Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Extinction

Film: Resident Evil: Extinction
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I’d love to say lots of nice things about Resident Evil: Extinction, but that’s not the world that we live in. As much as I am personally and oddly fascinated by the career of Paul W.S. Anderson and as much as I will apologize for a lot of his films, I can’t bring myself to say a lot nice about this film, which was written and produced by him. There is a sense to this film that the story isn’t really that important, and even the franchise doesn’t matter much. Instead, the entire point of the film is about spectacle for its own sake.

I promise I’m going to go into some detail on this, but I want to set a sort of general idea of what I’m talking about first. Resident Evil: Extinction is a collection of scenes that are connected to each other, and there is a semblance of plot here, but very little sense of the larger story or the reality of the world that the film wants to exist in. It’s an odd little snapshot that exists for its own sake without a sense of anything larger. Things happen because they would “look cool” on screen. Stupid decisions are made for the sake of spectacle with no sense of reality, even the reality projected by the film series.

Ten Days of Terror!: Razorback

Films: Razorback
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

When Spielberg made Jaws, he changed a great deal of things in the movie industry. The first thing he did was create the idea of the summer blockbuster. Whether that has been for good or ill I leave up to the individual. The other thing Spielberg did was create a series of Jaws knock-off films involving other elements of nature going berserk. These sorts of stories certainly existed before Spielberg. The ‘50s were rife with giant insect and creature films. But Jaws gave use a world where the reality didn’t need to be changed; it was just a really big shark. From that we got movies like Grizzly and Piranha, and we still get them in films like Anaconda and Lake Placid. Razorback, from the mid-‘80s, is an Australian Jaws that replaces the shark with several tons of aggravated and presumably delicious wild pre-bacon.

The film starts with our introduction to the creature. Kangaroo hunter Jake Cullen (Bill Kerr) is watching his grandson when his house is literally run through by the razorback in question. It runs off with the child, presumably to eat it. What follows is a trial where Jake is found not guilty because of a lack of evidence, but has his reputation and life destroyed. In no small part, this feels like the story of dingoes running off with a baby that led to A Cry in the Dark.