Part 3: Acknowledging “Special Effects” in Movies & TV

Part 1: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/11/metacinematic-moments-acknowledging.html

Part 2: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/11/acknowledging-special-effects-in-movies.html  

Last time I ended by talking about found footage films and mockumentaries, but one of the first found footage horror films ever made is actually an intriguing example of effects that came off looking too real to some viewers. Cannibal Holocaust (1980) contains footage of real animals getting killed, which is utterly deplorable, but there’s also a horrific shot of a woman who looks to have been impaled on a wooden pole—or was she? In reality, the actress sat on a bicycle seat atop a pole and a piece of wood was set in her open mouth to look like it was going through her body. It was all trickery and no humans were actually killed in the making of the film, but the whole thing was so convincing that the director went to trial for the potential murder of real actors. That story has aided in the film’s potent reputation as one of the sickest Italian horror films ever made.  

Halloween (1978) is credited as being the slasher film to really popularize the sub-genre, but also blamed for the flood of slashers that came in the 1980’s. Halloween itself became a franchise, and in Halloween II (1981) we get a false scare with a trick-or-treater wearing the Michael Meyers mask. It’s not the real Michael Meyers, it’s just some guy dressed the same (who is then hit by a car which blows up, for some reason) and it’s just one example of a slasher movie where the “real” killer is impersonated by another person. It also goes the other way where the “real” killer is mistaken for an imposter by a character (who usually ends up being a victim). This happens in the Halloween franchise, too, and famously in the Scream franchise. Scream (1996) goes even further than any slasher movie before it when Billy, who has been suspected to be the killer throughout the film, is seemingly killed, but not long after it’s revealed to have been a fake death. The blood on his stomach is fake, even though it looks the same as the blood that’s spilled when all the other victims are murdered for real.  

Another instance of a horror sequel mixing “real” blood and guts and scares with staged ones is Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), a meta-follow-up to the previous six Nightmare on Elm Street movies. New Nightmare takes place one step away from the reality of the sequels, but still in a realm of fiction. In this world, the Elm Street movies are nothing more than just movies, and we see filmmakers shooting a new fake sequel in the beginning of New Nightmare, but then it turns out that Freddy Krueger is real and the horror that happens later is real for the characters. This meta-cinematic technique was used in a similar way by Wes Craven again with Scream, and it leads me to the next type of movie that often acknowledges special effects.

I think we’ve covered enough horror movie examples that deal with these particular kinds of meta movie moments, but there are still many more films in other genres with moments like these. Movies that are about making movies are often the ones to do the dance of featuring effects that look convincing on top of commentary about shattering the illusion. This is different than mockumentaries or found footage films. I’m talking about fictional films where the characters in them are making a film. In Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005) Carl Denham asks his lead actor Bruce Baxter to get in the shot with the Brontosaurus herd because he doesn’t want people to think they are fake (to which Bruce says “Nobody’s gonna think these are fake!”) and what’s interesting is the original King Kong (1933) never had a moment like this even though the premise is the same. Ironically, the CGI stampede that ensues in Jackson’s version looks pretty phony in some shots, even for 2005. It would have been really neat if he had included footage doctored to look like authentic film stock from a 1930’s movie camera with the CGI dinos inserted in there to add a little more authenticity and be a visual throwback to the original’s black-and-white 4:3 format, but that might’ve been tough to accomplish in a truly authentic way.

Birdman (2014) is an interesting one, because it establishes a pretty realistic world, with some surreal elements infused in creative ways. We know Riggan is an actor and he’s famous for playing the superhero Birdman, we know how the effects for his stage play are accomplished (such as the wig he wears and the fake prop gun and the blood squib to make it look like he shot himself), but is he really levitating in his dressing room? Did he actually throw the Birdman poster into the wall using telekinesis? Those surreal moments really were accomplished with CGI, but in the context of the movie it’s unclear much of the time if what’s happening is in Riggan’s head or not, so once again it doesn’t shatter any illusions, because it’s all technically an illusion. Birdman is all kinds of meta, right down to the casting of Michael Keaton as Riggan.

I’m going to end this three-part essay with the TV show that got me thinking about these meta movie moments in the first place, and it’s the best modern example I can think of that strikes the perfect balance of winking at the audience and taking itself seriously. Amazon Prime’s The Boys (2019-present) takes place in a world where superheroes exist. It’s not a wholly original idea—in ways it’s reminiscent of the graphic novel Watchmen—but in this fictional reality people aren’t just saved by heroes, they react very much like people in the real world do to superheroes: by purchasing truckloads of merchandise, going to conventions, and seeing films depicting their heroic adventures. Sometimes The Boys gets a little too real with its commentary on today’s media consumers, but as I said, it strikes the perfect balance.

Dawn of the Seven is a big part of the first three seasons of The Boys, a film-within-the-show depicting the origin story of mega-conglomerate Vought’s superhero team. Instead of using actors, Vought Studios uses their actual employed superheroes, and create the rest of the film in the same way real studios create real superhero films, with green screens, fake explosions, and sets. The characters in the show know CGI exists. The Deep references how it might be used in security footage at one point. I found this detail fascinating, even though it might seem like a tiny trivial one, but the thing is that this show relies heavily on CGI in every single episode and yet drawing attention to itself in this way doesn’t take me out of the show.

The use of visual effects in The Boys is so effective that it sustains this unique in-between-reality where fakery exists but real heroes can destroy buildings and run incredibly fast and rip someone’s head off, and when they do those things there’s never a question from the audience about it being legit. The logical part of my brain knows Homelander isn’t really able to fly, but the characters in the show know he really can. When they see him fly over to a crowd of protestors their reactions are genuine. They can also distinguish between these “real” moments and when he’s in the movies produced by Vought that have visual effects involved, and when we (the viewer) see clips of these movies they look different and we understand the difference. What happens in those clips isn’t entirely real, to anyone. Homelander may be flying, but the background is a green screen. But, when Homelander uses his powers on real people in the real world, the reactions of the observers, the way these scenes are shot, and the depiction of the violence is all done in a way that’s convincing and doesn’t make me pause and think about how it’s all actually fake. It blurs the line to the point that I don’t see or even think about that line as the drama and action unfolds.

I like to think about special effects when I watch a movie or show, especially when the SFX are a main part of the draw, or a focal point for the entertainment/storytelling. I know not everyone likes to think about them; some people don’t care, others only like it when something looks 100 percent real, and some people, like myself, enjoy SFX even when they don’t look that believable. Movies and TV shows are supposed to be entertaining, and the different ways some stories play with the believability of what they are depicting can be a source of entertainment for me, but sometimes it can annoy me or make me roll my eyes.

I think the best point I can end this long essay on is this: if you can trick the audience into believing something is real when it’s really not, go with it. Don’t let the air out of the balloon, keep it floating. It’s one thing when Deadpool talks to the audience and makes a joke and winks and reminds us none of it is real, but it’s another thing when he thinks the action scene he’s in is just happening on a green screen only for him to realize all the explosions are actually real in his world and he gets blown up. It’s a balancing act, and as I think I’ve made clear, it’s also a case-by-case basis for how effective pulling back the curtain can be. Don’t draw too much attention to something in the wrong way, or else you might break that trust between the viewer and what they are viewing. We know none of it is real, but only remind us of that in the right ways.

Acknowledging “Special Effects” in Movies & TV: Part 2

Part 1: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/11/metacinematic-moments-acknowledging.html

 

Last time, I introduced the Hollywood cliché of characters in a movie thinking something created with special effects for the scene is, indeed, a special effect, and the characters think it’s fake before discovering it is actually supposed to be real. I gave a few examples, but this cliché extends into other similar meta-movie-territory, which we’re about to explore further.

First, let’s look at another example of the annoying old cliché from an otherwise good horror movie. In the seminal werewolf film The Howling (1981) Dee Wallace’s character turns into a lycanthrope on live TV during a news report, and in the last scene we get to hear/see the reactions of people who were watching the report at a bar. They think it was done with special effects and therefore not real, and I always felt like this ending undercut the whole movie, in a way. Some find it to be a darkly comedic end, but I found it made me think none of it seemed that real in retrospect, and shatters the illusion that had been sustained up to that point. The werewolf transformation midway through is one of the best ever done in a film, but that joke at the end just reminds me that all of the effects, despite their incredible realism, aren’t real at all.  

I don’t think I could talk about a topic like this and not at least mention M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), which has a big twist ending that makes the whole movie fall apart: the monsters that the characters thought were real all along were just people in costumes meant to keep them too scared from leaving their little village and discovering they were actually living in isolation in the modern day all along. It could have been an interesting idea, but the execution was handled rather unskillfully. The monsters don’t look bad, per say, and it’s actually an inversion on the cliché: instead of thinking a real monster was fake initially, the characters thought a fake monster was real.

As I think I’ve already made clear by this point, this cliché is usually something that happens in horror movies, specifically movies that have monsters or weird creatures, but it also happens in other genres, and in big productions, too. Remember when eagle-eyed fans spotted the Infinity Gauntlet in the background of the original Thor (2011)? Discussions online concluded it couldn’t have been the real Infinity Gauntlet, but it re-appeared in Thor: Ragnarok (2017) a number of years later, after we had seen Thanos put on the real Gauntlet in the post-credits scene of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). In Ragnarok, Cate Blanchett’s character Hela walks up to the Gauntlet in Odin’s treasure room and pushes it over, declaring it to be fake. This is a unique example of the filmmakers actually acknowledging something the fans had originally pointed out as being phony, even though I think the original intention in the first Thor was just to feature it as a fun Easter egg and not draw attention to it in a later sequel.

In some comedies it often works when jokes are made about the special effects because we may already not be taking it as seriously as a pure horror or sci-fi or action film. In Zombieland (2009) the makeup effects for the zombies are juicy and gross and quite well done, and when our heroes encounter Bill Murray (as himself) in his mansion for the first time, it seems like he has joined the legions of walking dead—but he’s actually not infected! He’s wearing makeup to blend in (I love his line about adding a little licorice “for the ladies” to his look) but his makeup isn’t too close to the way the other zombies look, so it doesn’t make the “real” zombies look less real.

Zombieland is still a horror-adjacent comedy film, though. Here’s a non-horror example of a character thinking something is an effect and then realizing it’s not: when Jim Carrey’s character Bruce Nolan at first thinks he’s being pranked by some guy claiming to be God in Bruce Almighty (2003). He believes the mile-long filing cabinet containing every piece of information about him is an illusion, he looks for a seam or a hollow spot on the wall, and as the scene goes on he comes to realize the guy is God and everything that he’s seeing is legit. Of course, for audiences watching, the effects are clearly movie trickery, and this is from a time when comedies were beginning to use more CGI to achieve these visual tricks.

Spoof films will often point out the fakeness of their own effects for comedic effect. The Scary Movie franchise is a great example of this, especially the first Scary Movie (2000). The killer stabs Carmen Electra in the breast and rips out her silicone implant. That is just one of many instances of exaggerated special effects, which only got more extreme with each sequel. What about when special effects-heavy movies that are intended to seem believable make fun of effects from other movies? Going back to Jaws for a second, in Back to the Future Part II (1989) Marty is walking around Hill Valley in the year 2015 and sees a hologram of the shark from the fictional sequel Jaws 19. He screams as it chomps him, then it vanishes into pixels, and he says “Shark still looks fake.”

Speaking of Jaws, the cliché happens (albeit in a much subtler way) in another one of my favourite films of all-time. Spielberg did it more explicitly in Jaws with the fake fin prank, but he also snuck in a similar meta moment in Jurassic Park (1993). When the lawyer questions park founder John Hammond about the scientists working in the lab during the initial introductory tour, Hammond says “There are no animatronics here. Those are the real miracle workers of Jurassic Park.” While those actors playing the scientists were real people, in reality, most of the actual dinosaurs in the movie were animatronic, created by effects legend Stan Winston. It’s a tiny moment, but still hinting at the true nature of these lifelike prehistoric animals. The reason the animatronic dinos work so well is because the characters interact with them in such meaningful ways, and they’re shot so well you don’t really question how they were brought to life, they look real, plus the way they are blended with the cutting-edge CGI sustains the illusion in a way hardly any other dinosaur films have been able to. Like I said before, this cliché doesn’t automatically ruin a movie for me.

Men in Black (1997) does an interesting reversal of sorts by acknowledging when something mundane that isn’t real is trying to look like something that is real. In the opening scene Tommy Lee Jones’ character Agent K identifies a weird-looking person who then turns out to be an alien in disguise. Our eyes can tell the imposter is initially played by a real actor, but then when the alien gets revealed it’s shown to be holding a fake human head on a pole, and when it cuts to close-up the animatronic human head looks almost like the real thing, but we can tell it’s not quite real, and the effect works, to the uh, well, the desired effect! The alien, on the other hand, is a practical effect when close-up and CGI when further away or in motion, but the SFX hold up pretty well today, and that is true overall of all the other effects throughout the movie. This trick was done in a similar way in the original Total Recall (1990), as well, with Arnold Schwarzenegger hiding in a robotic body of a large woman, though not as seamlessly.

These meta moments usually happen in small ways—maybe they pass by with a line of dialogue or a brief shot—but a couple examples I thought of take a broader approach. In Return of the Living Dead (1985) a character in the opening scene acknowledges that Night of the Living Dead (1968) was just a movie, but it was based on true events (which isn’t actually true), and in the context of this scene and beyond it works, because at no point in Return of the Living Dead is the reality of any zombie stuff that happens questioned. It’s one thing to reference another film as having been fake, but it’s another thing entirely to reference what is in the movie as it’s happening as fake, or potentially fake. Another example similar to this is how main character David Kessler is familiar with the original Wolf Man (1941) in An American Werewolf in London (1981), making multiple direct references to it, but it never undermines the credibility of the “real” werewolf lore David comes to learn about.

So, what about the sub-genre of “found footage” films? Everything is supposed to be taken as “real” even though none of it really is, but The Blair Witch Project (1999) cleverly avoided showing anything that might have been easily identified as a moviemaking illusion. Remember the part when they reveal some bloody human teeth wrapped in cloth left behind by the Blair Witch? The teeth they used for that shot were real teeth. In Blair Witch (2016), the sequel that tried to keep that same level of realism, we get an actual glimpse of the Blair Witch, and it’s clearly fake, accidentally ruining the intent of making us feel like we are watching footage someone had recovered as if it were authentic, almost like a documentary.  

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) is a great example of a mockumentary, which presents a fictional tale in a documentary format, and it makes fun of the horror genre as much as it celebrates it. The monsters in the movie live in our real world, so in much the same way that Zombieland’s Bill Murray cameo is an example of fake effects in an otherwise convincing reality, What We Do in the Shadows plays with the idea of the monsters sometimes being viewed by characters in the movie as fake, even though they aren’t. The TV series of the same name has even more jokes and references of this nature. I’ve focused more on movies than TV in the first two parts of this essay, but it happens in TV all the time, too, and a TV example is actually what inspired me to write this whole thing in the first place. I will cover that and more in the final part, coming real soon!

Metacinematic Moments: Acknowledging “Special Effects” in Movies & TV (Part 1)

 

An aspect of filmmaking that I often comment on when I do a review or analysis is special effects. Ever since I was a kid I have found special effects in movies fascinating. I got a DK hardcover book in elementary school called Special Effects in Film & Television from the book fair and it revealed some of the secrets behind Hollywood’s greatest cinematic illusions. That was my introduction, answering some of the questions I’d had about movies, and making me think about aspects I’d never even considered. How, exactly, did they make it look like a giant monster was destroying Tokyo in Godzilla? How are rain and snow effects created on an in-door set? What is the process for bringing a stop motion character to life? These questions and more were answered, and as I built up my DVD collection in my teen years I became more and more fascinated with the behind-the-scenes extras that revealed secrets about the making-of process.

One of the newer special effects techniques in that book was computer generated imagery (CGI), which was just getting its legs in the years prior to when I was born, and during my infancy and toddler years was when CGI learned how to run. But, nowadays, it isn’t special. CGI is used in everything, and special effects in general have lost their wow factor and become an expectation. You much more frequently hear about when a movie has bad special effects than you hear about a movie’s SFX looking unique and eye-popping. But, as digital artists continue to push the envelope to create more and more realistic-looking creatures, environments, and even fully-formed people that exist only in the virtual world, the line between what was a digital special effect and what was an effect done in front of the camera continues to be blurred.

Kevin Peter Hall: the man behind the mask in Predator

 

What I wanted to explore in regards to special effects though is something that has often bugged me in a number of movies. When we (viewers) sit down to watch a movie, we generally know what we are going to see is not actually real, in varying ways. Aliens are not actually invading earth, a cyborg from the future hasn’t actually travelled back in time, and a masked killer isn’t really murdering a bunch of teenagers. But, we suspend our disbelief to enjoy the entertainment. What happens sometimes is a movie will take a second to acknowledge its own fakeness, if you will. Let me explain with an example.

An unsuspecting young woman is walking through the woods. Let’s imagine her as the typical blonde-haired, blue-eyed, big-breasted archetype often seen in your average horror movie. She hears a sound behind her, looks back while still walking forward, and bumps into a ten-foot-tall reptilian monster out of your worst nightmare. She is initially startled, but then she looks the creature up and down, and smirks as it just stands there, looking menacing. “Nice try,” she says. “That’s a pretty good costume. Look at it, all detailed with scales and everything. I bet that blood smeared around those teeth is just ketchup, though.” The creature grabs her by the throat and lifts her off the ground. She gulps, realizing the creature isn’t a guy in a suit, it’s real, and she screams before being devoured.

The "Horrors" of Horrorland in Goosebumps

This is a made-up example, but I bet you can imagine a scene like this playing out in a B-movie with a monster like that. I know I can easily imagine it—and yet, when I tried to find some specific examples like this from movies of that type to support my dislike for this cliché, I was astonished to realize it’s tough to find very many. I guess the reason is because it’s not a cliché I like, and I’ve probably only ever seen it in crappy movies and shows I tried to forget about afterward. It’s something that definitely cropped up many times in shows and movies I watched in my youth. I’m talking about the genre of Young Adult horror that was a safe level of scary, with monsters and scares and creepy stuff but not too much murder or gore or genuine terror. In the TV series Goosebumps (1995-1998), an adaptation of the youth horror books of the same name, characters made this same mistake more than once, such as in the two-part episode “One Day at Horrorland” when a family goes to a horror theme park. When they get there they think it’s all just fake, but the monster masks are on a little too tight…because they aren’t masks, the monsters are real. Anyone with a set of eyes can tell with one look though that they are just cheap Halloween-costume-quality masks on actors playing monsters.

Here’s another slightly different example from a real B-movie. A group of tourists are on a sightseeing adventure in the desert lands surrounding the little town of Perfection, Nevada. These tourists have heard about the worldwide phenomenon that is the Graboid: a giant prehistoric species of worm first discovered in Perfection that put the town on the map and became heavily marketed. There are comics, movies, and souvenirs, but the tourists want to see a real, living Graboid, and on this tour in Perfection you might just get the chance. Their tour guide, Jack, spots a puff of dirt behind some bushes—it’s a Graboid! The tourists freak out and he drives away, but the Graboid pursues them, knocking down fence posts in the same way they famously did when the Perfection residents first encountered them. But, this is a staged Graboid encounter, Jack’s buddy helps him create fake evidence for their staged arrival, and the phony tour helps Jack cash in on the Graboid craze. Later, a real Graboid shows up during a routine tour, and Jack at first thinks it’s another staged scenario, but then he realizes it’s real and his friend has been eaten, and naturally he freaks out.

Someone being eaten by a real Graboid in Tremors 3

 

If you aren’t familiar with the series, this scenario is what plays out in the third Tremors film, Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), and the “fake” encounters emulate some of the memorable moments from the original film, but unlike the original, these staged tours are just supposed to seem real, not actually be real, so then when the “real” Graboid encounter happens, Jack recognizes it as real, even though we as viewers can tell the effects to create the fake Graboid encounter are basically the same as the effects to create what’s supposed to be the real encounter, the only difference is we don’t see the Graboid animatronic or full CGI creature in the fake encounter.

What am I getting at here? Well, I don’t usually like when movies or shows use special effects and portray them within the movie as being real, but characters mistake them at first for what they are: special effects. They think what they are seeing isn’t genuine, then all of a sudden they realize it is genuine and they get scared and/or killed. It messes with the illusion too much for me, and the Tremors 3 example is along the same lines as this cliché, but bugs me in a slightly different way. In the original Tremors (1990) everything to do with the Graboids is real to the characters, so even if the SFX don’t always look completely convincing we can at least suspend our disbelief because the characters in the film believe what they are seeing. In Tremors 3 the division between what is real and what is fake in the world of the movie is clear enough, but to the viewer it all looks fake, so it makes the “real” moments come off as phonier than if there was never any fakeness or trickery to begin with.

The pranksters in Jaws

This cliché doesn’t always ruin a movie for me, though. Let’s consider a moment from one of my favourite movies of all-time: Jaws (1975). Two kids use a fake shark fin to prank swimmers, and the first hint we get that this fin isn’t the fin of the real shark is when it seems to move backwards just before it flops over and the kids pop up. Another indicator is the music, or lack thereof. Director Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams also cleverly used the famous theme music only to indicate when the shark was actually present, and the music doesn’t play during this fake out, but then when the “real” shark swims over a minute later, the music helps us know this time the shark is not a fake. Again, this is about drawing a distinction between what is supposed to be real in the reality of the movie and what is actually a special effect. Viewers are supposed to believe the shark that goes after Chief Brody’s son and his friend is a real shark—even though behind-the-scenes photos and videos show that it was really just a robotic shark that didn’t even have a full body below the surface of the water.

Skeleton on strings in House on Haunted Hill

Fake outs like the shark fin prank had been done lots of times before Jaws, in plenty in horror movies, both those meant to be taken seriously and those less serious ones. In the original House on Haunted Hill (1959) one of the most classic movie monsters terrorizes a woman in the climax: a human skeleton that has somehow come alive! But, as we see not long after this scary moment, the skeleton was just on a bunch of wires being controlled by Vincent Price off-screen. The Haunting (1963) took a similar route in trying to explain away the supernatural occurrences in the supposedly haunted house the characters are staying in with logical reasoning, but to a much different (and scarier) effect than Haunted Hill.

One of the earliest examples I can think of for a movie/TV show shattering its own illusion of danger is Scooby-Doo. It has been a staple since the first series, Scooby-Doo: Where are You! (1969-1976), for the gang to unmask the seemingly supernatural antagonist as part of the conclusion. This isn’t really an example of actual special effects being pointed out, per say, since it’s all animation, but the reveal at the end of every Scooby-Doo episode is that the monster the gang thought was real was just some person in a rubber mask or costume, and that trope continued into the animated films—

The "real" monsters from Scooby-Doo

—that is, until later made-for-TV movies featuring the Great Dane and his pals subverted expectations and introduced in-world real monsters. The most notable of these early films for me was Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988), but the first Scooby-Doo movie I saw where the monsters were real was Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998). This concept was later used for the first live-action movie, Scooby-Doo (2002). The first monster the gang encounters is fake, but the ones they encounter later are not—yet they are rendered in poor CGI, so the illusion doesn’t work, especially when Velma tries to pull on the monster’s face like it’s a rubber mask.

This topic is such a broad one with so many different examples that I’ll have to make this is a multi-part essay, so stick around for part two coming soon!

Top 10 Funniest Resident Evil Movie Moments: CCC Issue #91

After re-watching all six Resident Evil movies for last month’s Sequel-a-Thon, I realized as I started writing the reviews that there are so many funny moments in those movies (a couple maybe intentional, most unintentional) that I couldn’t possibly do all of those moments justice by just including them in the reviews, so I neglected to mention many of them in order to cover all of them here, and count down to the funniest Resident Evil moment of all. Full spoilers for the movies ahead, and if you haven’t checked out my reviews, I’ll link them below. Here are the top ten funniest Resident Evil movie moments!

 

 

10. The Final Recap – Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

First up is the opening of the last film, which recaps all five movies that came before it. By this point you would think viewers know well enough what happened, but I guess they included one for any potential viewers who missed the last movie or haven’t seen any of them before, and to maintain consistency with the other sequels, all of which have started with recaps. What makes the recap so funny is the way they throw in new information that contradicts previously-established events on top of old information, and the whole recap goes on so long that it becomes comical in that aspect too.

 

9. “GTA Motherf**ker!” – Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Mike Epps as L.J. is one of the better actors/characters to show up in the series, and unlike many of the other characters in Apocalypse, his role is that of intended comedy relief. At one point he’s driving recklessly down a street in Raccoon City and runs over some zombies, afterwards shouting “GTA Motherf**ker!”—which, in case you don’t understand the acronym, is a reference to another violent video game series, Grand Theft Auto. It’s a pretty funny line, and I wonder if Epps adlibbed it, because that seems more likely than Paul W.S. Anderson writing an actual good piece of dialogue.  

 

8. Clone Factory – Resident Evil: Retribution

I don’t know how this scene ended up being so funny, because it’s clearly meant to be emotionally affecting, but completely misses the mark. Alice stumbles into the clone factory with the deaf daughter of the dead clone from the suburbia simulation. Thousands of Alice clones yet to be activated occupy the room, which really freaks out the kid (understandably so). The problems include: bad CGI for the factory, bad CGI for the duplicated Milla Jovovich’s, the absurdity of the whole concept, and the kid asking this real Alice if the clones are her mom. I mean, take a second look, kid, they obviously are. It could have been and should have been a grave revelation for the child that her mom was just one of many copies, but instead it’s just a bizarre, dumb, and funny moment.

 

7. “I’m [not] going with you” – Resident Evil: Retribution

Retribution is arguably the worst sequel, but this moment is easily the funniest unintentionally funny moment from the whole movie. After Alice says she’s going to save her daughter (the one I just mentioned in #8) Luthor West bravely announces “I’m going with you” and it’s clearly intended to be one of those cliché heroic moments for him—then he is immediately shot down with a machine gun by a bad guy! It actually almost feels like intended comedic timing, but I don’t think it was supposed to seem this dimwittedly funny. It makes Luthor look like an even bigger tool than he already appeared to be, and the moment ends up being even dumber when he isn’t killed by the machine gun fire, he somehow survives to the final battle and is dispatched by a precise punch to the heart. He was a terrible character, but this was a laugh-out-loud moment.

 

6. Fall from Electrical Tower – Resident Evil: Extinction

Extinction is one of the best of the sequels, and as a result has the fewest funny moments (intentional or otherwise), but there was one that jumped out to me. Every Resident Evil movie has to have a few brutal deaths, and Extinction shows people getting munched on by zombies, pecked to death by zombie crows, and ripped apart by zombie dogs. But, the most brutal death happens to a supporting character, and the culprit is gravity. During an attack a cowboy-looking fellah falls off an electrical tower and lands flat on a metal strut. It’s devastating and ultra-brutal, and the metallic clang as his body hits is so perfect that it becomes funny. This poor random guy who had like three lines before this moment gets killed in a way that’s way more gratuitous than it should have been.  

 

5. Isaacs kills Isaacs – Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

There was never a consistent main villain for the series, but when Paul W.S. Anderson looked back on his previous five movies, I guess he figured Dr. Isaacs (played by Iain Glen) was the best one to bring back for the last movie, and I hate to say it, but he was probably right (of course there weren’t many other options to pick from). It had already been previously established that Umbrella Corp. could clone people pretty easily, so it doesn’t come as that much of a surprise when it’s revealed that there are multiple Dr. Isaacses afoot. But, when it comes down to the final fight and Alice tries to kill the real Dr. Isaacs, he evades death and comes back to stop her once and for all—only to encounter one of his clones, a clone who thought he was the real Isaacs. The clone is enraged, and kills the real Isaacs! It’s completely absurd, but also kind of great that the villain is simultaneously killed by himself and gets to be killed twice in the same movie. The clone is eaten by zombies afterward, which is almost poetic.

 

4. Motorcycle Explosion – Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Alice’s big entrance in the second movie is about as cheesy as a big entrance can get. After bursting into a church on a motorcycle, she leaps off the seat with a spectacular back flip, but the vehicle keeps driving by itself toward a vicious monster. The monster leaps at the motorcycle, awkwardly embraces it, monster and vehicle fly up into the air, and then Alice shoots at the gas tank and blows it up, killing the monster in the explosion. The cheesiness is emphasized by the bad effects for the monster, the gunshots being in slow motion, and the choppy editing. It’s meant to seem badass, and I guess it does, but it’s also completely ridiculous.

 

3. Doberman Face Kick – Resident Evil

I think this is probably one of the most-agreed-upon funny moments from the original movie. Alice is trying to evade one of the vicious zombie Dobermans, and in dramatic slow-mo, she leaps toward the corner of a room, rebounding off both walls, turning around in mid-air as the Doberman leaps toward her, and then at the moment of impact the frame rate goes back to normal, accentuating the brutal sound effect as her boot collides with the dog’s head and the kick sends it flying back, crashing through a window. I think it’s supposed to be another example of a badass moment for Alice, as well as a shocking display of her strength and skill, but it also seems pretty specifically edited to come off as blatant and brutal. Still, it gets me chuckling every time because it’s just so blatant and violent and absurd. I don’t think it’s supposed to seem as funny as it does.

 

2. Final Fight – Resident Evil: Afterlife

This is more than just a moment. There are too many moments from the final battle in Afterlife to mention them all, so I’m just counting the whole thing. There’s the villain Wesker with a monster mouth made of bag CGI, then his incredibly stupid speedy moves—seriously, he can move so fast he becomes a blur and Alice can’t even shoot him—but then he stops using his super speed, for some reason, and Alice fights zombie dogs that also have monster mouths, but unlike the cool practical effects applied to real trained Doberman’s in the original, these ones are also made of bad CGI. Then, Alice kills a dog by kicking a broken pane of glass into it, somehow not breaking the glass further, she gets a knife through her arm, she takes it out of her arm and stabs Wesker in the face, and then she shoots him in the head with her shotgun loaded up with coins for ammo. This scene literally broke Mike, Jay, and Rich Evans during RedLetterMedia’s Resident Evil marathon, and once you see it, you’ll understand why.  

 

1. Old Alice – Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

This is the moment that got me more than any other. I’ll be transparent: Milla Jovovich was my first celebrity crush, and she’s one of the main reasons I followed this dumb series of movies in the first place. I know the movies aren’t good, but she does kick ass, and does so while looking very hot, so that was enough for adolescent me. The series finally came to an end a decade after I first started watching it, and by this time a lot had changed. I had grown into an adult, developed crushes on real people, and Milla had changed, too. She had married writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson and had two kids with him, but was/is still an attractive, kick-ass woman, so it felt weirdly nostalgic seeing her back as Alice one more time.

Until, Old Alice rolled out in her wheelchair.

What the hell? In a twist so stupid and hilarious I never saw it coming, it’s revealed the main Alice has been a clone all this time, and the original Alice, who we have never seen before, is now an old woman. Milla donned some questionable old-age makeup and used a strained elderly voice, and my adolescent memories were suddenly very distant. My friends who knew what Milla meant to me started laughing very hard, as did I, and the mere concept of Old Alice still makes me laugh. It became a meme between my friends and I, and it might not be everyone’s number-one-laugh-out-loud Resident Evil movie moment, but it’s definitely mine.  

 

Reviews:

Resident Evil: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-2002-review.html

Apocalypse: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-apocalypse-2004-review.html

Extinction: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-extinction-2007-review.html

Afterlife: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-afterlife-2010-review.html

Retribution: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-retribution-2012-review.html

The Final Chapter: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/10/resident-evil-final-chapter-2016-review.html