First off, this post has a theme song. Go here and download it first. You’ll want to listen to it before you go any further. Yes, it’s a legal download. Three cheers for Creative Commons!
Three movies in three days. I decided to wait and write one post about the three Resident Evil movies. After all, I wrote about each of the six Star Wars and each of the four Alien movies, but never did get to writing about what the whole thing meant.
These are zombie movies. Together, they make for some decent zombie movies. Do you like zombie movies? See all three of these close together.
These are not three versions of the same story. They are three very different stories, which is a real plus.
Resident Evil. Evil biowarfare development goes wrong with a thief tries a daring escape. The secret lab is contaminated, and the HAL9000 computer tries to control the spread by killing everyone. Two kinds of zombies — zombies, and these fancy face licker ones. At the end, our hero and her dorky sidekick are captured by the evil company, and they may or may not be infected.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Uh oh. Virus gets out into Raccoon City, above the secret lab. City is quarantined by the evil Umbrella Corporation, and set to be nuked. Our hero barely escapes, but we learn that she’s been genetically tampered with, to what end we don’t really know. Some more face lickers (and some more dobermans), but mostly just regular zombies. Oh, and dorky sidekick from first movie is back – and he’s giant, mutated, and has his face held together with industrial-strength staples. He dies, of course.
Resident Evil: Extinction. Not looking good, for the world or for our hero. Zombies of the world, unite! Zombies have taken over the world. Global warming, for some reason, has also happened. It turns out that our hero is in fact being cloned, and genetically tampered with — she’s robo-kung-fu-babe. Regular zombies, zombie crows and stuff, and one new big bad ass type of guy, who isn’t really a zombie because he’s actually been mutated by the anti-dote. An anti-zombie, maybe? Doesn’t matter – he dies. Oh, and she’s got crazy psychic powers now, too.
Nw, if you’ve been reading my crap for a while, you might remember that a) I’ve written about this movie before (here), and 3) I’ve seen a lot of zombie movies, from these to Hancock to Omega Man to the classic, Night of the Living Dead (which, BTW, is now free of copyright and available for download or available online, here). I’m no expert on zombie movies, but I’ve seen a few.
And I like these three. I like them more now that I’ve seen them back to back to back.
There are some things that every zombie movie needs.
1. It needs to be campy. Take, for example, the Special Tactics And Rescue Service. STARS. They’re SWAT. Well, maybe. They might just be police. Or mall security. It’s hard to tell. But they get an awesome name, and they’re called stars.
2. It needs a scene with the dead coming out of graves. Never mind that in these movies, a virus makes you a zombie, and you go right from alive and normal to being a zombie — there’s no dead period, no time when someone would say, “Hey, Tom’s dead, we’d better bury him.” Yes, there’s a rise-from-the-grave scene in this trilogy, and yes, it is that funny.
3. Yes, zombies move slow, and yes, a zombie movie absolutely has to have scenes with people being caught by these slow moving monsters. Really, to survive a zombie catastrophe you need open space in front of you and the ability to walk / run without tripping. If you’ve got that, you’re golden.
4. A guy in a red shirt. OK, you need the zombie equivalent of that, which is a minor character who gets infected, knows it, and tries to hide it, only to suddenly become a zombie and attack a / the main character, or another minor character at a critical moment. This is a must for every zombie movie. Better if it can happen a couple of times.
5 & 6. Hot chicks, a black leather boots. Oh, and 7. Guns. Lots of guns. And some knives. And things that explode.
There are two themes in these movies that I really like.
The first is Alice’s downward spiral. In the first movie, she seems to be just a happy go lucky woman. In a fake marriage but happy in sleeping with the guy, with a good job, and doing a pretty good job killing zombies. In the second movie, she’s not really sure what’s going on, but she’s been supercharged somehow. But by the third movie, she’s going through the whole self-identity thing, finding out that she’s not just her, she’s one of a thousand or so clones. Pretty interesting philosophical debate right there, if you ask me. What do you do when you find out that you’re not just a clone, but someone who was cloned to be a weapon for the very folks you hate the most? It’s very much like what Ripley went through in the Alien series.
The second is the whole Road Warrior thing. Starting in the second movie, Alice and others are begin their quests to get away. It wouldn’t be tough to argue that the caravan scene in the third movie is right out of the second Road Warrior movie, when they were trying to get away with their lives and the fuel. They do about as well, too. But it’s an interesting idea, that of being willing to abandon all to run from the past and in search of a new life somewhere, maybe in paradise. A bit like the Matrix movies, too.
There are things about zombie movies that always irk me. Yes, I am very critical, and yes, these things probably don’t bug other people.
When a zombie attacks, how does it know whether to kill and eat the victim, or just infect them? Is there some sort of tipping point, when zombies think to themselves, “OK, we have enough, we can just go about eating now”?
I understand that it’s a big philosophical topic, about why zombies don’t eat each other, but how come they’re not more skilled at working together? Sometimes they can take down a door or a window or something, but at other times they get caught up by things like…. a chain link fence? They’ve got super-human strength one moment and are ripping car doors off, and they next minute they’re shaking a chain link fence. I don’t get it.
These are good movies for Netflix, better if your library has them. Watch them in order, and eat popcorn. No need to pull your feet up on the couch with these movies. They’re good, but not too scary.
September 18th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I haven’t seen these, but speaking of campy horror movies, I’ve always liked Evil Dead.