Video game movies♒ have a long history of being, well, let’s say, slightly sub-par. There’s a whole ream of explanations for this, from video game narratives being dependent on interaction to games having premises that are frankly dull if transferred to a passive medium like cinema. Then there’s the issue that games characters are often left with blanks, allowing us to project ourselves into them more readily. Sometimes, however, the games can’t take all the blame. Just look at the rancid touchstone that is the first true game-based cinema flop: Super Mario Bros. Despite featuring some top talent in the form of Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper, and trying to take the frankly non-existent story from the franchise and beat it, like cinematic ironmongers, into a cohesive film, it failed horrendously. The number of positive reviews it received, at least from major reviewers, could be counted on one hand. It is singularly atrocious.
The Resident Evil movies? They’re a rare beast in that they started out on the right foot. The first movie is a kind of fun popcorn horror movie; not smart in the least, but certainly not terrible. Then the sequels came. Oh, so many sequels, all more tragic than the last, each one getting more and more desperate, reaching for some kind of cinematic approval in an industry so full of zombie films that the dead almost 🌜outnumber the living. In this article, I’m going to take a look at the films’ production, and find surprising secrets that may go some way to explaining their progression into farce.
25 ꦏ Magical Disappeari🦋ng Makeup
Earlier we ꦕtalked about some basic continuity errors with the hair colors of Jill Valentine across the franchise. She’s far from the only character to have experienced these baffling errors though. In the first movie, Alice seems to have…some issues with her makeup. When she’s walking through The Hive, her makeup changes from shot to shot, with the most obvious mistake being the constantly-changing shade of her lipstick. It’s not only the first film that saw the director apparently throw the concept of time out of the window.
In Extinction, Alice can also be seen wit♍h lipstick donned while in her red dress, but it disappears in the next scene. Putting on makeup in the apocalypse is to be applauded enough, but why does it keep changing?!
24 Through 𒉰The Lo𒆙oking Glass
There are quite a few interesting comparisons to be done between the original movie and Alice in Wonderland. The first of many of this undead Dark Side of the Rainbow-style saga is obvious: the main character is called Alice. The first film’s hostile AI is called the Red Queen – in Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen famously shouts “off with her he♋ad!” In the movies, the Red Queen uses the laser hallway to cut off, well, more than just a head. Kaplan can be read as the white rabbit, eternally worried about time, while Spence can be seen as the Cheshire Cat, getting Alice into difficultไ situations.
This comparison seems more than a little intentional too, and is made explicit with the death of Lisa Addison, killed with an Alice in Wonderland paperweight.
23 ꦺ A Cursed P🦂roduction
Some films’ productions seem cursed from the off. There’s the notorious case of The Omen, which saw numerous crew injured and even finales, and it seems like Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was one such movie. In one horrific incident, a stuntwoman, Olivia Jackson, lost her left arm after a motorbike chase scene went wrong during filming, and Jackson was hit in the face by a camera while traveling at high speed. 🔥Later in production, another crew member, Ricardo Cornelius, was killed in another tragic accident. Cornelius was standing near a Humvee which had not been correctly attached to a rotating platform, when the vehicle fell off its stand and crushed him against a wall. He later died in hospital. Sometimes film sets can be extraordinarily dangerous places.
22 𒊎 Continuity Errors 🥀Ahoy
Continuity errors can be small, or they can be far, far bigger. Take, for example, the scene in Commando, where John Matrix’s Porsche suddenly repairs itself in between scenes, or the error in the famous apartment scene in Pulp Fiction, where bullet holes are in the wall behind Jules and Vincent before any shots are fired. This one in Resident Evil is a bit of a glaring er🍌ror, and suggests that the film’s directors weren’t paying very much attention to their work.
In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Sienna Guillory had dyed her hair black while playing the role of Jill Valentine. However, in the next films in the series, Sienna is back to her natural shade of blonde. Ar🍨e we to suppose that somehow, while traveling around the infected world, they kꦫeep stumbling across boxes of L’Oreal dye?
21 𝔉 Reuse Is Better Than Recycling
Sometimes, when you’re filming a film that’s relatively low-budget, you’ve got to be smart about your budget. In Resident Evil: Retribution, this involved several scenes from Afterlife 💜finding their way on to the screen for a second time. Patient zero of the T-Virus in Japan, the anonymous “J-Pop Girl” is seen to attack a businessman in both movies, with the same sequence being used in each. The scene of the serum flowing through Alice’s system is also the same in both movies, as is the scene with the Osprey aircraft approaching the Arcadia.
Retribution isn’t the only film in the series which does this either. Apocalypse uses a whole sequence from its predecessor. I know that sometimes flashbacks serve as a stylistic choice, but this🍌 doe♓s rather reek of corner cutting.
20 Hurting For Your 𝔉Art
Normally if you see an actor or actress getting cut up in films, you may think to yourself “wow, that makeup is good/awful,” depending on how convincing the wounds look. Not so in the original Resident Evil film, where the movie’s lead, Milla Jovovich, did all her own stunts, resulting in the myriad cuts and bruises you can see on her body over the course of the film. Regardless of the quality of the finished product, you’ve got to respect an actor who iဣsn’t scared of getting their hands dirty for their art.
It does, however, raise an interesting point on continuity. As most 🍒films don’t shoot their scenes in chronological order, are there scrapes in the early scenes which aren’t there in later ones? I’ll leave that to someone who likes the films more than I do to find out.
19 Cleanliness Is Next 🎀To Dogliness
Zombie dogs are the bane of everyone’s life in the Resident Evil franchise. Whether bursting through windows or simply looking gross, they’re a rapid, efficient and terrifying enemy. In real life though? They’re still dogs, and as sucܫh, good boys. When the Dobermans were having the makeup applied, the artists found that there was a key problem with their plan. However they applied the fake blood, prosthetics, and false skin,💯 the dogs would find a way to get it off them again, licking and shaking off the artists’ good work.
How they managed to make them behave in the end is unclear, but the result is one of the standout scenes from the fir💝st movie, and a great call back to the franchise’s beginnings in gaming.
18 Always A Bad Sign 🐓
There’s a couple of ways to tell that a movie is going to be bad before actually seeing it. Maybe the promotion around the film has been focusing on a ten-second celebrity cameo, rather than the film itself. Maybe the film’s extremely short and has a bunch of “stars” that you’ve never heard of. Another surefire way? See if the producers allow critics to see it. If they don’t put on press screenings, you just know it’s going to be an absolute stinker, or at least, the people behind it don’t think it’s going to be. Resident Evil: Extinction was one such film.
It may not be abortively bad, and, in a cer🎐tain frame of mind, it can be entertaining, but nobody expects it t𝓰o win the Palme d’Or, and the studio knew it.
17 Not Dressed For The Weather 💧 ღ
Films often love to show off the, let’s say, assets of their main cast. The Resident Evil franchise is no different. As we previously mentioned, there’s only one franchise that doesn’t show Alice completely unclothed in one scene, but when it came to Apocalypse, the 🧸crew decided that Milla and Sienna would need an excuse to wear skimpy clothing. The reason given in the film is that there’s a heatwave occurring in Racoon City, which would be all fine and dandy were it actually filmed in summer, and ideally, somewhere warm. Yeah, there’s one little hiccup: the filming actually took place in Toronto, and in November. I’ve got to imagine that the pair of them were more than a little chilly under that Canadian winter sky.
16 🅷 Lights, Camera, Gunshot
Films are probably the most expensive form of entertainment that humanity has ever conceived. They frequently cost millions, and occasionally, hundreds of millions of dollars, all to get the seats filled. Do you know what makes them even more expensive? Accidents during filming. Take, for example, the accidental destruction of a camera during the filming of Resident Evil: Afterlife. During one scene, Milla Jovovich was required to shoot an appar🦹ently live round, and ended up peeling the cap o🐟f a $100,000 camera. I guess she needed to work on her aim a little after that.
As far as expensive bloopers go, it beats the $40,000 guitar which got smashed during The Hateful Eight’s filming, but is still dwarfed by the $200,000 model ship which Adama smashed in the Battlestar episode “Maelstrom.”