboptimal, graphically terrifying PC games for me, and in fact the PS1 was my first machine that could run anything interesting at all, as well as my first console since my childhood Atari 2600 days. This year in 2017 marks an interesting transition for the franchise, which, like the monsters it portrays, has grown in strange and weird ways. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is no different, offering up a movie that closes out this chapter of the franchise while RE7 opens up an entirely strange and new direction for the games.

Unlike the last several Resident Evil movies, the latest film isn't nearly as campy and stupid, making it hard to poke fun at the film. In fact, if you hadn't seen any of the RE movies since maybe #1, this film could arguably stand on its own....so long as your entire focus is on enjoying a zombie apocalypse film that keeps making allusions to prior events. They give you a decent enough recap at the start, and even fill in some odd holes from the dawn of the series (the kinds of holes this series takes for granted, normally), and then dives in to the current plot. In fact it even eschews the traditional "wrap up the ending of the last film" format by cutting to the chase....we know there was a crazy battle in the ruins of Washington DC but the film starts more or less "the day after" that fight, and moves in to Alice's last trip down the rabbit hole.

I'll get this out of the way real quickly: much like with xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is actually a lot of fun and quite enjoyable, so long as your in to that sort of thing. Which thankfully I happen to be, because otherwise I'd be having a real crisis of confidence in the state of films right now if I didn't. They are both action films predicated on the glory of on-screen excess and madness that is particular to their action-film visions of the universe. They both rely on spectacle over plot, action over story, and the "doing of stuff" over character.

Alice is promised an end in this tale, a conclusion to her story, and we do get that. I am kind of hopeful that this means we might eventually see a series reboot which tries to tell a RE tale closer to the games....but then we get into that tricky gray area where we have to admit that the games have their own special world logic, pacing issues, character development failings and weird plot holes (though none quite so spectacular as the films in aggregate).

The storyline of The Final Chapter wraps up Alice's tale (more or less), brings back Claire, brings back (no surprise) Wesker (and also wraps his tale up), along with gratuitious appearances by all of the Umbrella evil gang....especially the Red Queen and Dr. Isaacs, who's been "dead" for a few movies, actually. It does not clarify what happened to Leon Kennedy or Ada Wong....but I'm not fretting, their arbitrary appearance in this franchise remains one of those "visual nods" to the games without much effort to explain their existence in the weird mirror universe of Alice.

Here are a handful of my spoilerific observations on this movie (yes, SPOILERS AHEAD):

1. For much of the initial scenery this movie looks like they took a tab from Fallout 3's style.

2. As the plot progresses and it is revealed that the entire cabal of Umbrella is cryogenically locked away for awakening after the apocalypse ends, many "motivational" plotholes get nominally filled. This is good! Also, judicious use of clones to explain motivations, appearances, and reappearances was sufficient to help clear up some old (and new) plot detritus. But some of the motivations of prior villains in other films are suddenly cast in to doubt. Why, for example, did Wesker do pretty much any of the stuff he did in prior films? Why was it necessary to wait ten years to release the anti-virus? Why--if near as I can tell that was the goal all along--did anyone left at Umbrella oppose Alice's desire to do so, if it insured they would awaken to their brave new world?

3. Who set the bombs to blow up the cryotubes? I might have not followed this properly, but I was under the impression that no one had a good opportunity to do so.

4. Wesker died like a dog in a trap. Seemed like an oddly fitting end for Movie Wesker, but entirely out of sorts with the vicious mutating Wesker that haunted the video games.

5. I thought the Isaacs clone was motivated to cast down the Umbrella elite, knowing he was a clone. But in the end he seemed genuinely surprised to meet the Real Isaacs. So what, then, was his actual motive for baiting an army of the dead right to the entrance of the installation?

6. They try to clarify that the infection of the world actually started deliberately....but it doesn't quite jive with the first couple movies. I guess it explains how a post-nuked Raccoon City wasn't the source of the infection evident by the time of "Resident Evil: Extinction" but in fact it was Umbrella Corp deliberately infecting the population.....but at the same time, the prior movies held up on their assumptions just fine without this extra layer of Machiavellian scheming.

7. Do you remember the names of anyone else in this movie other than Alice, Claire, Isaacs and Wesker? Me neither. The entire population of survivors were pretty much just there to have a "visual recognition" and then their moment of doom.

8. Wesker still died like a dog. Hah!

9. That anti-virus sure did disperse quickly. Like....insanely quick. But this is RE science so yeah. They kinda clarify it will travel on the winds in the end, but that only lampshades the whole "army of zombies fall over" scene just prior. I guess the army was downwind?

10. I am officially impressed at how many frickin' times that laser trap corridor has made an appearance in the movie now. Officially it is like a character unto itself. The laser corridor is to RE films what the Necronomicon is to Evil Dead movies.

11. Fridge Moment: even if they were evil, I bet a fair number of the Umbrella elite would have been very useful alive to help rebuild society. Then again.....I guess they did cause the apocalypse....

Okay....so this was a fun movie, slightly less stupid than the last three, and slightly more energetic than many zombie survival horror films out there. It was all about the action, the LOUD NOISES as zombies pop out and the monsters. Also, a promise I think from W.S. Anderson to his wife Milla to get her off the film sequel treadmill she's been trapped on. To that end, a solid B+, for a solid B Movie!

B+

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)

Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Day Three: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Something I forgot to mention about the first Resident Evil film becomes increasingly relevant as the franchise plows along. Specifically: Milla Jovovich.* In many ways these films are like “action porn” for Milla fans. Indeed, by the time you get to the latest the films have to offer, it’s pretty obvious that the Resident Evil trappings are just there to frame the tale around the adventures of Alice, who of course is played by the best female action star to appear this century. The fact that her character takes center stage from the get-go, and all other characters, including the ones named after characters from the games, are there to serve as a frame and foil to her exploits becomes strongly evident with the second film and onward. She’s not quite a Mary Sue…yet….but she’s destined to be, if only for a short time.

Released in 2004, Resident Evil: Apocalypse starts the day after the last film ended, keeping pace (so far) with the chronology of the games (barring the 1998 date of the games vs. the “not too distant future” implied date of the films). A bit of back story reveals that not all is well in Raccoon City, and introduces us to Jill Valentine, or a version of such modeled after the actual Jill from the game universe. This Jill dresses similarly and is quick to shoot zombies as they pop up in the police precinct where she has just been drummed out of service with the STARS (Special tactics and Recon Squad) on trumped up charges. STARS are a sort of SWAT group for the Raccoon City set, and it’s never clear in the movie universe if they are some local independent group or some sort of special deal set up with Umbrella’s approval. In the game universe it’s sort of unclear, too. Almost as if the game were written by Japanese authors with only a loose notion of how US law enforcement worked, or a concern with how to justify why half a dozen heavily armed special ops agents are investigating what seems to be a private mansion conducting modest bioresearch in the middle of nowhere.

The movie then proceeds to break down rapidly in terms of pacing, over-the-top action and an utterly implacable plot with herky-jerky pacing that feels like someone writing the script was trying to squeeze as many elements of the game in as had been explained to them by a third party who had talked to someone who had a son who had played it and explained the plot. Sort of.

All of the story credits on the Resident Evil movies go to Paul W.S. Anderson, who has a list of credits that include a variety of films I’ve never seen, with the noted exception of these movies plus the Death Race film (which was fun but also nonsensical).  He also wrote Pandorum, which means much to me as I plan on watching and reviewing it soon, too. In any case, if I had to guess, I would say that Paul probably didn’t play the RE games before working on his scripts. And if he did, he was probably hampered by two factors: the first being how to translate the game plot to screen, the second by the fact that I’m pretty sure someone behind this movie had the hots for Milla Jovovich. I wonder who. Hmmm. The fact that Paul happens to be her husband makes me a tad suspicious. Also, a tad jealous. (To my lovely wife if you are reading this I mean that in the least offensive way possible!)

Yeah so anyway, keeping in mind that this entire franchise has been co-opted for films to serve as a churning engine of Milla Jovovich action flicks helps to frame what happens from here on out to the series. This is very important, because this is the film that jumps the shark, and it does so by making Milla’s character Alice a super hero. A horror super hero, yeah, but dress it up however you want: she can do super kung-fu, wire-fu, and before the end of the movie she’s even pulling a note from Akira and F.E.A.R. by giving people psionic nose bleeds and “hearing” thoughts occasionally. Oh, and she has this all thanks to being genetically ideal for bonding with the t-virus, making her a compatriot to the Nemesis himself. Yeahhhh…

Still, this movie has moments that work when its characters aren’t being too ridiculously clichéd or one-note for their own good. The best part of the movie was when they were looking for the little girl in the school. The second best part….hmm. Well, okay then. So that was the part that felt most like Resident Evil.

The end sequence was fun, too, if head-scratching. It was also a continuance of the tradition started at the end of the first movie, where the story runs past “stop” and carries on with the frame for the next movie installment.

In the end, this movie is about an event which begins with the tale presented in a game and then rapidly spirals into utter oblivion, ending as a completely new franchise about a psychic super warrior named Alice who just so happens to have some coincidental relations with another universe that it left almost completely behind.

If I had to rank it, I’d give it a D+. The D is for managing to take what could have been a much, much better “zombies invade rural America” film that has been done so much better so many other times, and instead making it kind of a crazy, outlandish wire-fu action hero flick with barely a nod to its source material. That’s okay, though. Later films will make this one look downright canonical and respectful of the IP.

Oh, and the Mary Sue? She's not quite there....yet. But she will be. Oh yes, she will be...

Next up: Resident Evil – Extinction Review

*You can see Milla go from "healthy" to "emaciated" between the first and second movie, too. Kinda scary. Her semi-naked shower scene in the first movie has her looking somewhat healthy and normal, but by the end of Apocalypse she looks like she's on a starvation diet. The ease with which Milla does nude and semi-nude scenes means its possible to notice stuff like this. Purely from a clinical perspective, of course. The clinical perspective being, "you need to eat a bit more before you disappear."

The Final Resident Evil 6 Review: The Ada Wong Campaign

It has at last come to this. After three other reviews, along with a re-evaluation of the original review of the Leon Kennedy campaign when Capcom graciously patched the game in with a "casual" mode (read: mode for guys over age 35 with nominal reflexes) I have at last gotten around to finishing the final campaign in Resident Evil 6: the unlockable Ada Wong campaign.

Disclosure: This version is based on the PC edition, single player mode, with Casual on to make it a pleasant experience rather than a gruelling nightmare of hate and bile. There will be spoilers, too. This campaign is the one that ties the other three together, cleans up the plot holes and in fact makes the entire storyline make sense.

Ada Wong has been with the RE universe since Resident evil 2 when she was engaging in some industrial espionage, trying to steal the G virus. As it turns out, the whole reason for RE6's events boil down to two factors: a madman Mr. Simmons in charge of Homeland Defense who decides to manufacture bioweapons to keep his job viable, and one of those bioweapons turning on him: Carla, the C-Virus created clone of Ada Wong who, it turns out, spends much of the game sowing havoc and confusion for the other lead characters.

Ada Wong is brought into the fray when Simmons apparently decides to brag about what he's done, and perhaps get Ada to dispatch the rogue Carla for him. Ada begins piecing together the torrid puzzle of deceit, treachery and betrayal as she weaves through her own story bits as well as the portions of the other campaigns, interacting with all the major protagonists along the way. She's conveniently wearing a tight red and black suit, so if you play the other campaigns and notice that Ada shows up in either a purple blouse or a red blouse then you know which one (Carla-Ada-clone or real Ada) is onscreen at the moment.

Without giving too much away, Ada helps everyone out while tracking down her clone, then escapes her clone after Carla overdoses on C-Virus, then she helps put Simmons down and at last finds Carla's secret labs where she started the chaos and wipes it out. The journey (on easy mode) is actually quite fun. The most interesting part of the experience for me was seeing how Ada gets around when everyone else in the game is trudging along the hard way, one street or building infested with BOWs (bio-organic weapons) at a time. Ada uses the startlingly effective grappling hook to grab onto situationally specific key spots and keep her pace measured and overhead most of the time. She spends a lot of time up in the rafters snipe assisting Leon, or maybe in a helicopter (one of the few pleasant in-vehicle experiences in the game).

The campaign, despite revisiting many spots where she appeared in other tales of RE6 does not feel stale or rehashed; it's got its own pace and rhythm, and Ada's style carries through well. Ada actually gets to stop and deal with the occasional puzzle, something sorely missing from the other campaigns. The game does suffer a bit in that, like the rest of RE6, it's ultimately a structured linear corridor shooter heavily disguised to look like something else; you do have a few hub spots where you get some freedom of movement, but the game's linearity is still the underpinning of the design.

There are many other ways that RE6 could have been designed, and I hope that RE7 takes this into consideration. It is a fun game, and it does far better that Resident Evil 5 (imo) at evoking survival horror, but it also is a long way from the original premise and style of Resident Evil, something that is perfectly attainable in today's game design as demonstrated by Resident Evil: Revelations.

As a side note, I've played a fair amount of the multiplayer game options, and they are fun. Not "you have got to play this" sort of fun, but "I like RE and this scratched an odd little itch" kind of fun. If you have a choice of editions to play go for the PC Steam version, since it adds the Left4Dead 2 crew and monsters to the multiplayer.

It's been more than a year since RE6 was released, and I've played it in fits and spurts over that period. My initial foray into the game was excitement mixed with disappointment and irritation, but with the patches adding in casual mode, a way to pause, and cleaning up some odd bits, followed by the PC version (the superior version to play) it made the game worthwhile for RE fans. Given that you can find it for $20 or less now, it's hard not to recommend the game to those looking for something with a lot of cinematic action and a little homage to survival horror mixed in.

That said, I really think Capcom needs to think carefully about what the next iteration of the franchise is going to look like. There's a lot of competition out there, from Outlast to Slenderman and State of Decay, and Resident Evil can still pull off real Survival Horror in its own unique way without compromising its overall identity. RE6's greatest current competition is it's own sister title, RE: Revelations, and RE7 needs to be built with that in mind.

A-