The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sci-Fi In July Edition: Resident Evil (2002)

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I stopped playing video games after things advanced past the Super Nintendo System. Partially, this was because I’d gone to college and found more interesting things to take up my time. Partially, this was because I was now college-aged and expected to purchase things like gaming systems myself, and I had other things to spend my money on. But also, my friend had a Nintendo 64, and when I’d play games on it like GoldenEye, I found I got nauseated.

My brother had a PlayStation, and I believe he owned the first Resident Evil game. I remember playing it a time or two, but it never hooked me in. So when the movie came out, I was none too interested.

I thought I had watched it sometime previously to tonight, but I’ve not logged it in Letterboxd nor rated it on IMDB. Watching it, I found that I had no real memory of it. The opening scene did seem a little familiar, and I definitely knew about a scene where a laser beam cuts some soldiers into pieces. But maybe I saw that in a trailer, or some other clip. Or maybe I started the movie, got halfway through, and decided it was too stupid to finish. I dunno. As I get older, my memory of what I’ve seen and haven’t seen diminishes, and I’m left scratching my head over certain films.

Obviously, none of this matters to anyone, but this is my blog, and I can ramble if I want to.

But on to the actual film. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked and alone in a shower. She seems to have fallen, pulling the shower curtain down with her (to strategically cover up her naked parts, yet reveal enough to get the horny boys most likely to see this movie all excited). She seems to have lost all memory of who she is and what she’s doing there. She sees a picture of herself with a man. They are dressed as if it is their wedding day. She notices a wedding ring on her finger.

Suddenly, a strange man tackles her just as a group of commandos busts into the mansion. The commandos have no time to explain, but take Alice and the man with them to an underground train. There, they find Spence (James Purefoy), the man in that wedding photo, who also says he has amnesia.

Riding the train deeper underground, the commando boss, James Shade (Colin Salmon), explains that they are entering The Hive, a top-secret genetic research facility owned by The Umbrella Corporation. Earlier that day, The Hive’s supercomputer, also known as The Red Queen, mysteriously killed all the people inside The Hive. The Commandos are there to find out why. Alice and Spence are employees of The Umbrella Corporation, tasked to guard the entrance of The Hive, and were only pretending to be married as some sort of cover.

For the first half of the film, our heroes do battle with The Red Queen. It is still on guard and has set deadly traps for anyone trying to get in. That’s where those laser beams come in, plus various other murderous traps.

Once they turn the computer off, they realize the reason it went haywire is that the T-Virus was unleashed, and The Hive had to be shut down lest it contaminate the outside world. The T-Virus turns humans into zombies.

Also, the crazy scientists in The Hive were experimenting with the T-Virus on various creatures, creating super monsters. The rest of our film finds our heroes battling them.

Paul W.S. Anderson directs (I seem to be having an Anderson weekend). Like all of his films that I’ve seen, he does a good enough job directing that I don’t hate what I’m watching, but a poor enough job to make me wonder why I kept with it. He’s competent enough to keep things interesting, but not enough of an artist to ever make me seek him out. Someone should tell him to lay off the CGI, though. It looks bad in all his films, but here especially, since most of the monsters are CGI and they are laughably bad.

He’s helped here by a script that kept the action coming at a steady pace. Jovovich is quite good as the lead; she’s starred in all of the Resident Evil films, and I imagine this is what she will be remembered for. She’s got quite a presence. As does Michelle Rodriguez as one of the commandos. This was just her fourth film, but she completely owns it. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, ranging from pretty good to fairly terrible.

This is a film where, if I have actually seen it before, I can totally understand how I’d forgotten it. It isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly memorable. It is, however, just good enough to make me want to watch the sequel. Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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28 Days Later was one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote for this blog. With the new legacy sequel, 28 Years later, coming out this weekend, I thought it would be fun to revisit the first film and its original sequel 28 Weeks Later.

I find I mostly still agree with my original review of the first film. I like the first half better than the second, but my opinion of the second half improved a little, and my thoughts on the first half declined. I think I appreciate what it was trying to do with the military stuff more, and the zombie stuff no longer feels all that fresh or original.

My memory says I hated the sequel, but I rated it 3.5 stars out of 5, so I guess my feelings were mixed. I didn’t write a review of it, so I don’t have the details of those feelings written down for posterity.

This time around, I mostly liked it.

It begins with completely different characters from those who were in the first film. We find a group of people huddled inside a small but rather fortified cabin, hiding from the zombies. This includes Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The zombies attack, and at first, Don plays the hero, fighting back the zombies while everyone else runs.

But then he runs and ultimately finds himself separated from his wife and a small child. The zombies attack them, and instead of fighting, he runs. We see him fleeing the house while his wife pounds on the window, presumably about to get eaten.

The film spends a lot of time painting that action as completely cowardly and Don as a horrible person. He is completely grief-stricken. The thing is, I kind of found myself on his side. It was a horrible situation, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could have done to save her.

Movies teach us that everybody should always risk their lives to save others, and while that is a noble sentiment, it is also perfectly human to be scared out of your mind in these types of situations, and not always be the hero.

I’m going to avoid spoilers, but something happens to rub that guilt in, and then it totally doesn’t matter because the film takes a different turn.

Anyway, flash forward to 28 weeks later, and the zombies have all died out. They apparently never escaped England, and all the humans either were bitten or escaped. The zombies eventually died of starvation.

Now they are trying to repopulate the country. NATO forces (led by Americans) have set up a fortified camp on the Isle of Dogs, an isolated peninsula near London. Don’s children, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) have just arrived, where they are reunited with Don.

There is some interesting subtext about Americans and militarization. They act like they have complete control of the situation, full of bluster and ego, and then everything goes haywire, and they are mostly completely useless to stop it.

The film takes its time before the zombies come back, but once they do, things kick into high gear. There are several terrific set pieces that I enjoyed a lot more than the original film. 28 Days Later used a lot of handheld camera work, and I often got lost in what was happening to whom, but here the action is much better balanced.

There is a lot of nonsense in where the plot goes, and so many characters make so many dumb decisions, it is hard to take it seriously, but if you can set that sort of thing aside, this makes for a good little zombie sequel. It helps that the cast is completely stacked. Besides those already mentioned, we’ve got Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Harold Perrineau as soldiers and Rose Byrne as a military doctor.

31 Days of Horror: Day of the Dead (1985)

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George A. Romero didn’t invent the zombie movie with Night of the Living Dead, but he certainly popularized it and solidified the tropes of the genre. I remember watching it when I was just a kid – maybe 13 or 14 years old – and absolutely loving it. I didn’t even mind that it was in black and white, something I usually hated at the time. It was one of the first films that made me realize that movies could be more than just mindless entertainment. They could be art. They could make you think.

I didn’t see the other two films that made up Romero’s original zombie trilogy until years later. I first watched Dawn of the Dead in a large theater in Strasbourg, France. It was dubbed in French and I don’t speak the language. I missed a lot of the nuance of that film in that first viewing but I still loved it.

I don’t remember when I first watched Day of the Dead, but I remember being disappointed with it. I suppose that’s only natural as Night of the Living Dead was so formative in my cinematic development, and that viewing of Dawn of the Dead was so wild, whatever other reasons there were I’ve long since forgotten but I haven’t watched the film since.

It is streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their visual effects in horror series and I decided to give it another go. I’m glad I did as I quite loved it on this viewing.

Like the first two films in this loosely connected series Dawn of the Dead drops our characters into an isolated, static setting and surrounds them with zombies. Once again two factions form within this setting and they two debate, and scream at each other over what’s the best way to come out alive.

The setting is a World War II-era, underground Army base. The two factions are scientists who want to find a cure for zombie-ism or at least figure a way to make them less brain-hungry, and a bunch of military dudes who just want to blow the zombies away. Trouble is they are vastly outnumbered and limited in ammo.

As always Romero’s view of humanity is bleak. We are the true monsters in these scenarios. To drive that point home one of the scientists, mockingly called “Frankenstein” (a name that isn’t too far off for as we will see, he’s gone a bit mad) has trained a zombie to realize some basics of its humanity. He seems to remember how to use a razor and seems to enjoy music. In doing so it has become less brain-hungry. Meanwhile, the Army dudes just want to blow it up. They also regularly threaten to kill the scientists if they don’t obey orders. In a wonderful bit of irony, one of the army dudes is later killed by the trained zombie in the same place they chained him up.

The underground setting creates a wonderfully claustrophobic environment, while still giving the characters plenty of places to run and hide. It is a great set design as it feels very much carved into the depths of the Earth. Some walls are made of concrete blocks, others have been left as solid rock. The deeper they go the more cavernous it is.

Romero creates a wonderful sense of mood and tension. We can almost smell the desperation of these characters. And he’s expanded his ideas on what it means to be living in a zombie apocalypse. In the previous films, there was a sense that things were somewhat under control. That the zombie outbreaks were isolated. Sure these particular characters were screwed, but maybe no humanity. Here, these people may be all that’s left.

The script could be a little tighter, especially the dialogue, and the acting leaves a little to be desired. There are a lot of scenes where everybody is just shouting at each other and it is exhausting. But overall it is a thrilling bit of cinema.

And those gore effects by Tom Savini are some of the best there’s ever been. My favorite is when one character has his head pulled off, as his larynx is stretched his scream gets pitched higher and higher.

Sci-Fi In July : The Girl With All the Gifts (2016)

A young girl sits counting in her cell. Suddenly an alarm sounds and the lights come on. Armed soldiers come calling. Though she can walk she sits down in a wheelchair. The soldiers strap her arms and legs down and her head so she cannot turn it. She is wheeled into a classroom with numerous other children likewise strapped to wheelchairs.

Soldiers look in on the classroom calling the kids names like “freaks” and “abortions.” Their teacher, Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) is the only adult who is kind to them. In a moment of grace, she touches the girl’s head. Immediately, the soldiers, led by Sergeant Parks (Paddy Considine) come in and chastise Helen for touching a student. He then spits on his hand and pushes it under one of the children’s nose.

Immediately, the kids go feral, writing in their wheelchairs and attempting to bite the soldiers. They are zombies. Or more correctly, they are zombie hybrids. They will attack with fury when they smell humans, but can also talk and think like normal people.

They may also be the key to a cure. The zombies in this film were caused by some sort of fungus that grows inside the brain. These kids were In Utero when the virus first came about (the film occurs some ten years after the beginning of the apocalypse). They absorbed the virus when their mothers got it which may have caused them to be…well not immune as they are definitely hungry for human flesh, but special. The scientists, led by Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) think this specialness may lead them to a cure.

I feel like I’m getting bogged down in the plot, but really what I’ve just described happens in the first ten minutes or so. But it is such an interesting setup for a zombie movie I wanted to dig into it a bit.

All of that occurs at a well-guarded military base, but just after those events, it is attacked by hundreds of zombies and overcome. Our heroes narrowly escape and the rest of the film finds them traveling into London in hopes of rescue.

That girl I mentioned is named Melanie (Sennia Nanua), she is smart chatty, inquisitive, and kind. In the time we spend with her on the base, she always says hello to the military people even when they are cruel to her. She always asked a lot of questions and was the top student in her class. This both endears her to her capturers and ingratiates them.

The look and feel of the film has a lot in common with the recent television series The Last of Us (the series came out in 2023 but was based on a game from 2014 game – the book this film was based on also came out in 2014 so I’ll let you be the judge of who created this look first). The landscapes are overgrown with vegetation while the city buildings and infrastructure are beginning to collapse. This creates a beautiful yet eery look to everything.

The plot is your basic quest scenario but it is well done. This type of movie often will involve a child but they are usually just there to add a sense of danger. Melanie is something different. Because she is a zombie the other do not sense her as food. She is safe from them. But when she gets hungry she is a force of danger. Yet she is also the human’s only hope. That makes the plot more interesting than your standard zombie fare.

This all worked for me quite well. I dug the the look of the film, the action scenarios, and all of the characters. If you like zombie films I highly recommend this one. It also has a fantastic ending.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night of the Comet (1984)

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While working on my list of movies I wanted to watch during the Awesome ’80s in April I headed over to Letterboxd, turned on their giant list of all films, filtered out everything but movies made in the 1980s, sorted it by highest rated, and systematically made my way through the entire list. I was looking for movies I had never seen, but had always wanted to watch. Or movies I’d never heard of but that looked interesting (one of the cool things about Letterboxd is that it lets you see how your friends rated any film, and read any reviews they might have written).

Night of the Comet falls into the latter category. I’d never heard of it before, but it was rated pretty highly by people whose thoughts on movies I respect and the plot sounded interesting.

Honestly, even after all of that, I expected something much cheesier. The plot synopsis sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Night of the Living Dead at the end of the world. But what I got was something more thoughtful, and well-made than that synopsis makes you expect.

An opening salvo tells us that a huge comet will be passing by Earth for the first time in millions of years. Everybody is excited. Parties are being held outside to watch the comet pass. The whole world is outside watching. The whole world except for Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Larry (Michael Bowen). They work at a movie theater and Larry has convinced Reggie to help him rent out a reel to some guys who will illegally duplicate it. Reggie really wants to see the comet pass by, but Larry is willing to pay her a whole $15 bucks and that’s hard to turn down.

They wind up spending the night in the steel-lined projection booth. The next morning they wake up to find that the comet has turned everybody (well, almost everybody) into red dust. A few people did survive but they seem to have been turned into brain-eating zombies. Larry meets his end pretty quickly and Reggie returns home to find her sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) is still alive. Turns out that after an argument with her mother Sam slept in the steel-lined shed.

Together, they do what any red-blooded American teenager would do after a zombie apocalypse – they head to the mall. Actually, they head to the radio station first because a DJ’s voice can be heard playing records and they figure finding another human alive would be a good thing. The DJ is actually just a recording on a tape, but they do discover Hector (Robert Beltran) at the radio station. Hector almost immediately leaves the girls as he needs to find out if his mother is still alive (he’ll come back to the movie a little later). That’s when the girls go to the mall.

There are some scientists types who survived by hiding in an underground bunker. They must now try to rebuild humanity and that begins by running tests of the few other humans who survived to see if there is a chance at finding a vaccine to counteract the effects of the cosmic rays.

Night of the Comet does a great job of blending comedy with horror and thriller elements. The Buffy mixed with Night of the Living Dead elements I mentioned at the beginning of this post are more apt than I thought. Although it is more like Dawn of the Dead since a great portion of the movie is spent inside a mall. But it is a much better film than that synopsis might indicate. It was made on a tiny budget, but they put every dollar they had to good use. It is funny and thrilling, and has a nice sense of what it’s trying to do.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

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George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) was a huge international success. It made over $1 million in Italy alone. In 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel, Zombi 2 (Dawn was titled Zombi in Italy). It was quite successful as well and for the next few years, the Italians began churning out one zombie film after another.

In 1980 Bruno Mattei got into the game with Hell of the Living Dead, aka Virus, aka Night of the Zombies, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, aka half a dozen other things. It is, well it is a mess, but kind of a glorious, ridiculous, god-awful mess. It’s also a lot of fun in a late-night weekend kind of way.

The plot, such as it is, involves a research facility in Papua New Guinea that accidentally releases an experimental gas called “Operation Sweet Death” which turns the recently deceased into flesh-eating monsters.

The government sends in an elite SWAT team to take care of business. Along the way they run into two reporters and together, they make their way through the jungle, battling hordes of monsters, to the research facility to…well it’s never exactly clear what their ultimate goal is, but there sure takes a lot of gore-filled violence to get there.

Most of the plot makes very little sense. The dubbed dialogue is hilariously bad, and the acting is atrocious. There is a ton of very obvious stock footage of animals and natives thrown in to boost the run time. The score is by the very excellent band Goblin, but all of it is recycled from various other films.

The characters make ridiculous decisions after ridiculous decisions. Though early on they figure out the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head, they constantly shoot them everywhere but the brain pan. One guy liked to taunt them and dance around them for some reason. Whenever a zombie attacks the other characters literally just stand there for the longest time watching them eat their friends until finally decide to act. Etc,. etc.

I’ve seen a lot of bad horror movies. I’ve seen a lot of bad zombie movies. This is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen. And yet, under the right circumstance, in the right mood this film kind of works.

28 Days Later (2002)

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The zombies are fast.

It’s true that in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later the crazed, flesh-eating villains aren’t technically zombies. In fact, Boyle has gone to great lengths to qualify them as humans infected with a virus known as RAGE. Yet, to this reviewer at least, the differences seem moot. In traditional zombie pictures, and in this film the creatures are mindless, they carry a real zeal for human flesh, they have a predilection for turning everyone else into their like, and they are fairly easy to kill. Whether the creatures are the living dead so to speak, or infected by an incurable virus doesn’t make much of a difference. Though the zombies here, seem updated from their cinematic ancestors.

These zombies are fast.

Traditional zombies are a slow-moving lot. Having been rotting in their own graves for untold years, their reanimated flesh is a little atrophied, causing them to move at a slow, sluggish pace. This has always been a helpful plot point for the heroes in zombie films, for they are easy to run away from. In fact, zombies are generally able to kill their victims through sheer numbers. Individually they are easy to destroy, but as an oncoming onslaught, the sheer numbers win every time. Boyle circumvented this convenience by allowing his monsters to run at normal human speeds. It is an excellent update to the genre, giving the ability for more scares.

Man, I dug the first half of this movie. Well, except for the very, very beginning. The opening scene gives us the origin of RAGE, with a bunch of Clockwork Orange-inspired monkeys. I’ve never really dug origin scenes in zombie flicks. I think it’s much scarier to just have the zombies running around eating brains, without any reason for their existence. Origins, generally, just seem dumb. And here, with the infected monkeys being freed by some Green Peace types doesn’t really inspire any other feelings. Though, I suspect it was another move to plant this film outside the zombie track.

But after the scene of the dumb origin, things get really good. We’ve got a naked guy named Jim (Cillian Murphy) hooked up to various tubes in a hospital bed. I always like it when there is a bit of male nudity in a flick since there is always so much of the female variety. Anyways, Jim gets out of bed and wanders the streets of London. There are plenty of shots of Jim (fully clothed now) walking by big famous London monuments without another soul around. It seems London has been vacated. It is creepy and effective.

In a bit, Jim clamors into a church figuring to find some sanctuary, or at least have a few questions answered. What he finds is a bunch of dead folks piled up. In a good holy crap moment, Jim says, “Hello” to find a couple of the dead guys not so dead and jumping up. From there until the second half of the film, it is a constant run from the zombies.

The zombies really work in this film. They are fast, furious, and vicious. Jim eventually teams up with some other survivors and they set about trying to figure out what to do. Boyle really does a great job of adding tension to the film and keeping the scares up.

Then the film changes.

The group is rescued by a gang of all-male military types, living in a compound. Turns out the military types are a bunch of psychos and the film turns from being a zombie flick into being a stranded-in-a-compound-with-a-bunch-of-psycho-military-types kind of film. To make sure we know this is no longer a zombie flick, a big group of zombies launches an attack on the compound only to be massacred with machine guns and land mines.

In this half of the film, I don’t dig nearly as much. Zombie flicks always have trouble filling out their whole hour-and-a-half time slot. Even with a good introduction of characters, and a slow build to zombie free-for-all, there is still plenty of filler time. Here, the filmmakers seem to have decided that they might as well dump the zombies and give us some other tension-filled concoction. But, there isn’t really enough time to develop the military end of the story and it feels wrong.

It’s too bad too because that first half was really promising.