DC promoted the event of a popular artist moving into their stable with "Steve Ditko Strikes Again!" I suppose that would be a strike in the baseball sense, as like Jack Kirby, none off Ditko's DC creations ever caught fire like the Marvel ones. In fact, I'd say the Charlton heroes DC bought about fifteen years later have profited them far more than the Creeper, Stalker or Hawk & Dove... although the Vertigoized Shade the Changing Man had a longer run than any of them.
The Short Version? The Matrix with zombies in 3D What Is It? Action-Horror Who Is In It? Leeloo, the other blond from Heroes, the Prison Break guy, that black dude who does black movies your pale ass don't see, that asshole who always plays scumbags Should I See It? Maybe.
I slag on most movie franchises-- hell, most movies-- but I have my weak spots. Resident Evil is certainly one of them. I'm up for unpretentious cinematic badness if the formula is right. I love zombies, and adore Milla Jovovich, so I'm Paul W.S. Anderson's meal ticket. I have warm memories of playing every damned variation on the incomparable Resident Evil 2 video game I and a group of friends could manage (Hunk's Run owned me,) and followed that series through until Codename: Veronica, by which point I'd given up on all gaming. I even read a few of the comics, and started one of the books. I didn't mind the liberties taken in the first Resident Evil movie, because it offered enough respectful nods while clearly being its own beast. I say that with full consciousness that the games were little more than a mutated mating of dozens if not hundreds of zombie movies, while the movie owed outrageously blatant debts to films from other genres. They're both totally derivative, and their pleasures run to the guilty side, but I indulge in them unapologetically.
I've seen every Resident Evil film in the theater, and I've run through the first on DVD better than a dozen times. Of the many "influences" you could slap across the franchise's face, I find the closest parallel for myself to be the Roger Moore Bond movies. No one ever confused the dubious quality of Moore's outrageous '70s spectacles for the better Sean Connery material, just like George A. Romero can rest easy knowing his first two Dead films remain the gold standard. Still, Connery made Diamonds are Forever, and not having seen Survival of the Dead, I can safely say Romero went at least thirty years without producing a good zombie movie (quiet, Day apologists!) Given my druthers, I'll take the cheap thrills of RE over any additional screenings of Diary of the Dead, not to mention any Brosnan Bond besides Goldeneye.
For the uninitiated, the first Resident Evil introduced Alice, an initially amnesiac heroine who worked with a commando squad to investigate a top secret laboratory of the sinisterly omnipresent Umbrella Corporation. This was followed by Apocalypse, the messiest, ugliest, and least interesting chapter, as an outbreak of the murderous undead sweeps Raccoon City. Extinction took the franchise into Mad Max territory, involving some entertainingly goofy sci-fi/super-heroic elements. Each has ended with a cliffhanger, even though the directorial vision is quite inconsistent, and nothing is sensible enough to lead anyone to believe the continuing story is given any thought until after the box office indicates a greenlit sequel. This is especially amusing when you realize this is the rare series written by a single individual, but it's Paul W.S. Anderson, so yeah.
Afterlife picks up in Japan, as Alice leads an assault on Umbrella headquarters that recalls Kurt Wimmer's Ultraviolet (also starring Jovovich,) which effectively ended his directing career. Anyone who tells you this is the high point of the movie likes their shit dumb, extending from the lousy acting to the stupid dialogue through the questionable CGI. However, it's in 3D, and the kind Jim Cameron used for Avatar, so I suppose the gimmick of throwing stars coming right atacha does it for some people. Paul W.S. Anderson is back in the director's chair, and still desperately wants his own Matrix, but at least this is better than a Matrix sequel. The patented "homage" and magical unclear resolutions of once dire circumstances will be familiar from past entries in this series, but there's an added dose of excessive bullet time slo-/non motion. Besides the gimmickry and a desire to start things off with a bang, the main purpose of this sequence is to hit the reset button on elements of escalating lunacy from previous chapters.
From there, Afterlife slows way down, a source of complaint for some. Tonally and as manifested, it falls somewhere between Apocalypse and Extinction. A bunch of new characters are introduced as cannon fodder for cartoonish action set pieces like the second flick, but as in the third, the pacing is more deliberate, with some returning characters lending tension to situations where someone who matters somewhat in imperiled. Some new mystery/conspiracy elements are introduced that will never be satisfactorily resolved, and the appearance of any characters originating from the actual game will continue to alert viewers of a dip in the already shoddy acting standard present.
I condemn Resident Evil: Afterlife in the same way I would admonish myself while enjoying a triple meat cheeseburger. I know it will attack my heart, do damage to my bodily systems, and could be easily replaced with something better for me, but I'm not going to stop chowing down. Zombies whose mouths split into tentacles just like the genetically altered vampires in Blade 2 means idiot characters getting ate in the face. Fast zombies swarm rooftops like cockroaches in a sewer, twelve foot tall medieval executioners throw meat tenderizing axes, Milla/Alice jumps off the usual shit while things blow up, and brains hurl at the audience's altered perceptions like watermelon at a Gallagher concert. If you don't know you're supposed to giggle when Alice steps out of a prop plane dressed like Amelia Earnhardt with the full Maybelline treatment after experiencing 177 days without any signs of human life, you're just not getting it.
I continue to miss the atmospheric music of the first film. The only song here I can recall is an incessant remix of A Perfect Circle's "The Outsider." How do we go from new Slipknot and inventive old Nine Inch Nails to a tired ass single from Bush's first term (the president, although I could see thinking of the band under these circumstances.) No one in this cast makes an impression beyond Jovovich, and the villain is flat out terrible (Agent Smith by way of Val Kilmer, with a reasonable approximation of the hilariously awful voice acting of the early games.) The movie runs long at 1 1/2 hours, because that silly ending will. not. stop. There's even a mid-closing-credits tease, involving a pre-existing character I didn't recognize (six years and a dye job will do that,) building off a cliffhanger too stupid to live. Resident Evil: Afterlife is an objectively bad movie that thrilled me, and I'll be back at the trough for part five, especially if they finally work out the kinks with Smell-O-Vision. What an olfactory trauma that would be!
The Old Spice Guy has begun campaigning to play former Power Man and Hero for Hire Luke Cage, complete with a fairly stupid looking photo shoot. I'm on record as hating the shitty non-costuming Luke Cage has been pulling out of the hamper since joining the Avengers, which is only one part of what's wrong with this picture. I like Isaiah Mustafa, but he's probably the absolute least qualified Cage this side of Nick Cannon. Lots of wrong-headed actors champion themselves in super-hero roles (see Wonder Woman,) many of whom would be hard-pressed to sell themselves as sidekicks, much less the main attraction. I would be fine with just nodding my head and backing away from this, except that I think Isaiah Mustafa could actually be a fine choice for nearly any other Marvel super-hero of African decent. His Old Spice commercials demonstrate a very toned body, regal bearing, and a solid "hero" voice. Black Panther comes most immediately to mind as a casting choice, and the Avengers movie could use a Falcon, as well. Okay, nobody needs a fucking Falcon for anything, but make Captain Mar-Vell black and roll with that. Hell, if Marvel felt the need to recast Jim Rhodes yet again, Mustafa could rock the War Machine. What Isaiah Mustafa cannot work, from what I could dig up online, is street credibility. He looks good in a suit, he'd probably handle a costume with aplomb, he's funny, he's awesome... but he's so not Luke Cage it's just sad he could delude himself into believing otherwise.
The Short Version? Domestic Reapers. What Is It? Dramedy. Who Is In It? The series regulars, minus Rube and Daisy, and including Zod Jr., Whitley Gilbert, Hope Davidson Should I See It? No.
I was turned on to Dead Like Me after the demise of the television series through a friend's DVD set. The short version is that chosen members of the recently deceased would return to something closely approximating life to serve as grim reapers. These individuals were charged with collecting the souls of those who died extremely, shortly before the big splat, and lead them to the afterlife. In their downtime, the reapers also had to maintain new living identities in the mundane world, operating inconspicuously and without contact with people from their past lives.
I liked the show enough to buy my own on sale, and just finished a nightly viewing of each episode over the past month, my second look at each. I also happened upon a used copy of the direct-to-DVD follow-up over the course of the marathon, and looked forward to finally catching that. I was put out by the absence of a few preferred cast members, but I'm not some devotee that would call that a deal breaker. It was a fun show that suited my sense of humor, but never essential.
Few revivals can ever capture the "magic" of the original, but there was only a three year gap between the cancellation of Dead Like Me and the initial production of this feature. Ideally, especially with a cult favorite, the creators would hew as closely as possible to the original, which in this case had a very distinctive visual and writing style. When the credits begin, and there's a new logo that would be at home on a Spooky Sounds of Halloween cassette tape. Then a faux Dead Like Me comic book materializes to relate the basics of the show, the only appropriate response bears the initials "W.T.F." It isn't even a good comic book-- just badly colored storyboards and the dreaded Comic Sans font. The natural assumption would be that the production budget must have been pretty skimpy, and that they maybe didn't have the rights to use footage from the television show to flash back to. However, in the commentary track, the director reveals that this was instead a way for him to place his own stamp on the show. His stamp reads "Clueless Asshole," and it'll cover this movie before he's done.
One of the series' gimmicks was to keep its reapers guessing as the exact identity of the soon-to-be departed, and to kill the unfortunate in a roundabout Rube Goldbergian manner. In this movie, there's only one brief scene where a reap's target is in question, and the flick opens with a scientist committing suicide through an entirely too literal Goldbergian contraption-- complete with an unironic last minute call rewarding his inventiveness that he's unable to take. The specific group of reapers the series followed specialized in violent deaths, but to the exclusion of suicides. In this instance, the divergence from the norm is explained, but the movie sets itself early on to the task of breaking as many of the series' rules as possible, succeeding in ruining a lot of what was good there while opening up a big can of worms that are left squirming about at the curtain call.
Comedy is timing. You can say something poorly thought out, or plain nonsensical, and get laughs-- if you do it quickly enough in the right moment. Wait five seconds to polish the joke, and the thought becomes a bomb or a non-sequitur. The timing throughout the movie is way off. Where the show's afterlife was represented by brief flashes of blue light that sometimes vaguely represented something, the movie offers saggy moments of the dead being applauded by auditorium crowds and-- wait, it's always cheering crowds here. What a rip!
Another major problem is found in the sets. Der Waffle Haus is burned to the ground off-screen, which symbolizes the strip mining of the show itself. Rube, the guiding light of the series, is pronounced dead, while Kiffany and Casey never appear. The new Daisy actress is introduced, and is so clearly not Laura Harris (or even reflecting the right fashion of the character, with her staid '50s ensemble,) you're immediately aware something is off. The cast is then whisked away by limo to a dimly lit high class restaurant, where they're presented with Palm Treo smartphones in place of Post-Its by some Eurotrash Brit that's the new boss. Meanwhile, the Lass home must have finally been sold, which might help explain George's seeming detachment from her remaining family in town. The most egregious change is to Happy Time, the sterile, florescent lit cubicle hell George worked at. In the interim, the piss-ant temping agency has become a stunning corporate office with byzantine architecture involving glass and orange-red natural lighting everywhere. It looks like heaven as imagined by Renny Harlin, and is so far removed from the aesthetic and purpose of its existence in the series that its appearance is to the detriment of the proceedings. Crystal shows up just to show up, though.
Sarah Wynter replaces Laura Harris as Daisy Adair due to a last minute scheduling conflict with Harris' TV show Women's Murder Club. Great pains are taken in commentaries to connect the two actresses, who played terrorist sisters in the second season of 24, but that's a show known for its implausibility. Harris is a stunning alabaster beauty, and Wynter is a rubber chicken that should have Wayland Flowers working her from behind. Daisy Adair was the most complex character on the show, with Harris navigating positively schizophrenic writing with grace. Wynter's career highlights involve showing her tits in a Species sequel and a lesser Schwarzenegger flick, her comedic timing is shit, and her performance is flat as a board.
One casting divergence from the series that actually works is Jennifer Rae Westley as Millie Hagen, George's living alter ego. In the earlier episodes, the actress portraying how the living world saw George, put indelicately, looked like a heroin addict on the down side of life. As the series progressed, George saw romantic attention from some fairly hot guys that would be out of that chick's league, where Westley is actually hotter than George, so that turn makes sense.
Inevitably, you have to cast about for blame. The veteran actors had varying degrees of trouble with finding their characters. Cynthia Stevenson and Britt McKillip fared the best there, as they were shielded from the mess of the reaper world, and could focus on their mother-daughter relationship. Both characters had matured and progressed in mostly believable ways, and were able to sell some clunky dialogue. Ellen Muth carried a similar trajectory, but because of her presence in the reaper entanglements, she is forced to carry out actions that don't fit even an older, wiser George. Callum Blue was on auto-pilot as Mason, while Jasmine Guy couldn't quite overcome the contrivances forced on her character. Christine Willes is still Delores Herbig, but seemingly sadder and more defeated by age.
I expect the actors all had confidence in their writers, veterans of most series episodes, which is one area where the movie goes astray. Every reaper except George is given short shrift, devolved to their most base character attributes and painfully manipulated to suit the needs of a coolly constructed story. Without the grounding presence of Mandy Patinkin as Rube, their amusing infantile tangents are never met by an opposing force, killing the humor for lack of tension. Roxy's failure to step up in Rube's absence sends the lot flying out of their usual orbit and into trouble, with repercussions that are never adequately explained. The new boss, Cameron Kane, is initially portrayed as a make-it-or-break-it shark who sacrifices humanity for efficiency. However, the organization immediately breaks down due to the incompetence and/or callousness of his oversight, which begs the question of why he was given a position of authority in the first place. Whether he was an active agent of evil or simply disinterested in his duties are never elaborated upon, and the seduction of the reapers is so easily initiated that everyone in the affair comes off as lacking sophistication. My best guess is that the series' strengths lay in lacing boring normal life with divine undercurrents, where the movie's script has fantastic aspirations beyond the writers' comfort zone.
Ultimately, the head to call for is director Stephen Herek, whose feeling the need to impose his style on the production spoils the soup. Constant use of slow motion. A desire to unnecessarily elevate the production values from the show, conversely making the movie look cheap. A fixation on expanding the scale of the premise without laying down a proper structure to support it. Soap operatic turns, saccharine melodrama, and incongruous sexual escapades. Awful attempts at broad comedy and third hand gallows humor that never should have escaped the cutting room. An attempt to pull a Shyamalan by sticking clocks in every scene. Fucking bullet time. Thanks to a moronic director, much of the flavor of the show is lost, and this debacle will only sully the memory of a pretty swell show that seems to have lived just long enough, and then a bit too much.
Extras?
Audio Commentary by Director Stephen Herek and Actress Ellen Muth Muth relates the story of filming her death scene from the series shortly after 9/11, sending bystanders dialing 9-1-1. There's some other anecdotal crap like that, but mostly it's just pretension and delusion.
Back From The Dead: Resurrecting Dead Like Me Featurette You know the usual interview bullshit on these things? That.
Before TV, print media and radio were the people’s forums, so you could find just about any kind of comic you might be interested in reading with a little effort. Other communication mediums took precedence, so now comics are mostly a ghetto for super-hero geeks. Back in the day, a Harvey Kurtzman type might poke a bit of fun at super-heroes, then move on to his next target. Today, there’s a whole genre of comics devoted to bitter, frustrated satirists who can only make a living in this industry by telling the most mean-spirited, hateful stories about costumed characters they can muster. Matt Sturges is one of those writers, and one of those books is Final Crisis Aftermath: Run!
Following on the set-up from a previous mini-series, a dumpy Silver Age villain who had appeared once half a century ago became among the most hated figures in the DC Universe. Through his connection to a hero’s murder and the betrayal of a host of villains, the Human Flame was left on the run from everybody and their mother. Joining a group of villains even less noteworthy than himself, the Human Flame takes a transformative journey toward realizing his ideal being. This is achieved through thinly veiled cursing, a supporting cast filled with junkies and other assorted reprobates, and the former bank robber becoming a full scale sociopath.
Run is one of those books, and it’s a good enough example of what it is, so Garth Ennis/Mark Millar fans may wish to take note. The Who’s Who reject super-villains throughout the book may be a little too silly for the hardcore, and the book lacks sexual situations or other prurient material its natural base may miss. The art of Freddie Williams II is broad and cartoonish, while mixing a Bart Sears type exaggerated anatomy, contorted posturing and meaty violence. Someday, Run will be pointed to as an example of the excesses of the aughts, but if you know what to expect, it can be a decent diversion.
Written By: Brad Roberts
Released: October 26, 1993
Album: God Shuffled His Feet
Single?: #6 on U.S. Billboard Top 40
Lyrics:
Once there was this kid who
Got into an accident and couldn't come to school
But when he finally came back
His hair had turned from black into bright white
He said that it was from when
The car had smashed so hard
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
Once there was this girl who
Wouldn't go and change with the girls in the change room
But when they finally made her
They saw birthmarks all over her body
She couldn't quite explain it
They'd always just been there
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
But both girl and boy were glad
'Cause one kid had it worse than that
'Cause then there was this boy whose
Parents made him come directly home right after school
And when they went to their church
They shook and lurched all over the church floor
He couldn't quite explain it
They'd always just gone there
The Short Version? 27 Weeks Earlier... in an isolated building... zombies attack. What Is It? Survival Horror. Who Is In It? Spaniards Should I See It? No.
Like The Blair Witch Project, [*REC] was a single camera movie in which the lens served as a proxy for the viewer’s virtual involvement in the proceedings. [REC] traded on the sense of the film being recorded live and in a reality too near to our own for comfort. Like The Blair Witch Project 2: Book of Shadows, [*REC]2 is a glossy Hollywood sequel that chucks everything that worked about the first film out the window so that the filmmakers could prove they were capable of hacking out the usual bullshit. Instead of a low-res real time environment, [rec2] is a multi-player first person shooter with shifting vantage points, flashbacks, and techno-tomfoolery.
A big part of what made [REC] work was its simplicity. Common everyday people found themselves in an extraordinary, terrifying circumstance. Tension built slowly, until the levees broke, and then the situation became bad topped by worse along a progressive trip through the infernal. The characters didn’t need to be developed, because they were, like you, innocents caught in a harrowing ordeal folks could sympathize with. [REC2] begins fifteen minutes after the conclusion of the original, in which a SWAT team enters a building full of 28 Days Later… Rage rejects to investigate the cause of a viral outbreak. Instead of taking the audience with them, the viewer is a passive spectator in a video game movie derivative of Aliens and Dawn of the Dead. The perspective camera constantly changes, gets dropped on its side, loses sound, blinks out-- incessantly reminding the audience they're watching various recordings from a prior time. Only one of the SWAT team members exhibits any personality, and that one is of an obnoxiously over-reactive nature, so the rest are essentially the players’ various “lives” in progressing through the game. First time players, I should say, because everyone in this flick is a nimrod of the type audiences impatiently wait to see die for their stupidity. Could someone please explain to bad "comedy" and "scary" movie directors that the only response having your actors shouting all their lines invokes is a desire for them to shut. the fuck. up?
One of the most common faults of horror movie sequels is to build on an ongoing mythology. The more familiar you are with something, the less frightening it is, and the better equipped you are to deal with it. Even if crosses or garlic fail to kill your particular vampire, just keep going down the checklist until you find something foolproof. Once you demystify a threat, you remove much of the horror, and are left with a fantasy or science fiction story. In [REC,} one of the more effective reveals toward the end of the picture was the true nature of the contagion. [REC]2 picks up from that point, and then negates its impact with a litany of direct swipes from other pictures/familiar mythos. “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell” is easily repurposed, as are visual ticks from the last decade of Japanese horror exports. Even [Rec]’s own technique of still creatures suddenly rushing the camera is abused so often and reproduced so exactingly that it begins to feel more like a replay than anything to shriek at.
[REC] 2 is a predictable franchise killing knock off of a shitload of other movies, right up to its unsurprising “twist” ending. If you found yourself haunted by [REC], this sequel is the perfect antidote, as it effectively neutralize any residual impact of the original. Unless you've been anxiously anticipating a truly faithful screen adaptation of House of the Dead, leave this lie.
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