Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2010): UK, Germany, USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at West Wind Drive-In, Goleta

If there is one thing that all of the film reviews on this website have in common, it’s that they are all, well, reviews of films.  I’m going to change that.  So, while this review will cover Resident Evil: Afterlife (for the impatient, it’s terrible!), I’m also going to talk about the theater where I saw the film.  Why?  Because it let me fulfill a cinephile dream – I’ve been to an American drive-in.

Drive-ins are the stuff of legend.  Peaking in popularity in the late 1950s and early 60s, they were all but finished off by urban sprawl, the VCR, and the rise of the multiplex.  But in their heyday the “passion pits” provided a cheap night out for everyone, from young couples seeking a little privacy in which to enact their own romantic scenes, through to parents who wanted to escape for the night without having to fork out for a babysitter.  When audiences began to decline, they became home to the exploitation films of Roger Corman and his contemporaries, and finally there was more action on the screen than in the backseats of the cars!  But the drive-ins vanished from the American landscape as surely as the elegant bullet lights and wonderfully outrageous fins of the cars that bathed in their screen’s silvery light.

However, after an absence of nineteen years, Goleta’s drive-in reopened this summer, with double bill features playing for a little under $7.  Tuesday nights are even cheaper.  You get the sound through your radio.  It’s crystal clear, though obviously only in stereo.  Just park your front wheels on one of the ramps, turn off your engine and lights and enjoy the show.  There are compromises of course – the occasional set of headlights plays across the bottom of the screen due to late arrivers and early leavers, and an occasional plane adds background noise – but on the plus side, other people talking or rattling off messages on their cell phone will never disturb you.  Overall, it’s a great experience.

And speaking of great experiences, I did promise a review of the latest installment in the Resident Evil franchise.  It’s a stinker.  The series perennial protagonist, Alice (Milla Jovovich) returns to continue her war against the Umbrella Corporation and the zombies and assorted mutants that their T-virus has unleashed upon the world.  It’s perfect material for a mindless blast through the undead hordes, but the director (Jovov, ich’s husband Paul W.S. Anderson) doesn’t even manage to rise to that level.

Huge chunks of the plot go unexplained (I assume to be tied up in yet another sequel) and the film doesn’t even manage to stick to it’s own tortured logic.  Alice, who has been steadily accruing super-abilities since the first film, is de-powered at the start in an apparent attempt to increase the suspense and make her a more relatable character.  And that would be fine, if she didn’t proceed to walk away from a helicopter which has ploughed into a mountain, display telepathic senses and swing from an exploding skyscraper roof having grabbed exactly the right length of (explosion proof) cable to hit the ground running.  It makes Bruce Willis’s Die Hard leap look strictly amateur.

Add to the mix a group of the most clearly stereotyped characters (will the all-American athlete pull through?  Will the weasely  Hollywood executive stab them in the back?), some atrocious dialogue and a story which manages to go from A to A over the course of 90 minutes, and you have the makings of one of the worst films I’ve seen so far this year.

So there you have it: a great experience with a terrible film for a bargain price.  Who could ask for more?

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Published:
09.24.10 / 6pm
Category:
Films