Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City

Valentine’s Knight

Resident Evil
Welcome To Racoon City
Germany/Canada 2021
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Sony Pictures

I’ve got quite a lot of time for the previous live action franchise based on the Resident Evil computer games, I have to say. However, they’re not sacred to me, perhaps primarily because they let me down somewhat. The second of the six was quite disappointing but the third, fourth and fifth ones were all, like the original movie, way better than that. Alas, the sixth and final one was a real franchise killer in that the plot twist, which would have been obvious in any film to spot, completely betrayed the continuity of the preceding five films and basically contradicted the motivation behind the events of the second movie. Thereby rendering both it and the whole franchise suddenly useless and nonsensical. Yeah, I think there are a lot of fans of the franchise that went completely nuts at how bizarrely, badly written the storyline of the sixth part was. You can read my reviews of those original six films here, here, here and here.

So, it’s time for a reboot with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racooon City. A reboot that was announced, I should probably add, while the sixth film was still playing in cinemas. So, yeah... I guess they knew it was a franchise killer even then.  

With this one, director Johannes Roberts takes it back to the roots of the game. As in, it’s a return to the horror elements that the early games in the series on which this was based are best known for. The original film series had taken a few key elements from the original stories in the games, kept the zombie body count element and then pushed it to its logical point... or rather, one of a couple of logical points. That is, it turned it into very much an action franchise with big guns and explosions and a few added horror elements. And I was fine with that and I guess a lot of other people must have been also... considering it ran for six movies.

With Welcome To Racoon City though, while there are certainly some big explosions and scenes of rat-a-tat-tat gunplay, for sure, it’s mainly not an action picture. Instead, the director slows things down and moves the camera around in a more exploratory manner, allowing the creepy atmosphere of a mostly deserted city (more like a small town, actually, I would say) to come forth. This one is obviously based on the first two games and, as such (and almost coincidentally, it seems to me), it also takes elements from the first two movies. So, the mansion house which leads into the underground Umbrella Corp complex is included, mostly in the final third of the picture and there’s a lot of just trying to survive the decaying town of Racoon City, as the population slowly ‘go zombie’ with the T-virus they’ve been infected with.

The cast of characters including many favourites from the various games such as Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Claire Redfield (played by one of my favourite up and coming genre actresses Kaya Scodelario), Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Leon Kenedy (Avan Jogia) are all cool and have good chemistry together, I think. Also, the creature effects in this one are handled a lot better than in, say, the second Resident Evil movie, where one of the big ‘man in suit’ creations was a huge let down.

And there’s some nice cinematography with some much brighter colours which really work in the darkness (the film is pretty much all set over one night) with occasional more subtle palettes sneaking in if a scene calls for it. This is coupled with some slower paced, leisurely camera movement and a director and DP who know how to calm things down to not break the atmosphere. For instance, sometimes they will wait for a character who is out of focus to wander into the focus of a shot rather than bring the camera in straight away to sharp focus on them, which is nice. Also, the use of verticals to separate screen elements is something this director uses from time to time with a nice bold choice of leaving two thirds of the frame in darkness around a doorway, for example, to focus the collective eye of the audience where he wants it, by deliberately withholding the detail of the periphery. Nice.

Another thing he does... and I personally first became conscious of this technique when I first saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho... is to give time checks to the audience with some very specific times as the movie progresses. There are a few reasons for this kind of tactic but the documentary feel that Hitchcock was going for is definitely one of them. By that I mean that telling us the time is 11.17pm subconsciously fixes the time frame in your head as being something real and therefore more believable, because, otherwise, you’d round it up every time, right? The other thing this does in this specific film is ratchet up the tension because it’s established fairly early on in the picture that the Umbrella Corporation are going to destroy both their old labs and the entire town at 6am the next day. So, yeah, we keep getting time checks until, the last one of 5.59am suddenly ticks over on screen to the 6am deadline.

And, yeah, it all works. It’s not exactly a scary film but it is genuinely much more atmospheric than the previous films in the first series and it also brings in little elements from the early games like the zombie crows, which is nice. It’s also nice that it’s set on the 30th of September 1998, which is the same year I think the original game was first launched (I had a Playstation version of... I think it was Resident Evil 2 but, I wasn’t much good at solving the puzzles and got frustrated at the limited ammunition they gave you to get past zombies with). So there’s some nice moments of ‘old school’ technology such as Claire Redfield using a VHS machine or nice touches of humour when her brother asks her, “What the fuck’s a chat room?”.

And I have to say, although I don’t think it did very well at cinemas (well, gee, I guess you shouldn’t have released it during a pandemic guys... maybe just stop releasing films for five years until we’re out of this, the audience will still be there, if they didn’t die from the real life C Virus), I'd have to conclude that I really had a good time with Resident Evil - Welcome To Racoon City and I would certainly be up for a couple of sequels if somebody would green light those please. My only two complaints are that, a couple of the screen transitions seemed a little sloppy on their timing and, well, good lord people, how long does it take for a crack police team to realise you have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it. Apparently forever, if you go by most of the characters here. But, yeah, those minor grumbles aside, I thought this slow burn of a movie was pretty great and a refreshing spin on the Resident Evil live action franchise. Fingers crossed for a sequel.

47 Metres Down

Eat Metres

47 Metres Down
Dominican Republic/UK/USA 2017
Directed by Johannes Roberts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Here be spoilers...
but I will warn you again before I get there.

There came a point around about halfway through Johannes Roberts' new shark bait movie, 47 Metres Down, when I realised I was sat in a dark room spending an awful lot of time watching dark water, floating bubbles and not much else. I chose to see this on a weekend where I just had to see the almost perfect movie Wonder Woman for a fifth showing (and counting... my initial review is here)... so that just left me one slot with a choice of two films which, quite frankly, seemed like a slow cinema weekend. It was either yet another teen killing, spooky haunted something or other presentation (which I may yet still manage to catch) or it was a shark movie. Since there haven't been that many shark movies in cinemas in recent years I opted for the latter but, in hindsight, that may not have been the wisest choice.

The film though, I'm happy to say, is certainly not populated by the vacuous, over-teened characters that the trailer makes out. Although my concerns over whether to two leading ladies were destined to be shark fodder or not was hard to judge, they at least weren't the kind of bratty, empty headed young party goers you maybe might have been expecting from something like this, I'm pleased to say. They weren't exactly greatly drawn characters either, for sure and the usual 'move fast, ask questions after the movie' Hollywood style short hand does still apply here but, at least I could imagine hanging out at a bar with the two main leads, played by Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, without making my excuses and leaving early. So that was okay. And as for the rest of the characters in the movie... barely traced outlines of shades of people, even in the case of the one 'star name' in the movie -  Mathew Modine as Captain Taylor - who spends most of the film as a disembodied but authoritative voice on a headset radio.

The plot set up is two sisters, one just coming out of a relationship break up, who go on holiday and end up meeting two guys who persuade them to do the latest, semi-legal tourist activity, being lowered in a human cage a few metres down at sea to look at the passing sharks. At this point, though, I was pretty much in the camp of... anyone who would put themselves in that kind of semi-risky situation in the first place deserves to be eaten.

So, yeah, the inevitable happens and the dodgy bit of string holding the cage in the water breaks. The girls and cage go tumbling down to the bottom of the ocean floor (or at least a ledge in his case) with only 30 to 50 minutes of air left in their tanks and with various obstacles other than just the man eating (and in this case I guess I should call them woman eating) sharks which are making periodic drive bys to see if their packed lunch has come out of the wrapper yet.

It's not the most boring of films and the director keeps things lively but, it's not the most intense either and it wasn't long until I came to that point which I mentioned earlier where everything was just dark (clearly shot in a tank) water and fizzy bubbles. In fact, the teal tension and unease in the movie, and it's not without those specific elements either, come from Tomandandy's score. Like the recent movie Dunkirk (reviewed here) the music is pretty much everything in adding a layer of menace to the proceedings and the scoring is, at the very least, a well functioning water beast that plays its part maybe more than it might honestly be expected to, truth be told. Apart, that is, from the terrible songs in the early parts of the film, both diegetic and non-diegetic, which almost made me want to swim to the nearest exit.


Spoiler Warning. Miss out the next
paragraph if you don't want to know.

Perhaps the most inspired part of the movie is the fake ending but, alas, the introduction to this sequence much earlier in the movie is clumsily handled in that it's badly telegraphed to the audience. There's a point where the good captain drops a couple of oxygen tanks for the girls and we hear his warning to the particular lady who has swum in range of his signal, that the reason he didn't drop them before is because there's a possibility the overuse of these may give them oxygen psychosis hallucinations. Now, come on, there's no way that would have been written into the script unless the writers were going to use it as a feature of the film later on in the 'story' and, sure enough, as I watched the girls float to their rescuers and get back on board the ship, albeit with some nasty but implausibly gentle (for a shark) wounds... I was thinking, yeah this isn't real... and it isn't. There's a nice effect with some blood on the hand wound of one of the leading ladies and it’s beautifully done as a reveal that half merges the hallucination she is having in her head with the reality of her situation (which is vaguely reminiscent of the ending of the original British cinema and home video cut of The Descent) but, like I said, you kind of know it’s coming so... nice idea but failed to make much of an impact on me, I’m sorry to say.

End of spoilers.


So there you have it.

According to the IMDB there seems to be a whole slew of technical inaccuracies, some of which, from what I could make out, would stop the possibility of the way this story might play out in real life in it’s tracks. I was interested in the fact also, that at the depth the main protagonists are in here, there is no light to give certain things the colours we know them as... so the blood should apparently look green to the human eye at this depth. I wouldn’t have known that unless I’d read it though because, clearly, the blood in this film is pretty red. This includes a ‘close but no cigar’ opening sequence where one of the leading actresses spills her red cocktail into the swimming pool beneath her as a not so subtle visual metaphor for what we are going to see later on. It doesn’t really work all that successfully as a moment of tension, however (which is what I suspect the director was going for there), because once you realise the girls are in a swimming pool, you know there’s no possibility of a shark attack happening at this moment.

And that’s about all I can say about this one. 47 Metres Down is a nice idea but it’s a limited one and the exploration of those story limits throughout the fairly short running time doesn’t serve to help put any real bite in the picture. It’s maybe a little better, or at least more credible, than the shark movie I reviewed last year, The Shallows (reviewed here) but ultimately I left the cinema a bit disappointed with it, I have to say. I’ve not seen any movies which truly measure up to the king of all shark movies, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and, in all honesty, this one comes nowhere near that in terms of quality and entertainment, as far as I’m concerned. Not the big fish I was hoping it might turn out to be.

The Other Side Of The Door

The Monkey’s Door

The Other Side Of The Door
2016 India/UK
Directed by  Johannes Roberts
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah, there are probably what could be
considered some very slight spoilers, for some, here.

When I first saw the trailer for The Other Side Of The Door a few weeks ago, it looked to me like just another in a long line of reworkings of W. W. Jacobs famous tale The Monkey’ Paw and, yeah... that’s pretty much on the nose as to what it is. Of course, it’s not like a lot of the other various 'labelled' movie and TV adaptations of this story over the years in that it goes very quickly past the last act of that tale as, I guess, you would expect it to in this day and age. This film does, though, exactly what I expected it to do... dispensed with the three wishes part of the tale and found a different means to bring the dead son back to... well not quite life... back to the undead, I guess.

The film replaces the monkey’s paw with a magic temple in India and, after a strong pre-credits moment when a girl on a beach turns out to be... something else... we have a fairly long ramble until we get to the point where the mother, after a failed suicide attempt, is tempted to bring her dead son back from the dead... by going to the temple. The rulebook on this one is that you scatter the ashes of your loved one outside the temple, where death and life meet, and lock yourself in. You will then, in the night, be able to speak to your deceased relative but, no matter how much they plead, you must never open the door to let them inside. So, yeah, the rule books are always thrown out the window in these kinds movies otherwise you’d have no story progression and this one is no exception.

Now, the film is fairly well made in some ways... the tension in certain sections is nicely ratcheted up and the director has a penchant for using any verticals he can find... trees, columns, fencing and even the corners of a four poster bed... using them to split the screen up into sections for the actors to play in. So there was definitely some nice stuff going on here but... and it’s a big but... while the atmosphere in some sequences works well, in other parts of the movie it tends to fall flat on its face.

For instance when the, at this point invisible, ghost son wants a story read to him in bed, a book drops off the shelf, the lights go on and a chair is invisibly pushed into place... and the movie completely loses any power it had to be creepy or eerie in these moments. Maybe it’s the suddenness and speed at which these incidents occur that was the problem but any slow build up to these moments are pretty much lost at these kinds of points in the film. It’s too well lit, it’s too fast and it’s downright comical in some places, it has to be said.

Another thing that seems a bit 'off' in this film is the timings of some of the shots. There are plenty of moments in this movie where the director is trying to scare the pants off you via jump scare tactics and, yes, he uses all the clichéd set ups you would expect in a horror movie, good or bad. I have no problem with the film taking the obvious route in these kinds of situations because, done well they can really work. The trouble here, though, is that they aren’t done that well in a lot of places... some of them work and have the desired effect but at other times, not so well. For instance, there’s a transition moment from one quiet scene to another where the shot starts with a large flock of birds taking flight, loudly on the soundtrack. Now that’s obviously supposed to be a big scare moment but... yeah, it just doesn’t work. The timing is all wrong it seems to me... can't quite explain it but maybe the editing lingered just a beat or two too long to get the required jump. Usually this kinda thing works on me... and it did in some of the other parts of this movie... but here, nothing.

One of the big saving graces of the movie, apart from some beautiful scenic shots of India and the performances by Sarah Wayne Callies, Jeremy Sisto and Suchitra Pillai as the mother, the father and the wise housekeeper, is Joseph Bishara’s score to the movie. It’s nicely unsettling and this, at least, goes a lot of the way to supplying or bolstering the required tension in certain sequences. Of course, this composer has a particularly good track record in composing for horror scores, with his three Insidious scores (movies reviewed here,  here and here) and his scary sci-fi score to Dark Skies (movie reviewed here), which is a pseudo horror film in itself. He’s a composer who I feel really raises the stakes when he works on one of these things and this movie is no exception. I’m hoping this one will at least get a CD release somewhere down the line so I can hear it divorced from its context. Bishara does this stuff pretty well.

However, all the music, beautiful photography and fine performances in the world can’t stop The Other Side Of The Door being as obvious and light weight as it is as a horror film. I think the editing on this one might have helped enormously if it was drastically trimmed in places but, asides from not quite working on some of the jump scares, it also feels a little bloated in places and uneven in pacing in certain areas. Also, I’m pretty sure most people watching will see the very last scene of the movie coming way before it happens. It’s a well done moment but... totally expected and, although clichés like this can work, I think using it here just feels like a final slap in the face. I would imagine if you’re a young teen and you’ve not seen these kinds of horror movies before then you might find yourself surprised and, possibly, even frightened in places on this one but, for the majority... no. I reckon seasoned horror fans certainly won’t find an awful lot to get their teeth into here either. A really nice try but... just not enough subtlety or tension, I suspect. Perhaps don’t necessarily be tempted to look beyond the other side of the door of your local cinema screen if there are other films you want to see out there at the moment. You’ve been warned.

Storage 24

Store Wars

Storage 24
2012 UK
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Unstoppable BluRay Region B

I was kinda desperate to see this movie when it first came out at the cinema... but it was only around for a very brief run, from what I can remember. There was no way I could make an opportunity to see it in the two days I might have had a shot at catching it at that time... even if I’d have known it had already come out. Luckily, the second hand DVD exchange shop in Soho came to my rescue and I was able to pick up this Blu Ray for £4. So that’s handy, then.

I quite like the work of Noel Clarke... who starred, produced, came up with the story and wrote an early draft of this screenplay, from what I can understand. I especially liked his movie 4,3,2,1, which you can find reviewed here. Storage 24 is his take on the whole sci-fi/horror cross-over genre and, although I found it quite entertaining, I think it also has a few problems, if I’m going to be fair.

The film involves some people in a 24 hour storage for hire place in Battersea (I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of places popped up in various locations over the years) and involves a group of friends and acquaintances who are helping Noel Clarke’s character Charlie, and his latest ex-girlfriend Shelley (played by Antonia Campbell-Hughes), go through their joint stuff in storage and sort it out. However, a plane crash in London has caused the storage facility to go into full lock-down mode, with shutters which are only temporarily repaired and reopened to let a couple of the main characters into the storage facility before... yeah, you guessed it, locking down on them again.

As it happens, this storage place is not a good place to be at the moment because a hungry alien behemoth was in a crate in the crashed plane and it has now promptly escaped and is busy using the film’s main location as an “all the humans you can eat” buffet... and that’s the plot. And it’s an okay set up, to be fair. A nice way of getting all your creature fodder together in a confined space so your lead monster can pick them all off while they react to their new situation and work through their personal issues as they are now forced to become heros and villains to each other.

So far so good. Let’s have a look then. Okay, so the good things about this movie are...

Well the performances are mostly pretty good. Noel Clarke is someone who I would expect to turn in a good showing but most of the supporting cast are pretty cool too. Not all of them, to be sure, but that might be more to do with some of the lines of dialogue given to some of them rather than the actors themselves.

You also have some nice little nods to the history of the genre, with some very specific shout outs to the ALIEN franchise in particular. For instance, there’s the engineer who is called in to get the doors working and who then goes down into the dark basement wearing a cap which is the dead spit for the one Harry Dean Stanton wears in Ridley Scott’s original classic. So you know full well what’s going to happen to him.

And this films very own version of an air vent scene, as Charlie and his friend Mark (played by Colin O'Donoghue) are trying to get into various storage bays to tool up with some weapons whilst simultaneously avoiding the nasty beastie hunting them. That’s a pretty nicely photographed sequence actually and, although obviously another nod to ALIEN, it also put me in mind of the  sequence with Sean Connery stuck in the air ducts in Dr. No (reviewed here)... but with much different sound design.

Now I heard a criticism from a friend of mine who said the monster in this lets the film down. I’d disagree with that to a certain extent. I think the make up, prosthetics, CGI or however this one is done is all fine. I think what lets the film down in regards to the monster is that it’s just too damn well lit. Most horror directors know the advantage of only showing little bits of the monster for most of the key scare scenes because, no matter how good or physically scary your monster is, it’s nowhere near as threatening as what your own imagination fills in on the blanks between shots. I think I could have done with seeing a lot less of this guy as the film progressed and would have preferred some seriously groggier lighting during some sequences.

The other thing I think lets this film down to a certain extent is the pacing. Now I’m all for horror movies to be very slowly paced and with nothing much happening apart from the key scare moments... but this one seems to be lingering too long in certain sequences and, although I was personally surprised that this leisurely pace wasn’t working during the first half of the movie, it... well... it just wasn’t. Can’t quite put my finger on why but I felt that certain of the scenes just needed to be a little punchier. Maybe more cross cutting between places might have helped... it just felt too drawn out in certain scenes and my mind went wandering when I should have been more fearful of what was coming next. If you look at a movie like The Descent, for example, they may employ cheap shock tactics in a lot of it but the timing and pacing are absolutely spot on and it’s become a modern horror classic because it just does what it does so well. Here, I dunno... maybe the editing is at fault? Whatever the problem... it is too protracted during sequences and that, ironically, loses the suspense and anticipation when it should have been highlighting it, I feel.

But there’s some nice quirky stuff going on too. A sequence where the monster is somewhat taken aback by a “woofing” mechanical dog in a toy container, for example, or the fact that some of the character arcs don’t quite go in the way you’re necessarily expecting them too (which is always a good thing). There’s also the final shot which shows something I’d already thought of about what’s happening in London outside of the storage facility during the running time, but i’d dismissed it as a real possibility. However, the last shot definitely changes the playing field for our “heroes” in this one and it’s nice that they ended on this idea. It could have been worse.

Ultimately then... for me... Storage 24 is more of a comfort horror movie. Something you screen during a horror all nighter if you want to give your audience a little break from the intensity for a while. If you’re into these kinds of movies then there isn’t really a great deal to complain about here and it’s certainly not going to be a waste of your time to give this one a spin when you get a chance... before you drop it into storage.