O’Shloktoberfest is an autumn exploration of that rarest of substances: Decent Schlock. Each October I’ll wade through the sludge of 21st century horror so you don’t have to.
I think I should start this off with an open acknowledgment; Milla Jovovich is a great sport. Her obvious good looks aside, she has that Ukranian pluck that makes it tough to dislike her. She seems to be constantly in motion, typically crashing through walls and windows. I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate that Milla Jovovich is out there blasting the dogshit out of something or other, usually while looking terrific if not kinda stoned.
Milla’s earnestness in action roles elevates crap. She, her bandage suit, and her pumpkin-spice hair are what sold Fifth Element tickets in 1995, not the concept or the state-of-the-art effects. Gary Oldman’s weirdo space-Trump was fun, sure, but he hasn’t been a cosplay lolcow for nearly twenty years. And without Jovovich, Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet would have been certifiably unwatchable, instead of ocular poison.
Good grief, Milla can crank out Resident Evil movies with her husband Paul W.S. Anderson, the hack bastard who gave us the Alien vs. Predator series of turds. There are five Resident Evil films between 2002 and 2012, which even a dolt like me can see is a chapter every two years. That makes for some lean storytelling, meaning faithfulness to the game franchise falls by the wayside. It also took a few movies for Paul to get the Matrix bullet-time shit out of his system. By Retribution, the fifth installment and the subject of today’s bloviations, it was absent enough for me to get through the whole thing in one sitting.
The film opens with an operatic battle played in reverse, which is a nice effect. This also implies a reboot, which after the previous four movies was not only needed but inevitable. The scene ends, and Milla in her recurring role as “Alice” addresses the audience on a screen. She recaps the preceding movies, reminding me of all the stupid stuff that drove me away from the series; the annoying little “Red Queen” girl (there were insistent “Alice In Wonderland” allusions infesting the first one), the dude who gets diced into cubes by a laser lattice. The Nemesis monster whom I think was Alice’s old boyfriend. Sienna Guillory as a dead-on Jill Valentine, but hot enough to pop a fanboy’s aorta.
Alice awakens as a regular housewife, with a breadwinner husband, a deaf young daughter, and a seemingly idyllic life in the picket-fence suburbs. Of course, zombies suddenly attack, infecting the husband and sending Alice and daughter Becky into hiding. For whatever reason, things are reset here, and Jovovich gets to play the terrified mom for a change. Truthfully, it works very well, as all the pieces are now in place for classic, stripped-down zombie hijinks.
Alice and Becky scramble into the daylit street, and Michelle Rodriguez appears as a different character (kind of a soccer mom). She almost drives everyone out of the cul-de-sac, before the car gets smashed. She doesn’t make it out and is overwhelmed by zombies. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Paul W.S. Anderson got tired of having his ass handed to him by movies like Dawn of the Dead, and decided to give us some roots rock Romero. Maybe Resident Evil means crazy tech and gadgets to Capcom, but to us American plebes, it means good old zombie terror. Perfect for Halloween time.
The zombies barf out quad-tentacles that don’t look very good, but for better or worse, they’re kinda reminiscent of the old PlayStation game’s effects.
Alice wakes up in a lab on a big Umbrella logo. She’s naked, but wearing napkins attached by tiny threads. This is a clever touch. You know she’s naked as she rolls around, but all you can see is her sides. And frankly, we know what Milla Jovovich’s body looks like at this point. It has been heavily documented.
Jill Valentine, under Umbrella control, zaps Alice to interrogate her. Jill zaps her and zaps her. Then there’s a moment as Alice collects herself, and Jill zaps her again, just to be a dick. Jill has a flashing metal doodad attached to her sternum that makes it utterly impossible not to stare at her cleavage. I clearly remember a blurb from years ago wherein actress Sienna Guillory said she refused to do topless scenes because she felt her nipples “look like targets”. What I’m saying is that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Sienna Guillory’s breasts.
Something knocks out the power, and a drawer slides out of the floor, providing Alice with the Aeon Flux outfit she wears on the DVD cover. I would say that Jovovich could have been a perfect live-action Aeon Flux, but that would disparage Charlize Theron’s absolutely game yet babyfaced portrayal, as well as exceed my Fawning Limit for this article. For your own benefit, do not get me started on Theron’s voice being the sole saving grace of that turkey. Say what you will, she got Aeon Flux’s voice exactly right.
Alice escapes into a virtual reality simulation of Hong Kong. On a crowded rainy street, a girl in a blue dress makes the film go slo-mo, confusing both Alice and myself until finally she chomps a commuter’s neck. Alice leaps into action with a chain and a pistol, until she’s fighting a horde of zombies, several of which are women. It’s like Milla Jovovich’s version of the Oldboy “hammer” scene. Really, name another movie with a woman doing all that, outside of Tarantino’s fetish-o-rama.
Alice finds Umbrella Central Control, but everyone there is dead from massive head wounds. A weapons carousel emerges from the floor, and just as Alice begins to rdy up, a distractingly hot Chinese woman in a long red dress attacks her. Any man who played Resident Evil 2 knows this is Ada Wong, played here by Li Bingbing. Bingbing can be seen wearing too much makeup in this year’s Transformers: Age Of Extinction, but in this, her skin is so flawless, at many times she looks like living CGI. I can’t imagine what could be more appropriate for the material. As the icing on the cake, she’s dubbed by the original Ada Wong voice actress. So: Quentin Tarantino and other Ada Wong fetishists, look no further.
Classic RE villain Albert Wesker appears on a screen, explaining the VR concept and how it’s used to test viruses for different countries. I guess old grudges die hard, because my teeth clench every time this fucker pops up. He comes from the 1990’s school of one-dimensional baddies, an evil straw man you can’t wait to execute when the time comes. Wesker says that the annoying Red Queen controls Umbrella’s ultimate facility; the testing floor.
This complex is deep beneath the Arctic, and a strike team rolls up to infiltrate. Two of them are instantly recognizable; Leon S. Kennedy and Barry Burton. Kennedy is the RE2 protagonist Capcom based loosely on Titanic-era DiCaprio, and Burton is the husky gay bear whose VA in the original game was so awful, I swore for years he said “jibble sandwich”. Their binoculars make the same noise a Game Boy makes when you turn it on. The testing floor is made up of several environments; New York, Moscow, Berlin, Hong Kong and “suburbia” (which is the biggest one!). I would really like to play this movie.
These testing environments are a fantastic excuse to cram a bunch of good locations into one movie, not to mention a nice way to cast doubt on what actually happened in previous installments. In “New York”, Ada and Alice battle a pair of ax-wielding monsters that I think are in a later game. They get doused with gas and blowed up. In “Moscow”, the strike team shoots it out with some hilarious-looking Soviet zombies with extra-puffy faces to hide their safety helmets (there are upcoming stunts with zombies on motorcycles that are much more awesome than I’m making them sound).
Alice and Ada enter “Suburbia”, and here we tie things up from the intro as Alice sees her other, suburban self, whom Ada divulges is one of a zillion Alice clones that help populate the testing areas. While inspecting the house, Alice discovers Becky still hiding in the closet. Becky thinks Alice is her mother. This is an interesting take on all this mess.
I’m having some ice cream.
Alice gets all gooey as she looks around at the pictures of her alternate self and family. Ada tells her to nut up, and they exit the house to see Michelle Rodriguez, her old hubby, and Jill Valentine all pointing big guns at them. Jill has eyes that morph into Umbrella logos for some reason. A giant shootout results. Try not to look at Jill’s cleavage. Just try.
Zombie carnage continues unabated in Moscow, which includes a chainsaw zombie. In the subway, suburban Michelle Rodriguez shows up, and Alice sends Becky with her. She picks up what’s left of the strike team for the big chase scene. On the way back they encounter not only motorcycle zombies, but a zombie ablaze firing an RPG. That is boss.
Everybody regroups in the subway tunnels. Leon and Barry are unmistakable as usual, but they’re really little more than guest stars to appease the fans. A “licker” attacks and pseudo-Michelle gets smacked so hard she bites the big one. Barry gets a mortal cheek wound and the licker makes off with little Becky. There’s a bald dude who I think is a Resident Evil character too, but I can’t place him. Look him up yourself.
Alice hunts for Becky, but she’s losing blood rapidly from something or other. Barry martyrs himself so Bald Dude can escape. Alice finds Becky stuck in a yucky Creepy Crawlers mold, guarded by a giant licker (or Hunter, I forget). She kills it and frees Becky, before finding grenades on a dead guy. Barry commits suicide by cop.
Alice finds the clone farm, which has a Jovovich section. This obviously explains all the movies she appears in.
Seeing the clones, Becky works it all out, but Alice says she’s her mommy now. She then proceeds to blow up the whole place, which floods with Arctic water. Alice, Becky, Leon and Bald escape through the tundra in a snowmobile. This of course is the third-act fake-out, as an Umbrella submarine bursts from under the ice. Jill Cleavage emerges.
Michelle Rodriguez has Ada at gunpoint, and injects herself with a syringe that has a tiny facehugger wriggling in it (“The Las Plagas parasite”). This makes her impervious to weapons fire, and after being shot, bullets pop out of her fingertips, and thank god not someplace else.
The final fight begins, as Alice and Jill battle with weapons. It bears repeating- here’s two women fighting with weapons. This movie’s flaws aside, where else to do you see this?
Side fight: Michelle fights Leon and Bald. From the way things tend to fly into the camera, I’m guessing this was originally released in 3D. Michelle beats them so badly, we see X-rays of bones breaking for a nice cheap thrill.
Jill nearly beats Alice to death, even lifting her off her feet like Darth Vader. The annoying Red Queen tells her to terminate, but Alice manages to rip off Jill’s robot cleavage spider and destroys it, freeing her from Umbrella command. Meanwhile Michelle punches Bald in the heart and he croaks. Time for Alice vs. Michelle.
Alice almost gets a heart-stopper too, but as she crumples on the ice, she spies a zombie literally chilling underneath. Jill rolls onto her nipples- I swear to god, this girl is fucking with me- and recovers herself enough to toss Alice a firearm. Alice shoots the ice out under Michelle, who sinks into a total world of shit.
Help arrives as Alice falls to the snow and Leon finally puts a goddamn jacket on Ada’s bare shoulders. A chopper flies everyone to safety, and we see Jill’s cleavage is miraculously unscathed. Leon slides his hand onto Ada’s knee and she coyly removes it. Character development!
Alice and company are taken to the Oval Office of the White House, which is completely bombed out with Wesker in charge. Again my hands clench into fists at the sight of this dickbag. He jabs Alice with a T-Virus syringe, and as she writhes on the carpet, he informs her that she is a weapon. It’s humanity’s last stand; total zombie apocalypse. But… IS IT REAL???
I dunno. Maybe. There’s another one coming in 2015*. What do you think?
Listen, as far as Resident Evil movies go, you can do a lot worse. The earlier chapters are too dumb and the all-CGI ones are antiseptic and dull. This is the best you’re going to get by Halloween 2014. Enjoy.
Update (1/2017): It’s coming out this month. Conditions permitting, I might check it out.
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