I join “CTV News Toronto at Five” with anchor Zuraidah Alman to talk about the charming “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom,” the historical drama “The Weight” and the bloody good time of “Resident Evil.”
Watch the whole thing HERE! (Starts at 12:01)
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser. Directed by Zach Cregger.
REVIEW: Set during one dangerous night, the reimagined “Resident Evil” begins with on a regular day for medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams). Asked to do one more run, he agrees when he finds out, “It’s outside the zone, so it pays double.” As night falls, he sets off to Raccoon City General, precious cargo in hand, as a viral leak from pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Umbrella Corporation turns people into violent mutants.
As the infected hunt for humans, Bryan tries to stay one step ahead during the chaos, as Umbrella attempts to contain and cover up the epidemic. Using borrowed phones Bryan unsuccessfully tries to contract the police and explain to his unimpressed girlfriend why he’s detained.
With his life hanging in the balance the bumbling Bryan must turn from hapless to hero.
“Resident Evil” delivers the thrills and gore you expect from “Barbarian” and “Weapons” director Zach Cregger, but it is its dark sense of humor that surprises. Darkly funny, the movie offers laughs and jump scares in equal measure as Bryan narrowly escapes the perils of a post infection world.
Horror fans will appreciate the genuinely creepy atmosphere. It’s a dark world that allows Cregger to explore the nasty stuff hiding in the shadows, showing just enough to set the viewers imaginations on fire.
When we do finally get a look at the tentacled creatures—think John Carpenter’s “The Thing”—or an acid-vomiting zombie, or the bloated blood sacs, they provide a primal blast of old-school horror that’s the good gory stuff horror fans buy tickets to see.
In other scenes when people get shot or squished, infected or otherwise, they don’t simply lay down and die. Instead, they explore in a fireworks pattern of plasma and viscera. It’s wet and squishy enough to make you simultaneously cringe and cackle.
At the film’s heart is Austin Abrams as everyman Bryan. He doesn’t have a lot of meaningful dialogue, he mostly mumbles to himself in frustration, but as a good guy in over his head, he’s easy to get on side with. Abrams, who is on screen for 95% of the film’s brisk 90-minute runtime, carries the movie with an exasperated everyman charm.
“Resident Evil” is a straightforward movie. Cregger, working from a script he co-wrote with Shay Hatten, keeps the story simple, refusing to let the action get bogged down by backstory or exposition. It’s an uncomplicated story of survival, buoyed by gloriously grotesque effects and a winning lead performance.
“What we do know, is that in order to become sick you have to first come in contact with a sick person or something that they touched. In order to get scared, all you have to do is to come in contact with a rumor, or the television or the internet.”
Sound familiar? No, it’s not a ripped-from-the-headlines excerpt from a CDC speech. It’s a quote from “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 all-star “Towering Inferno” of germ movies.
If “Jaws” kept people out of the water “Contagion” should have kept them from touching their faces. The average person touches their face upwards of 3,000 times a day, and in the world of “Contagion” everything that comes in contact with your skin — an elevator button, a glass at an airport, a handrail on a ferry — could be fatal. In our world of big diseases with little names like COVID-19, SARS and H1N1, germs are the new Frankensteins.
The movies have used microscopic germs and viruses as bogeymen for years, leaving us with a plethora of topical films to stream during quarantine and self-isolation.
“28 Days Later” begins with a great horror movie premise. A group of British activists free infected animals from their cages, unleashing a deadly “rage” virus on the human population. It is a full-blown Halloween flick, complete with drooling angry zombies, (although most of the horror here is psychological) but at its core it is also a compelling study of human nature and the will to survive.
“The Crazies,” a remake of a 1973 George A. Romero film, is the story of a virus that turns the inhabitants of a sleepy Norman Rockwell town into koo-koo bananas killers. It’s a classic tale of “us” versus “them”, with an extra “them” thrown in for good measure.
“Pontypool” is about a disease that turns regular people into flesh eating creeps, but it’s more about how they became that way than the eerie aftereffects of the sickness. Set entirely inside a small radio station in the basement of a church, the story focuses on announcer Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and call screener Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) who use eye witness accounts to slowly piece together the horrible story that is happening outside their doors. When the reports turn ominous Mazzy realizes he is at the center of a big story and keeps broadcasting. What he doesn’t realize is that, perhaps, he is helping to spread the disease.
“Pontypool” is a movie set in a radio station that plays like a radio show. By and large the action is described and for once the old cliché that what you can’t see is more terrifying that what you can actually see rings true. Couple that with a mounting sense of doom and you have an edge of your seat thriller.
“Outbreak” features germs of a less speculative type. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman star in this 1995 film about an outbreak of a fictional Ebola virus called Motaba spread in the States by a white-headed capuchin monkey. If the contagious simian looks familiar, no wonder. It’s Betsy who also appeared as Ross’s pet Marcel on “Friends.” The sitcom spoofed Betsy’s work in the disaster flick by showing the monkey on a poster for a fictional film called “Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan.”
Michael Crichton dreamt up the idea for “The Andromeda Strain” when he was still a medical student. The story of a deadly alien virus was inspired by a conversation with one of his teachers about the concept of crystal-based life-forms. His novel was a bestseller and the author — who would later go on to write the sci-fi classics “Westworld” and “Jurassic Park” — actually makes a cameo appearance in the hit 1971 film of the same name. He can be seen in the scene where the star of the movie, Dr. Hall (James Olson), is told to report to the government’s secret underground research facility to study an outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in Arizona.
More down to earth is “The Cassandra Crossing,” a big budget disease-on-a-train flick. This time it’s not an extra-terrestrial virus, but a plague contaminated terrorist starting all the trouble. Structured like a “Love Boat” episode, with an all-star cast that mixes and matches Sophia Loren with O.J. Simpson, it has none of “Andromeda’s” serious edge, but for sheer cheesy fun it can’t be beat.
Medical mayhem rules in “Warning Sign,” where an experimental virus turns people (including “Law and Order’s” Sam Waterston) into rage filled maniacs, a plot echoed in “Resident Evil” when a virus gets loose in a secret facility. “The T-virus is protean,” says the Red Queen, “changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill.” “The Thaw” sees Val Kilmer unleash a prehistoric plague when he discovers a diseased Woolly Mammoth carcass. Eli Roth gave new meaning to the term cabin fever in his virus movie of the same name and the film “Doomsday” sees most of Scotland devastated by a deadly germ.
Predating all of them was “Panic in the Streets,” a low-budget film noir set in 1950s New Orleans. In it, a doctor and policeman (Richard Widmark and Paul Douglas) have just 48 hours to track down an illegal immigrant infected with pneumonic plague and stop a possible eruption of Black Death. Made during the Cold War, the rapid spread of the infection plays like a paranoid metaphor for the proliferation of Communist ideology. Despite this subtext, director Elia Kazan said: “This isn’t very deep. It has other virtues. It has lightness of foot, it has surprise, it has suspense, it’s engaging.”
These days watching the news can feel as though we’re watching a scene from one of these fictional bacteriological horror movies come to life. As alarmist as the films may be, they occasionally offer up some good, simple advice in the face of a pandemic: “Stop touching your face, Dave,” says Dr. Erin Mears in “Contagion.”
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
It’s said the people of Pompeii regarded the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. with “a response more of curiosity than of alarm.” The volcano had burped and belched as many as 50 times over the years, so most of the city’s 20,000 citizens didn’t pay attention when Vesuvius started to gurgle.
Perhaps they were too busy visiting one of the city’s many brothels — like a proto-Las Vegas, this was the richest city of ancient times, ripe with amenities and vice — or enjoying their lunches of broad beans, olives, dormice (plumped up by chefs in terracotta jars) or even garum, made from the first blood of a still-gasping mackerel, to detect the cloud of deadly volcanic ash headed their way.
By the end of the day the dust “poured across the land,” claiming 2,000 lives. Buried beneath, “a darkness… like the black of closed and unlighted rooms.” The remains of Pompeii and its people were preserved, left untouched for two millennia.
Today the ancient city of Pompeii is one of the most popular attractions in Italy, drawing almost three million tourists annually. But if you can’t make it to the Italian region of Campania, a new movie aims to recreate the experience for you.
Pompeii stars Kit Harington, Carrie-Anne Moss, Emily Browning and Kiefer Sutherland in a love story about a slave-turned-gladiator (Harington) who must rescue his beloved, Cassia (Browning), before a rolling mountain of lava and ash dooms her to the ages.
The big action adventure take on the story directed by Resident Evil helmer Paul W.S. Anderson has an ancestor in The Last Days of Pompeii, a 1913 silent sword-and-sandal movie based on the Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel of the same name. That book has been remade eight times.
The most famous version came in 1959. The big budget CinemaScope production was to have been directed by Mario Bonnard, but when he fell ill on the first day of shooting, screenwriter Sergio Leone (who would go on to make classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) stepped in. It’s big on pageantry, just as the advertising taglines would suggest. It’s a “Fiery Summit of Spectacle,” the posters screamed, promising an inside look at, “the City that Lived in Sin and Died in Flame!”
Certainly it’s more puffed-up than Up Pompeii, a 1971 Frankie Howerd comedy that featured a speech by emperor Ludicrus Sextus during Vesuvius’ eruption.
“I say, Lurcio, how did my speech go?” he asks his servant as the city crumbles.
“Master, you brought the house down!”
