Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

 

In the 1980s, Claire Redfield and her older brother Chris are children living at the Raccoon City Orphanage. Claire befriends Lisa Trevor, a disfigured girl who has been experimented on by Dr. William Birkin, an employee for the Umbrella Corporation.  Birkin oversees the orphanage and takes children for his own experimental research. Claire escapes from Birkin when she is selected to participate in one such experiment. 

In 1998, Claire returns to Raccoon City in search of Chris, whom she wants to warn about Umbrella's experiments.  But Chris, now a member of the Raccoon City Police's "STARS" team (basically, think SWAT) isn't home.  He's at a diner with his colleagues; one of whom, rookie Leon S Kennedy, notices that the diner's owner has blood coming out of her eyes.

Yep, Claire's made her return to Raccoon City at exactly the wrong time, with her warnings about Umbrella Corporation experiments coming too late to prevent the apocalyptic mayhem of zombies, monsters and evil conspiracies that is about to lay ruin to the whole place.  Claire and Chris and Chris's STARS team buddies all soon find themselves in a desperate battle for survival.

Welcome to Raccoon City represents a reboot of the Resident Evil franchise at the cinema, jettisoning the increasingly muddled chronology of the six Milla Jovovich films in favour of ... well, an entirely new muddle, to be honest.

I've never played a Resident Evil game but a little reading online informs me that this movie essentially structures a composite plot from the first two games. This was a mistake that leads directly to the film's core problem: there is too much going on and not enough happening, both at the same. 

A significant contributor to this issue is that the cast is too big.  The script tries to wedge in too many "iconic characters" from the game series, resulting in none of them getting to actually do anything very interesting because the movie simply doesn't have time for that.  It's too busy introducing them all, and giving them each their own plot-lines (and their own "big action scenes") to give them time to just be people we get to know and want to see succeed.  Which is a shame because there are several actors here whose other work I have enjoyed in other projects.  With more focused material, they could have made this a far more engaging watch.

The film makes other odd scripting choices, as well.  For instance, Leon S Kennedy, a recurring protagonist of the video game franchise, is presented here as an incompetent putz.  He's frequently incapable of performing even simple tasks, and on several occasions acts in the kind of ways that would normally mark a character as "destined to die".

I'm also not a fan of the score.  It is rather over the top at times.  There's also a recurring effort to "ironically" juxtapose popular songs with scenes that feel thematically opposite.  This can work really well when done sparingly, but the frequency of going to that well here came across to me as a case of "trying too hard".

Welcome to Raccoon City falls short of the first Milla Jovovich Resident Evil film in pretty much every regard. Technically I guess some of the CGI is better, but it's been 20 years, so it should be! Even then, the basic designs are not especially interesting. The final monster in particular is completely generic.

Ultimately, very forgettable stuff.

Ice Cage (2017)

 

A group of people wake up naked in a snowy wilderness, with no clear idea of how they got there.  They stumble their way to an isolated log cabin.  Inside, they find underwear, a dead woman, and a note.

According to this note, one of them killed the woman.  They have until 5pm to work out which of them it was, and punish that person with death.

Is one of them really a killer? Can they find a way out of this predicament? Who brought them here?  These are all questions that seem  impossible to answer, but they are going to have to try.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that each of the people in the cabin attended an erotic party the previous night.  Their reasons for being at the party vary wildly, as do their responses to their current situation.

Naturally, as time elapses and stress mounts, their differences of opinion on what to do grow starker and more embittered.  They've already been told that one of them must die ... but will it end up being more?

This film can also be found under the title Snowbound, which is how it is listed on IMDB.  It's a low budget, high concept thriller-style 'horror' film.  

Like a lot of such films, I think it struggles to deliver on the promise of the premise.  As I have noted before, writing good endings is a lot harder than coming up with an intriguing initial hook.  The basic scenario is an interesting one, but I was less convinced by the resolution. I can see that they were going for psychological horror, "what would you do if your life were on the line?" but the actual scenario presented seems implausible, and the ending lacked clarity.

An area for which I have seen the film criticised is the acting.  I think this is a little unfair.  It is evident that English is not the native language of many of the cast members, which is a significant impediment.  Given that significant disadvantage I think they do a solid job.  They emote reasonably effectively, if sometimes in ways that feel a bit "stagey".  Probably a bigger issue for me is that the majority of the characters they are playing are not very likeable people.  It's difficult to care much about the fate of most of these folk.

Production-wise, it's clear that the film-makers have worked hard to minimise costs where they can.  Some of the methods used are obvious techniques, such as limiting the cast and sets. The film has only a quite small number of speaking roles and almost all the action happens either in the cabin, in the woods directly outside, or in the mansion where the sex party took place - basically just three locations.  There are some more sophisticated and clever cost-cutting strategies, though,  I particularly liked the use of a model of the cabin, owned by the 'mastermind', to stand in for the cabin itself at times.  This allowed them to tell us what was happening in the cabin without avoid the need for expensive effects.

The cinematography - by Halayna Hutchins, who would be tragically killed in 2021 in an on-set accident on the film Rust -  is a strong point.  It's well thought out and executed.

As an example, as noted in the synopsis, the entire cast starts nude.  But if you came for the titillation, you will be likely disappointed by the opening sequence.  The cinematography here eschews ogling the actors' bodies, while also nimbly and cleverly averting overly blatant contrivance to avoid incidental skin.  There's little sense of artificiality, which shows care, attention and judgement.

There is more overt nudity later, in the flashbacks to the sex party.  This may be a positive or a negative, depending on your perspective. Also, while I have no first hand experience of sex parties, I doubt that anyone would be allowed to wander about with a mobile phone so obviously!

Ultimately, this is probably one to watch more for the potential of the ideas than the actual execution of them.

Death Ship (1980)

 

There will be some spoilers in this review.  I doubt it will hurt your enjoyment of the film at all, but still wanted to warn you in advance.

Captain Ashland is a sailor of the old school. Prickly and a tad officious, he deeply resents the schmoozing of passengers required by his job as master of a cruise liner.  So it's perhaps for the best that this is his last cruise before retirement, after which he will be replaced by his more personable first officer, Trevor Marshall.

Marshall, for his part, has invited his family along to see his elevation to the top job; perhaps not the most diplomatic of gestures to the older man.

But such questions will soon be relegated to very low priority: late one night they detect another ship on a collision course with their own vessel.  Not only does this other craft not respond to attempts to communicates, but every time they adjust course to avoid a collision, it adjusts its own to ensure they will crash. And indeed, despite everyone's best efforts, the two vessels collide, sinking the cruise ship and taking with it most of her crew and passengers.

The next day, a handful of survivors - Ashland, Marshall and his family, and a few others - are adrift on a large piece of wreckage when they come upon a black freighter.  They celebrate their apparent good luck and, eager to meet the crew of the vessel and secure assistance, climb aboard via a ladder that has been conveniently slung from the stern.

Their celebrations, of course, are premature.  There seems to be no-one aboard this mysterious craft, and it soon becomes apparent that not only did terrible things once happen here, but that their band of castaways may soon become merely another set of victims of this Death Ship ...

This film is part of the 'possessed machine' genre of horror, in which apparently normal machines become imbued with an malevolent intelligence that allows them to operate themselves and wage war against humanity.  Other examples of the form include Killdozer and Christine. Also at least three other films based on Stephen King short stories, come to think of it.  The man loved his killer machines in the early days of his career.

The big challenge of the concept is frequently "how do these machines actually operate?"  This often leads to absurd answers, such as the scenes in Trucks where vehicles adjust their wing mirrors to "watch" people, or ... well, trust me when I say that Trucks has some spectacularly silly ideas.

Death Ship also feels pretty silly at times, generally whenever it goes for its more contrived elements, such as the scene where the ship "makes a snare" for someone.  The film is much more effective when it keeps things simple: there's a scene of metal doors just slamming shut behind a character, for instance, works well.  I admit that this is technically no more realistic, but it doesn't as obviously jar as "impossible" because of course, in the real world, doors do sometimes suddenly slam shut, such as from a gust of wind.

The film's biggest problems, however, are the pacing and the characters.  The former, in particular is a real weakness.  Even at a mere 90 minute run time, the movie feels very drawn out.  It has extended and closing opening sequences that don't really add much to the main story, and that main story is itself very lethargically told.  The film is full of slow motion scenes, lots of footage of machinery in operation, and a number of events with no consequence other than to fill time, such as when one character is grabbed and locked up ... and then she just immediately gets free without any real effort.  What was the point of that?

And then there are the characters.  To be fair to then movie, it allows them to start to twig "this is a bad place to be" pretty fast, but it is transparently obvious which of them are going to survive, and it seems to actively sabotage any possible interest it may have built in the others.  For instance, early on, I was very pleased with how proactive and sensible the character Lori was.  It was a particularly nice surprise given her introduction suggested she was in the movie mainly to do the sexy stuff.  But having subverted expectations in a good way, the film simply backflips and says "nope, we did just hire her for her bosoms, and now you've seen them, she can be unceremoniously killed off"

And then we have the main "hero"; who at one point in the film jumps a guy twice his age from surprise, and still gets his butt kicked. An action hero, he most definitely is not!  He's so ineffectual, in fact, that his blatant plot immunity becomes particularly irksome.

Ultimately, the primary entertainment here is from unintended comedy. Which to be fair, is sometimes quite a lot of entertainment. Still, not recommended unless you've a real passion for such nonsense.

Prison of the Dead (2000)

 

Four former high school friends - Kristof, Michele, Allie, and Rory - travel to a funeral at the remote Hawthorne Funeral Home, built atop the old Blood Prison: a brutal jail built by Puritan extremists specifically for the torture and execution of "witches and heretics".

The funeral is for their friend Calvin, who was part of their high school circle.  All five members of the group were once amateur Paranormal Investigators, but have since found other interests.

Soon after their arrival, Calvin reveals himself to actually be alive. He faked his death on Kristof’s behalf, as the only surefire way to get the others to come.  Why was this gathering so important?  Well, Kristof‘s father - a confirmed sceptic of the supernatural - recently bought the Funeral Home and set up a contest: $1 million to anyone who can prove the existence of a reputed supernatural artefact known as the Talon Key.

Kristof intends to win the contest before it begins. Not for the money, which he instead offers as inducement to the others, but because he has daddy issues that he needs to resolve. 

Although annoyed at being duped, the others now have one million reasons to stick around and go along with Kristof's plan.  Of course, the problem with trying to prove that the supernatural is real, is that you might find the demonstration of that proof quite unpleasant ...

Let's start with the headline item: this is not a very hood movie, and I can't honestly recommend you spend your time on it.

The biggest problem?  It's a 70 minute film and pretty much nothing happens until around minute 40.  That's criminally slow pacing in such a lean run time.  Mind you, even when things do happen, it's mostly just possessed people sitting there calmly and quietly while zombies kill them.  Which is not as exciting as the film makers presumably thought.

"Not exciting" is unfortunately a theme of the film.  The end's a complete cop-out: one character basically pulls out a "stop all this supernatural nonsense" magic doodad, and the film stops.

Speaking of cop-outs: the movie uses the old "mucking about with a ouija board turns real" schtick, which is a bit like claiming that playing Monopoly will turn you into a real property baron.  And having the script acknowledge that ouija boards are just party games - as is done here - does not excuse using one in your séance scene.

So are there any pluses to the film?  Well, I'll give it credit for being unusually LGBTQ positive.  Bisexual male representation is a rare thing in movies in general, even today.  To see all three of the "main" male characters in this - a 20+ year old horror film - be presented as less than 100% straight is quite notable.  Even more so when you consider that two of them are pretty openly acknowledged as (former?) lovers.

I also quite liked the motivation the film eventually ascribes to the murderous zombies.   It's more complex than the usual "killing things is just what zombies do" paradigm.  There's even the potential for a good quandary in it.  This is not the movie to deliver on that potential, though.

The Blob (1958)

 

Teenagers Steve and Jane are kissing at a lovers' lane when they see a meteorite crash beyond the next hill. Steve goes looking for it, but Barney, an old man living nearby, finds it first. When Barney pokes the meteorite with a stick, it breaks open and a small jelly-like globule blob inside attaches itself to his hand.  This is intensely painful, and it won't come off, so Steve and Jane rush the old man to the local doctor's.

The Doctor has never seen anything like it, and sends Steve and Jane back to the impact site for more information.  Which keeps them out of the building just long enough for the blob on Barney's hand to grow exponentially, absorbing first the old man, then both his nurse and the doctor himself.

Steve and Jane get back just in time to catch a glimpse of what happens to the Doctor, but the local police are understandably skeptical of the teens' wild story, particularly when a visit to the Doctor's house shows no sign of the Blob or its victims.

Fortunately for the town - and for that matter, the whole human race - Steve and Jane are the kind of young go-getters who refuse to have their tales of alien monstrosities ignored.  They continue their efforts to raise the alarm.  Of course, that makes them unpopular with their parents and the police.  More importantly, it also puts them right in the path of the Blob itself.  Will their heroic efforts end up leading to their own demise?

The Blob is perhaps best remembered today for the fact that it stars a pre-fame Steve McQueen in the leading role.  I have to say, he is not a particularly convincing teenager ... probably because he was nearly 30 at the time of shooting!

The acting in general is a bit dodgy, to be honest: a lot of the line delivery feels a little bit "local drama society" in quality.  This is of course not surprising for a cheaply-made science fiction film of the era.  And it was cheaply made, with a budget that, if converted to today's dollars, would only just break the $1 million mark.  For comparison, the current day value of the budget of the 1988 remake would be about 25 times that amount.

Mind you, if you're only going to see one version of this story, I'd definitely give the nod to the more expensive film.  It's a fun ride with some great, gross and goopy effects.  This movie is a lot more restrained, due to both its budget and cultural expectations of the era.  I do have to acknowledge though that this film's effects team did a solid job.  The depiction of the Blob itself is actually pretty good, even if the amount it is shown is necessarily limited. The team have made clever use of scaled sets, reversed footage and varying camera speed to create the visual effects.

On the script front, I liked that one of the local police officers is very level-headed and willing to give "the kids" some latitude.  This makes a nice change from the usual uncooperative or even outright counter-productive authorities seen in many films. The script of this movie is notably more trusting in the government than the remake is, though it does also squarely put the 'hero' role on the 'kids': they are the ones who realise what is going on and alert the town, keeping the death rate lower than it might otherwise have been.

Lower body count than the remake and less overt humour, but still fits in a few sly gags amidst its kills

Overall, this movie was goofy fun, and it was interesting to see how scenes from this are echoed in the remake.  It's got less overt horror and comedy than the later film, but still fits some gags and a few (for the time) thrills into its runtime.  I enjoyed myself, and think this is worth a viewing as an example of 50s 'teen horror' films.  But it's a one and done thing. I would happily watch the 80s version again, but I don't think I could say the same about this one.

Valentine (2001)

 

At a junior high school St. Valentine's Day dance in 1988, social outcast Jeremy Melton asks five girls to dance. The first three reject him spitefully and cruelly. The fourth, Kate, politely responds "Maybe later". Jeremy eventually gets a positive answer from the fifth girl, the overweight Dorothy, and the two end up making out beneath the bleachers.

However, when the school bully and his pals discover them, Dorothy falsely claims Jeremy sexually assaulted her. The bully and his pals publicly strip and severely beat Jeremy. The only one punished for these events is Jeremy himself. Those first three "mean girls" testify against him for "unwanted sexual advances", and he ends up in reform school and juvenile hall, and ultimately a mental institution.

Thirteen years later, in 2001, the bully and his pals have all died in unknown circumstances. When one of the five girls - the first Jeremy asked to dance - ends up murdered, the other four are contacted by police. At first, they are sad about the death but see no connection to themselves: their former friend had moved away for college and they didn't have much contact.

But when all of them except Kate receive threatening Valentine's cards, each signed "JM", they understandably become alarmed. Jeremy Melton appears to have vanished; all traces of him scrubbed from records. Is he now hunting them all, one by one? Is he perhaps already involved in their lives in some way, under an assumed identity? Or does the killer have other motivations and is merely using those long ago events as cover?

To be honest, you probably won't care about the answers to those questions, because this is not a very good film.

The simplest example of the film's failings is that on several occasions the detective investigating the case mentions facts that he could not know unless one of the other cast members told him, which we've not seen anyone do.  Now yes, this can just be explained as "well, someone told him off-screen", but it could also be a subtle hint that he's secretly the killer.  Or it could be a cheap trick to mislead the audience into thinking he's secretly the killer.  Or it could just be a bad editing job.  Without giving spoilers, I can say that I don't consider any of those to be good film-making choices.

Speaking of the detective, he's also rather creepy in his sexual fixation on the women in the case; but then, every single male in this movie is in one way or another a creepy scumbag of some kind. Probably this is to create as many suspects as possible, but it's a very lazy way to do it.

This also tries into another aspect of the film where it's not clear what the script is trying to do.  Is trying to be a "post-modern" slasher by deliberately making the killer's motivation be about women who weren't sexually available?  Or is it just an accident that the film represents a different kind of toxic masculinity?  The latter seems more likely to me, as little suggests that this script is smart enough to be a deliberate commentary. And if it is the former, it's not very well done.

Left unstated in the above is my fear that the truth may actually be that the writers were oblivious to the awfulness of their male characters.

That's all very well, you might say, but what about the kills?  If a slasher movie has good kills, much can be forgiven!  Well, on that front, Valentine does at least offer variety.  The killer lacks any specific murder method, employing different techniques for different people.  In a smarter film, these methods would all have an obvious correlation to previous events, but here I saw only once case where the means of death was something of a callback, and that was pretty thin. The lack of a motif or connection is a bit disappointing.

Then there's the final showdown of the film, which is preposterous in conception and works only because the script says it does. It's like the scene in City of Lost Children where a thousand things have to go exactly right to save the day, except without any of the self-aware glee of that scene.

Valentine is memorable mostly for a brief appearance from a pre-Grey's Anatomy Katherine Heigl. She plays the first on-screen murder victim, who chooses the world's worst hiding place when pursued by a killer. 

The Belko Experiment (2016)

 

Mike Milch and the other US employees of Belko Industries in Bogota, Columbia, arrive at the building one day to find unfamiliar security guards turning away the local Colombian staff at the gate.

Mike and his colleagues are bewildered but not excessively alarmed by this phenomenon, even though the usual head of security has no idea who the new guys are, or why they're turning the Colombian staff away.  These colleagues include new employee Dany Wilkins, who reports for her first day on the job and is told that a tracking device is implanted in the base of every Belko employee's skull "in case something happens to them".

As you have no doubt surmised, Mike, Dany & Co. really should be alarmed. Once all the employees show up, a voice on the intercom instructs them to kill two of their co-workers, or else there will be consequences. Several staff attempt to flee the building, but steel shutters seal off the walls and doors, locking them all in. They ignore the announcement at first, believing it to be just a sick prank, but after the set time ends and two people have not been killed, four employees die when explosives hidden in their trackers detonate and blow their heads apart.

And this brings us to the meat of the movie, as the mysterious voice orders increasingly brutal actions on the part of the employees.  It is not long battle lines are drawn between those who - with varying degrees of reluctance - decide to save themselves by doing as ordered, and those (led by Mike) who insist on trying to find some other way out of their predicament.

The Belko Experiment was written and produced (but not directed) by James Gunn, and features a talented cast that includes Michael Rooker and Gunn's brother Sean, both of whom are frequent collaborators of his and who are instantly recognisable these days for their work on the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

Of course, The Belko Experiment is a very different kind of movie to those MCU offerings.  And in my opinion, not overall as successful a film.

It starts strongly, introducing several characters and - with one exception that I will discuss later - giving us some insight into who they are before things get nasty.  The start of the experiment itself is also very punchy and effective.  Fifteen or twenty minutes into this film, I was looking forward to a tense, claustrophobic pressure cooker like Cube.

The problem is though is that the movie doesn't seem to know what to do next.  It basically just repeats the same scenario - kill your colleagues in the hope it will save yourselves, or pay the consequences - without much to vary it up.  Yes, there are some wacky hijinks with Sean Gunn's character, and we have Mike's efforts to find a way out of the experiment, but these don't take up that much time - most of the movie is just about separating out 'people willing to commit murder to save themselves' (all middle aged white guys in management positions, which seems about right) and 'those not willing to do so'.  Also, given horror film tropes, I felt the ending was pretty much the most formulaic and predictable kind of way they could have wrapped things up.

The final problem with the film is Dany's role within it; or perhaps her lack of one.  Her introduction suggested to me that there was something going on with her beyond the apparent, an impression reinforced by the amount of time and attention the script gave her ... but there's not an actual pay-off to this. I guess the 'weirdness' of her introduction was just to show she felt uncomfortable with Belko's tracker, or something like that?

This movie is generally effective in the moment to moment, but ultimately didn't hold together that well, for me.