In short: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

Our long nightmare is finally over! Well, if you ignore the actual ending of the film that leaves the castle gates wide open for Greeks bringing gifts, direct-to-video sequels, TV shows, or whatever else you can dream up in your nightmares.

Unlike quite a few people, I don’t have any problem with the low-brow nature of the Resident Evil films, their inherent stupidity and their frivolous dumbness. In fact, I remember actually enjoying one of the franchise entries – I believe it was the third one but am much too lazy to look it up and am certainly not going to work through the other films again to find out – and having a bit of fun laughing at some of the others. This purportedly final film however mostly frustrates me. There is so much wasted potential for a fun hundred minutes of post-apocalyptic SF horror action shenanigans, so many ideas that should by all rights be awesome in their own silly ways but never work out being even the tiniest bit entertaining. The problem dragging it all down is franchise director/writer/producer Paul W.S. Anderson when he’s wearing his director’s hat. Despite his bad reputation, I think Anderson started out bright-eyed, talented, and imbued with a lot of love for genre films, making crap movies and some that were nearly very good. Alas, he has become a worse director with every Resident Evil chapter he has inflicted upon us.

This one, he absolutely ruins by overloading nearly every action scene (the final twenty minutes are a bit better, inexplicably) with so many edits, and so many camera positions and shots that for half of the time, you don’t really know what he’s actually trying to show you. To make bad matters worse still, the action in general feels as if it was filmed by an epileptic cameraman while in the throes of an attack. Calling the camera work during the action sequences jittery makes it sound much too calm. If you’re like me and not prone to headaches, you might experience a curious effect – I certainly did – for the camera is so jittery, the editing so fast and random, that there’s really no difference between any of the action scenes at all. Milla Jovovich being chased by zombie horde, Milla Jovovich wrestling with some big grey zombie dude, Milla Jovovich being chased by mutated dogs – it all feels the same, the sort of detail that makes action interesting and exciting to look at is completely lost in Anderson’s fits, until most of the film ends up as a random assortment of flashes and noises up there on the screen, displaying no attempt to connect with the people watching it even on the most basic level. Now that I think about it, it’s a bit of an avantgarde film in that approach.
Too bad it is also an utter failure as the kind of film it is actually supposed to be.

House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Evelyn Stockard-Price (Famke Janssen) has decided that the ideal place for throwing her next birthday bash is the titular House on Haunted Hill, a former psychiatric institution once under the charge of a mad man (Jeffrey Combs, as a matter of fact), and claiming a history of death and destruction during and after that particular stint. Despite their marriage having come down to the point where it is a series of entertainingly bitchy dialogue sequences and murder attempts, her husband Stephen Price (Geffrey Rush), a stinking rich carnival barker style rollercoaster tycoon, obliges. Well, sort of, for Stephen invites rather different guests to the party than Evelyn had in mind, because he has decided to run with a gimmick for the evening - survive the night in the house and get a million dollars! – and does consequently go for a rather more desperate clientele than the rich friends of rich people.

The victimsguests who eventually show up at the House – as played by Ali Larter, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher and Bridgette Wilson – aren’t the ones Stephen had invited either, though, for some mysterious force has changed the guest list yet again. It comes as no surprise to the audience when the guests, the Prices and the owner of the place (Chris Kattan) soon find themselves locked in the mansion by a neat mechanical lock-up device, nor that things will get rather dangerous for everyone involved.

It’s not just that Stephen has rigged up the house with all kinds of spooky contraptions so the guests have to work for their million, there are also quite real, and very nasty, ghosts to cope with, as well as a little murder conspiracy, and…the Darkness.

When it comes to remaking films, going for something like the great William Castle’s original House on Haunted Hill makes a lot of sense: it’s a well loved film to some – like me – but it’s not well-loved for being particularly artful, nor deep, nor complex, nor important to the development of genres or lives. Rather, it’s loved as an extremely fun example of the movie as carnival ride, made out of funny and sharp dialogue, some hokey yet great effects, Vincent Price, and Castle’s very distinctive impresario personality and all that it brought. Apart from Price, these are things a film in the late 90s could provide.

And while Geoffrey Rush certainly is no Vincent, his performance, which is about in equal parts a homage to Price and one to William Castle himself, is pretty damn fun. Particularly so in Rush’s scenes with a Janssen who clearly also gets the joke and enjoys herself.

I’m fond of director William Malone’s decision to set the film’s first half hour or so mainly up as an extended Castle homage, be it through the very Castle-like prominent billing of people like James Marsters and Jeffrey Combs who barely have cameos, or through the sheer insistence of Rush’s character on the sort of gimmickry and overcooked showmanship Castle loved so well.

Once that part of the film is over, things settle down to a competent horror romp through some very cool looking sets - mechanical gothic by way of art deco style in design –, hokey yet fun scares, and featuring a bit too much late 90s shock rock music video editing. The whole affair is scandalously lacking even a single moment of depth but fully delivers on all promises of cheap thrills. As a little extra, this House on Haunted Hill does also belong to the tiny minority of horror films whose shared main sympathetic character is a black man who even survives the movie.

In short: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

An army of Milla Jovovichs (realized surprisingly badly for a film made in 2010) attacks the headquarters of the Evil Umbrella Corp in Tokyo to finally take her (their) revenge on her arch enemy Wesker (Shawn Roberts). After laying waste to half of Tokyo, possibly killing Wesker in a plane crash and losing her superpowers (not that the film seems to want to remember that for much of its running time), the original Milla (or Alice, if you need character names in a film without characterization) tries to follow her companions from the last movie into a paradise known as Arcadia, supposedly located somewhere in Alaska. Upon arrival in the North, our heroine finds only a bunch of abandoned planes and helicopters, and her friend Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) who must have been lying on the ground, outside, in Alaska, in the snow, for a few months but is only suffering from PCA (short for plot-convenient amnesia).

Together they fight crime fly to an unnamed (I think; going by Resident Evil naming conventions it's probably called Squirrel) Big City, because that's the place where you want to be during the zombie apocalypse. The two women manage to hook up with another handful of survivors (Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates and some other people sure to be eaten soon) who hide in a prison, and keep Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) prisoner there for reasons that will never make much sense (what a surprise), staring longingly at a ship anchored outside the city. A ship named Arcadia. Obviously, the zombies and their friends will soon get into the prison, but Chris knows a way out.

As someone who more than just sort of digs survival horror games as one of the few console-centric videogame genres close to his PC gamer heart, I do of course have my experiences with the Resident Evil games, which are the most low-brow and (alas) most successful series of their genre. I'm not madly in love with the series (that's what Silent Hill and Fatal Frame/Project Zero are for, after all), but I do respect its peculiar mixture of baroquely ridiculous and stupid plots and senseless violence. Although every new iteration of the series' movie adaptations has less to do with the games it is supposedly based on, their "writer" and (sometimes) director Paul W.S. Anderson uses all his powers of stupidity to keep his work as much in the dumb but bizarre spirit of the games as a Brit adapting a Japanese source can.

Still, stupidity and all, the first three Resident Evils didn't manage to charm me. There was always something artificial about their dumbness that managed to keep the films less fun than they should have been. This tragic state of affairs ends with this fourth film. Finally, the dumbness (as demonstrated by the idiotic plot - if you want to call it that, the non-characters non-acted by people who could act a little if they wanted to, the unbelievably absurd dialogue, and the mind-blowingly stupid use of slow motion and freeze effects as if The Matrix had never gone out of style) reaches critical mass and transforms what could be just another crap film by Anderson (whose Event Horizon I'll always cherish as actually nearly very good) into a movie so enthusiastically bad yet aiming to please that only those most soulless of creatures known as mainstream film critics could not appreciate its spirit of fun.

Needless to say, I sort of love it.

 

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