Tag: zombie movie

Resident Evil: Extinction

Reviews

I actually saw Resident Evil: Extinction weekend before last, but I figured I’d dig out my thoughts on it for a Zombie Wednesday post. There are going to be spoilers. You have been warned.

I loved the first Resident Evil film. I’ve never played any of the games, so I went into it with just the expectation of a zombie movie, and it delivered. The only mild disappointment I might have had with it was the open ending and the not-quite-zombie monsters at the tail of the film. The second movie was more of the same, until they introduced the boss mob. That was silly. But hey, it didn’t totally suck.

The third movie, well, I was hoping for the end of a trilogy. It even seemed like it was going that direction. The world is infected by the T-Virus, dried up. If people stay in one place too long, the zombies will find them, so they stay on the move, driving around the desert in a caravan. Meanwhile, Umbrella is still around and is actually searching for a cure, sort of, and they happen to be in the desert too. Alice is still running around trying to save the people she can, and Umbrella needs Alice to manufacture the cure.

There are some really cool scenes of the caravan and of Alice as they move through this dead world. Stuff happens, people die, things go wrong… the usual. But then the movie takes a left turn. See, there is this scientist who has been using clones of Alice in place of Alice, and its not working out well. So he decides to go after Alice, but only after he creates some super zombies to fight her. The doctor ends up getting bit by a super zombie, and instead of turning into a zombie or even a super zombie he turns into a boss mob with tentacles and other weird shit (I’m told it is Tyrant from the game). Its lame. And then Alice wins, and she tells all the other hidden Umbrella labs that she’s coming to get them, her and her army… of Alice clones.

There are rumors and allegations going around that they are working on a Resident Evil 4, and as much as I now dread it, I hate movies with giant gaping open endings. Leave a couple loose ends untied? Sure. But the end of this movie was just too much. They need an RE4, if for no other reason than to put an ending stamp on it.

Dawn of the Dead

Reviews

I love zombie movies. Ever since I saw the original Night of the Living Dead, I’ve just always liked them. One main reason is that within the span of the movie, a good zombie movie remains internally consistant, and its not hard to be a good zombie movie. Do your zombies run or walk? Are they capable of any speed movements or are they always slow? Do the only attack humans or anything that lives? Is the whole body reanimated or is it just the brain keeping it going? Is anyone who dies capable of being a zombie or do they have to be bitten by one?

Answer those questions, stick to them, and you can have a good zombie flick.

When I went to go see Dawn of the Dead this weekend, I knew alot of what to expect. I had seen the original (though not recently), and knew it was about a bunch of people who wind up in a mall while the world outside spirals into zombie hell.

It was good in that it was scary. It was good in that is was consistant. It was good in that it had funny moments to break the tension, and calm you down as a viewer.

But I didn’t love the movie…

Now, before I continue, let me get something out of the way:

** SPOILER – DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE MOVIE, INCLUDING HOW IT ENDS – SPOILER **

Okay, now that everyone has been warned, let me talk about why I didn’t love the movie.

Night of the Living Dead is a cornerstone of the zombie genre. At the end, everyone from the house, the story you’ve been watching is dead… but, the human race is winning. Zombies are getting under control and the bodies are being burned. In a way, it has a very War of the Worlds feel to it. We are on the bring of destruction, but as dawn arrives, we start winning.

Return of the Living Dead (and its sequals) are the flip side of the genre. They are pure camp. The zombie say funny things, do funny things. People die in funny ways. There are two actors who are in every movie (they play different people and die in every one of them). And the movies end with total destruction. In fact, more than one I believe ends with us (the Army) nuking the infected town only to further spread the infection in the form of contaminated rain.

The original Dawn of the Dead ends when the people from the mall decide to make a break for the harbor, where they plan to get on a boat and sail off to an uninhabited island or somesuch. The movie literally ends with a shot of the boat sailing away, abandoning the main land. In this end, its similar to both Night and Return… We (the humans) have lost, and have turned over the main land to the undead, but there is also hope because we are sailing to a safe place.

The new Dawn of the Dead ends in the same way. I could feel in myself, and in the sigh of relief in Jodi, and the other members of the audience, a sence of relaxing, and sadness, but also of hope as the boat sails away. Like the original, we lost, but we survived. However, as the credits rolled, snippets of film continued in the form of seconds here and there on a video camera found on the boat. Food on the boat, which had been idle for weeks, is covered in maggots. They run out of gas. The engine catches fire. They find a row boat with a cooler, and in the cooler an undead head (funny, but… ). Snippets, until they pull up to shore at the island. The dog is barking, and runs off. They have guns out and start to move down the dock. Then dozens of undead rush the boat and camera, which drops to the ground and you keep seeing snippets of undead running by, screams, and death. The movie finally ends with total destruction… we lost, and we didn’t survive, and it wasn’t funny enough to laugh it off.

In the end, the new Dawn of the Dead leaves you without hope, and not enough to smile about.

Is it worth seeing? I would say yes, but just make sure you leave when the credits begin to roll.