{"id":9730,"date":"2010-09-24T18:51:05","date_gmt":"2010-09-25T02:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9730"},"modified":"2010-09-24T18:51:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T02:51:05","slug":"resident-evil-afterlife-paul-w-s-anderson-2010-uk-germany-usa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=9730","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2010): UK, Germany, USA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Richard Feilden<\/a>. Viewed at West Wind Drive-In, Goleta<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If there is one thing that all of the film reviews on this website have in common, it\u2019s that they are all, well, reviews of films.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to change that.\u00a0 So, while this review will cover Resident Evil: Afterlife<\/a><\/em> (for the impatient, it\u2019s terrible!), I\u2019m also going to talk about the theater where I saw the film.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it let me fulfill a cinephile dream \u2013 I\u2019ve been to an American drive-in.<\/p>\n

Drive-ins are the stuff of legend.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But in their heyday the \u201cpassion pits\u201d 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.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 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\u2019s silvery light.<\/p>\n

However, after an absence of nineteen years, Goleta\u2019s drive-in reopened this summer, with double bill features playing for a little under $7.\u00a0 Tuesday nights are even cheaper.\u00a0 You get the sound through your radio.\u00a0 It\u2019s crystal clear, though obviously only in stereo.\u00a0 Just park your front wheels on one of the ramps, turn off your engine and lights and enjoy the show. \u00a0There are compromises of course \u2013 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 \u2013 but on the plus side, other people talking or rattling off messages on their cell phone will never disturb you.\u00a0 Overall, it\u2019s a great experience.<\/p>\n

And speaking of great experiences, I did promise a review of the latest installment in the Resident Evil franchise.\u00a0 It\u2019s a stinker.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It\u2019s perfect material for a mindless blast through the undead hordes, but the director (Jovov, ich\u2019s husband Paul W.S. Anderson) doesn\u2019t even manage to rise to that level.<\/p>\n

Huge chunks of the plot go unexplained (I assume to be tied up in yet another sequel) and the film doesn\u2019t even manage to stick to it\u2019s own tortured logic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And that would be fine, if she didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 It makes Bruce Willis\u2019s Die Hard leap look strictly amateur.<\/p>\n

Add to the mix a group of the most clearly stereotyped characters (will the all-American athlete pull through?\u00a0 Will the weasely \u00a0Hollywood 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\u2019ve seen so far this year.<\/p>\n

So there you have it: a great experience with a terrible film for a bargain price.\u00a0 Who could ask for more?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s that they are all, well, reviews of films.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to change that.\u00a0 So, while this review will cover Resident Evil: Afterlife (for the impatient, it\u2019s terrible!), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}