Admittedly the Resident Evil movies have never ranked among the greatest films ever made. When I first saw Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the only other person in the theater answered his cell phone and started talking, and I didn’t bother to say anything. Some of the movies are fun enough, though the last installment, Resident Evil: Retribution, is god-awful, just terrible, even by the low standards you judge a Paul W.S. Anderson movie by.
Date: Feb 19, 2013 | Author: David Wharton | Category: Sci-Fi
I’ve never really gotten into the whole Resident Evil thing. I know there are die-hard fans out there for sure, since somebody out there has been throwing enough cash around to finance however many RE films they’ve done so far. But when it comes to franchises with devoted followings, there are a few things you can usually count on: 1) if you bad mouth it, their fans will show up and flame your comments section, and 2) at some point, a group of them are going to get together and make a fan movie about it.
Such is the case with Resident Evil: Raccoon City, an ambitious new fan-made web series from the memorably named “Like a Boss TV.” Here’s the teaser trailer for Raccoon City.
Raccoon City debuts next week, on February 28th. The cool part of the concept is that it will tell three distinct stories, each focusing on a well-known RE character: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Leon Kennedy. It’s hard to tell from this short trailer how well the series will hold up from acting, writing, and production standpoints, but this is something any devoted RE fan ought to at least give a chance.
Date: Feb 1, 2013 | Author: Nick Venable | Category: Sci-Fi
The year is 1996, and zombies have not yet overtaken vampires to become the most ubiquitous monster in fiction. Capcom releases Resident Evil on the Playstation, giving survival horror its foothold in video gaming. Sure, other zombie games existed – Zombies Ate My Neighbors, anyone? — but this was a different, darker beast entirely. Seventeen years and 20+ reissues and sequels later, the series has traded in the scares for the action, much like the film series, whose most frightening aspect is that it’s still growing. With The Walking Dead making zombie survival scary and carnage-minded again, maybe it’s time for Capcom to go back to the blood-soaked drawing board.
Capcom’s Masachika Kawata, who has worked on and off with the game series since Nemesis, gave an interview with IGN that hinted at a Resident Evil reboot that would return the series to its horror roots. More often than not, just the term “reboot” can blast a person’s most negative opinions straight to the surface, but this one deserves some consideration, seeing as how the aim is to bring it back to what made it popular in the first place, instead of continuing to adapt the concept to fit the more popular trends in video gaming.
Zombies are the least of Alice’s problems in Resident Evil: Retribution. Most franchises which make it to five movies start to run out of ideas by then, but if Retribution has one glaring problem it’s that it has far too many of them.
It starts out as sort of a Resident Evil’s greatest hits with Alice (Milla Jovovich) reawakening yet again in the clutches of the Umbrella organization. The movie quickly invents a series of convoluted and confusing reasons for her to re-enact some of her greatest zombie battles from previous franchise entries and then proceeds to pit her against not only a rogue’s gallery of her greatest historical foes, but also her most stalwart friends.
