[31 Days of Horror Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan] Day 8 – Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

Director: Russell Mulcahy
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Ashanti, Mike Epps, Christopher Egan, Spencer Locke, Jason O’Mara
Screenplay: Paul W.S. Anderson
94 mins. Rated R for strong horror violence throughout and some nudity.

There are a lot of elements in the third Resident Evil film that convinced 17-year-old me this one was going to absolutely rule. It was directed by Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, In Like Flynn), its trailer appeared to have similarities with my favorite Romero Living Dead film, Day of the Dead, and with the new character introductions, it seemed like it might be honing in on more of what the fans of the games wanted. Sure, what we got wasn’t really like what I had gleaned from the trailers, but let’s be clear: this movie is entertaining as hell through all of its many faults.

It’s been five years since the events at Raccoon City left most of the world devastated by the T-Virus. Alice (Milla Jovovich, The Fifth Element, Monster Hunter), on her own for some time, finds herself taken in by a convoy including some old friends: Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr, The Mummy Returns, Lair) and L.J. (Mike Epps, Friday After Next, The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2). The convoy is in search of shelter, and Alice shows them a book she discovered, claiming to have safe haven in Alaska, but they lack the gasoline to get them there. The convoy heads to Las Vegas to get supplies and gas, all the while Umbrella Corporation and the sinister Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, TV’s Reyka) plot to retrieve Project Alice and continue their research.

First of all, I have to be the one that says it: screen your movie. Resident Evil: Extinction was not screened for critics, but here’s the thing, we all were pretty confident critics would hate the movie anyway, and most of the time, critical reviews can really only influence about 10% of the box office take. When Malignant came out recently, and we were all discussing the lack of reviews, no Thursday night opening, and the assumption was that the studio didn’t believe in their product. The same is true here. Screen your movie.

As far as Resident Evil: Extinction goes, the entertainment value is a definite win. Sure, the movie itself has flaws in and out, but I was thoroughly entertained. I think that Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Extinction are the absolute best that this franchise will have to give, so if you aren’t won over at this point, this just may not be the movie series for you. Where it wins most is in the action. This is probably the best action of the series, and that is due to Russell Mulcahy’s handling of the set pieces. It’s obvious that he’s the most capable of the directors in this franchise because he has the best looking action, and it’s the most tense that the series gets. His choice to film in sunlight more often as opposed the coldness of the first film and the darkness of the second really give a more stunning visual flair that’s in line with the film’s comparisons to Day of the Dead and Mad Max. In particular, the crow scene is a new element taken from the mythology of the games that feels quite fresh and is handled well.

The returning actors, Jovovich, Fehr, and Epps are all putting forth some solid work, even if it feels odd that Jill Valentine and Angela Ashford are just gone from the narrative (with Sienna Guillory primed to return in the next installment). Their absense gives the film an Alien 3 vibe (something the franchise would probably want to avoid). All the same, I like their general chemistry and performances, but Paul W.S. Anderson’s script just doesn’t give them much to do. The big Alice moments of the film are either “She’s too powerful” or “She does nothing.” She can firebend at some points, and also, Umbrella can completely control her movements, but they’ve elected not to for the past five years. Carlos is mostly reactionary in the film, and L.J. goes from street-smart in Apocalypse to completely foolish in this installment, ultimately becoming a fairly stereotypical stock zombie movie character that we all hate now.

As far as new additions, I feel like Ali Larter (Final Destination, The Last Victim) was miscast as Claire Redfield and Ashanti (Coach Carter, A Christmas Winter Song) is just kind of bland as medic Betty. Spencer Locke (Insidious: The Last Key, Walk. Ride. Rodeo.) is given a nickname as character development, and Jason O’Mara (Batman: Hush, TV’s The Man in the High Castle) is just given very little to do as the first appearance of franchise villain Albert Wesker is concerned.

As mentioned above, you get some pretty iconic characters from the game series here, like Claire Redfield and Albert Wesker, and there’s also a newly-named scientist seemingly modeled after William Birkin with Dr. Isaacs. I guess, at this point, I wonder why they’re even introducing iconic characters if they aren’t going to use them. I’m all for creative license in adapting, especially where the video game to film adaptation is concerned, but Claire Redfield has nothing in common with her video game persona at all, and Albert Wesker ends up being very underutilized in the franchise starting here. As far as Dr. Isaacs is concerned, Iain Glen chews up the scenery quite well and has fun with the role, and because he isn’t named after William Birkin, it feels like game fans were willing to give him a pass as a character. Why didn’t they do that with everyone? It’s become obvious that we’ve strayed heavily from the video game franchise at this point, so why continue to under-deliver on legacy characters? I guess it’s worth noting that Anderson (who scripted every installment of this franchise) did care about fan reaction, but he didn’t do a great job of taking that criticism.

Alongside that, it needs to be stated that this film is the one you can look back on and realize that there was no plan for this movie series. Why is the Red Queen replaced in this film with the White Queen, and then why do we never see the White Queen again? Why does the finale of this film have a trilogy-ending set piece meant to take us “back to the beginning” of the series? I remember the idea going in was that this movie was likely to be the ending of the movies, and this film gives us that sense that we are going back to where it started to finish it, but then it ends on another cliffhanger (something that becomes more frustrating from this point on) and, looking back, this feels like an ending that was retconned into not ending, and even the final installment of the series, titled The Last Chapter, hits the same kind of story beats as this one, going back to the very beginning all over again.

Resident Evil: Extinction looks great, and the action is tense and exciting, but this is a hodgepodge of Resident Evil mythology, a Greatest Hits in some ways, hobbled together and retrofitted to kind of showcase a general knowledge of the video games. It’s full of ideas, but it’s also full of frustrating characters doing stupid things and being punished for it, and while the movie still has a solid amount of entertainment, it’s unlikely that this film will win over video game fans, and the franchise should be moving forward with its own thing and stop trying to be the games.

3/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, click here.
For my review of Alexander Witt’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse, click here.

For my review of Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, click here.

October 8, 2021 1

[31 Days of Horror Part VI: Jason Lives] Day 29 – [Happy 20th Birthday!] House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Director: William Malone

Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, Bridgette Wilson, Peter Gallagher, Chris Kattan

Screenplay: Dick Beebe

93 mins. Rated R for horror violence and gore, sexual images and language.

I heard that House on Haunted Hill is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and I absolutely had to rewatch this film. The last time I interacted with this property was when I watched the sequel, Return to House on Haunted Hill, many years ago, so this was a perfect opportunity to revisit this 90s horror film.

Stephen Price (Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech, Final Portrait) is throwing his wife a hell of a birthday party by inviting some guests to the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, a now-closed former asylum where the patients revolted and murdered most of the staff sixty years earlier. The invites have gone out, and guests have started to arrive. There’s only one problem. All of the guests who arrive are people that neither Stephen nor his wife Evelyn (Famke Janssen, X-Men: The Last Stand, Asher) had invited. Stephen and Evelyn each suspect each other of a murder plot, but Stephen’s not going to let his plan go south, and he offers each of the guests a million dollars for staying the night in the house. Evelyn has plans of her own for the night, but the House on Haunted Hill has plans for all of them tonight.

Let me preface everything I’m about to say here. This is not a good movie. In fact, it’s a bad movie. Like many of Dark Castle’s films from the late 90s/early 00s, House on Haunted Hill is super-cheesy and super-silly and super-dumb. There’s a whole lot of bad surrounding this film including an upping-the-ante from the original film’s over-the-top premise. The Stephen-Evelyn dynamic is so excessive throughout. House on Haunted Hill is batshit.

It’s also so-bad-it’s-good in a lot of ways. It’s a bad movie that is so much fun to watch for some of its elements. Let’s talk about the bad stuff that surprisingly works. I love Stephen and Evelyn upon a rewatch. Seeing them both suspect each other of murder while also plotting the very same thing is a lot of fun. I believe that Geoffrey Rush knows exactly what kind of movie he’s in and he plays to it well. This is the strength of getting an actor like Rush to do horror. He gets the movie.

Chris Kattan (A Night at the Roxbury, TV’s Bunnicula) also kills it as Pritchard, the guy that is an exposition-machine/comic-relief for the film. He mixes his unhinged performance into the exposition and comedy and it’s just so crazy. He is perfectly cast in this film and becomes an equal to Rush’s Stephen Price.

I also like the idea of an all-consuming evil inhabiting the house is really cool. Some of the CG near the end of the film hasn’t aged well enough to work, but as a plot element, it’s still very fun. Many of the effects in the film still look pretty cool, especially how Dr. Vannacutt’s ghost doing that shaky-shaky effect, but the darkness effect is pretty bad.

So what doesn’t work in the film? Most of the remaining cast. Outside of Rush, Kattan, and Peter Gallagher (American Beauty, TV’s Grace and Frankie), no one in the film really know what film they’re in. We spend just as much time as possible with many of the other party guests, and the scenes they appear in go absolutely nowhere.

House on Haunted Hill is a movie that works despite all the bad things in the movie. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a good movie, but it’s bad works pretty well if you see it from a certain point of view. I would suggest it as a solid 90s B-horror film.

2.5/5

-Kyle A. Goethe

For more 31 Days of Horror, click here.

October 29, 2019 1

[31 Days of Horror 3] Day 30 – Final Destination 2 (2003)

Director: David R. Ellis

Cast: A.J. Cook, Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Michael Landes

Screenplay: J. Mackye Gruber, Eric Bress

90 mins. Rated R for strong violent/gruesome accidents, language, drug content and some nudity.

Sequels are tough. Sometimes tougher than the original. Especially when it’s the first sequel of a big franchise, which Final Destination ended up becoming.

Final Destination 2 begins on the first anniversary of the explosion of Flight 180. Kimberley Corman (A.J. Cook, TV’s Criminal Minds, Mother’s Day) and her friends are heading to Florida for Spring Break, but when she has a premonition of a major traffic collision, she inadvertently saves multiple lives. Now, though, she and the survivors are dying one by one, and the only person who can help her is the lone survivor of Flight 180: Clear Rivers (Ali Larter, TV’s Heroes, Resident Evil: Afterlife), who resides in a psychiatric ward where she can be safe.

Final Destination 2 makes the fatal error of breaking the rules of the first film multiple times and insinuating that there are ways to cheat death when it regularly breaks its own rules. Death’s motives and methods change drastically in the film. The decision to bring back Larter and series regular Tony Todd (The Man From Earth, Hatchet II) were good choices, but to play with a pre-established set of rules really messes with the series.

I personally didn’t like many of these characters who came off as caricatures of normal humans. Kimberley is a nice lead and Thomas Burke (Michael Landes, Burlesque, 11-11-11), the Deputy Marshal, is a nice male lead, but most everybody else is rude, unlikable, or generally cartoonish.

Final Destination 2 definitely ratchets up the body count and style of the first film in spectacular fashion, now if only we liked the characters enough. The screenplay from J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress (TV’s Kyle XY, The Butterfly Effect) gives us little in terms of character development other than interesting but fizzly Rube Goldberg-esque deaths.

FINAL DESTINATION 2, Keegan Connor Tracy, 2003, © New Line

Final Destination 2 is a fun movie, but one that is picked apart quite easily. This movie has straight-up flaws, and most of them could be fixed by just understanding and respecting the mythology. Director David R. Ellis (Shark Night, Snakes on a Plane) would return to helm the fourth entry of this franchise to similarly misunderstood results.

2.5/5

-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of James Wong’s Final Destination, click here.

October 30, 2016 3

31 Days of Horror: Day 29 – Final Destination (2000)

Director: James Wong

Cast: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Tony Todd

Screenplay: Glen Morgan, James Wong, Jeffrey Reddick

98 mins. Rated R for violence and terror, and for language.

Death comes to all of us. When it is your turn to die, it is your turn, and there is little that can be done about it. That’s the message we get from Final Destination, from director James Wong (The One, Dragonball: Evolution). The original idea for this film came from James Wong’s time as a writer on The X-Files. He envisioned the story as an episode from the wildly popular sci-fi television series. Unfortunately, the idea was scrapped several times and eventually was reformed into a feature film screenplay.

It tells the story of Flight 180 and its passenger Alex Browning (Devon Sawa, TV’s Nikita, Idle Hands). Alex has a premonition of the plane exploding upon takeoff, and forces himself and several other students from his field trip from the plane. The plane explodes and the seven survivors feel as though they just cheated death. They soon discover that you can’t cheat death for long, as the survivors are being picked off in the order they were supposed to die on the plane, but Alex starts seeing clues, and along with fellow student (Ali Larter, TV’s Legends, Resident Evil: Afterlife).

The original film in this series is the best one, though it is still riddled with multiple technical and artistic issues. These characters are just not very smart. Alex keeps searching out clues and getting himself deeper and deeper with law enforcement as he tries to stop these crimes. He grabs murder weapons and tracks DNA all over crime scenes. He sees signs that clues him into the next death, yet at one point, he sees a man burning leaves and then assumes that a house will blow up. I like the idea of a magazine getting shredded and his friend’s name comes up, but the fire is a bit much. Then there’s the cops who believe that Alex is somehow capable of committing these crimes, like somehow orchestrating a bus hitting someone when they are surrounded by witnesses that could attest to his innocence. We have a character who believes that if it is his time, he should kill everyone else with him. I get it, these are students and teenagers, so they still have some learning to do, but these are dumb teens.

I like the performance given by Tony Todd (The Man from Earth, Hatchet II) as coroner Bludworth. It doesn’t amount to much more of a cameo appearance, but it is a classic horror film trope of the warning of death and dark times to come, much like Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13^th. He practically yells “Doomed! You’re all doomed!”

Wong’s directing is really nothing special. His cinematography is disappointing. The film has nice pacing though and moves along with ease, not stopping long enough for most of these issues to take away from the enjoyment of the film.

I do really enjoy the clues that Alex and Clear do not see. I like that there are numerous noticeable clues in the film that foreshadow events soon to come, many of them are ones that aren’t even pointed out by our main characters. There is even the inclusion of John Denver songs at many of the Rube Goldberg style deaths. If you didn’t know, Denver died in a plane crash and his music works as a calling card in many ways, a warning like Bludworth’s. I know I didn’t listen to his music for a while after seeing this film.

I also like the score of the film. It stays with you long after the film ends. It won’t win any major awards, but as far as horror scores go, not bad.

So there you have it. Final Destination is far from perfect, but it is a lot of fun. I find that it still holds up now, 14 years later.

3/5

-Kyle A. Goethe

For more 31 Days of Horror, click here.

October 29, 2014 6