The 187th review!
Hello and welcome to the 6th annual October-horror movie extravaganza. For those of you new to my Facebook, I watch and review a horror movie for every day of October. This year may be slightly different in my choices because I don’t have a video store near me anymore and I don’t know if I trust Redbox. So, for the first movie of the month, I checked out...
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)
I’ll be honest, I have a soft spot for these movies. I don’t wanna say the first one was a grounded story, but compared to the batshit-insanity of the later installments of this series, the first one is better because it doesn’t try to do so much as the others. This series went from me liking them, to just being entertained by them. With that said, I didn’t like this one.
It’s really silly, but that’s to be expected. Here’s the gist, Alice wakes up (again) after surviving her latest ambush at Washington DC, and after wandering around she becomes BFF with the “Red Queen” who gives her an arbitrary deadline of 48 hours to save the world, or the last of humanity will be wiped out. Later she runs into Jorah Mormont (who I was practically begging to refer to someone as Khaleesi), turns out she only killed his clone in the second movie, and since we last met they turned him into a religious fanatic because apparently you can’t have the end of the world without making the Christians look insane... but I digress. After that a lot of goofy action set pieces happen and random silliness. If you remember at the end of the last movie, perennial baddy Albert Wesker is sitting in the oval office, gives Alice her zombie powers back and says they need her help. The camera then zooms out and there’s an army of the undead attacking the city. Instead for this movie, it was all a trap and the movie starts shortly after Wesker betrays her and the city is already abandoned. Personally, I think a movie of having her and Wesker fighting the undead in Washington DC a MUCH better idea for the movie than the one we got. (sigh)
I didn’t like this one. Each one kind of ups the ante as far as Alice’s unbelievability and this really jumps past the line. But that’s more of a nitpick that is to be expected. My biggest problem with this movie is it retcons my favorite of the series. The whole rescue the girl/Red Queen storyline in the second no longer happened, Jared Harris’ character died well before the outbreak, and his daughter somehow had progeria the whole time. On the other hand, the more people who know about progeria the better. When I worked at WTVG, Lissa did a bunch of stories about Carly Q, an adorable girl who has the rapid aging disease, but has probably the best attitude in the world about it. Go to http://teamcarlyq.com/ for more information.
So yeah, when watching an action movie, you can expect the baddies to be stupid, but this is really bad. Wesker takes control of the security, he orders maximum, he’s setting all the traps, releasing the dogs and the bees, and the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot bees at you, but for some reason LEAVES THE MASSIVE GATE WIDE OPEN FOR HER! If that gate was shut, the movie literally ends there and he win. Only once she gets in, he closes it. Then he lets them take an elevator, then he turns off his giant fan as soon as it kills one person. On multiple occasions the baddies talk about how dangerous Alice is, how they have to kill her, but they literally hand her the keys to the kingdom the entire time. My last nit when it comes to this movie, there isn’t much zombie action. There are a bunch of goofy looking monsters, both the flying and running variety, but outside of following tanks, there is very little zombie fighting. I understand they’re not much of a threat to Alice anymore, but they’re still better than the ridiculous monsters, and no matter how much the series (or the video games) steer away from it, at its core the movie is a fight against zombies. As far as Resident Evil movies, it’s eh. As far as movies with the subtitle The Final Chapter, not so much a fan. Friday the 13th IV set the bar too high. It’s not good, it’s a bit longer than it needs to be, but it’s not terrible and not something I plan on watching again.