Trick or Trailers: Resident Evil (2002)

Kind of crazy how the movies from the early 00's are old now. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the trailer for 2002's Resident Evil and tell me that it doesn't look like a relic from a bygone age.



It's so early 00's, right? I mean, not a lot of movies today would consider it a selling point to boast "new music from Slipknot."

The world of 2002 was certainly a different place for the horror genre. Dark Castle was still a thing with the release of Ghost Ship. Eli Roth debuted as the hot new name in horror with Cabin Fever. And the J-Horror trend just hit the US with Gore Verbinski's remake of The Ring. 2002 was so long ago that not only were we in a pre-Blumhouse time but Liongate hadn't even had its day yet as the studio to beat for genre fare. if you can believe it, we were still in the Dimension Films era with the release of Halloween: Resurrection.

Seems more like the last century, not the last decade.

Something else that was different then that seems hard to imagine now is that the zombie genre was dead. Before Resident Evil I don't think there'd been a new, serious zombie movie in theaters since the remake of Night of the Living Dead in 1990.

There was the comedy My Boyfriend's Back in 1993 but as far as serious, flesh-eating ghouls, nothing. Resident Evil brought back the living dead in a big way when it was released in March of 2002. I'm not a gamer so the fact that this was an adaptation of the popular game meant nothing to me but as a zombie fan eager to see the sub-genre make a comeback I was thrilled when I saw the trailer for RE.

A lot of people credit Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later for kick-starting the zombie craze but while I agree it helped, RE is what got the ball rolling.

Resident Evil came out in March of '02 while 28 Days Later didn't premiere until November '02 in the UK and not until January '03 in the US. So RE was very much ahead of it and was a bigger box office hit to boot. There seems to be a revisionist history at work these days where discussions about horror in the '00s give all the credit for the return of zombie movies to 28 Days Later and forget Resident Evil.

Maybe it's because Boyle's film was more critically acclaimed and it's just more fashionable to laud it than to give Paul W.S. Anderson any credit but the truth is that Anderson made zombies into a bankable thing again. He brought an energy and excitement to zombie movies that they hadn't had in ages. RE was a new breed of zombie movie for a new decade - a new century even! - and it re-introduced zombies as a still-viable movie monster to a whole new generation of fans.



Yes, 28 Days Later came along and further amplified that but RE was there first. Credit where credit is due. And for me, personally, I just like Resident Evil better. 28 Days Later is perfectly fine but it doesn't have Milla Jovovich kicking ass, does it?

Of course, these days I can't think of an aspect of the horror genre I'm more ready to see go away than zombies. The Walking Dead beat my love of the undead out of me. That's another thing I couldn't imagine back in 2002 but that was whole other time and whole other world.

Remembering The Class Of '02

The older I get, the more I find myself saying crap like "man, where did the time go?" but I have to say it feels odd to consider that 2002 is already a long ten years ago.

It wasn't a particular milestone year for the genre but as the year following the events of 9/11, it did represent a crossroads of sorts. Post 9/11, some pundits speculated that the audience for fear fare might dry up in the wake of such a catastrophic tragedy but, if anything, the fall out of 9/11 and the two wars the US became embroiled in because of it led to a renewed popularity for the genre.

That new wave didn't really florish until 2003/2004 but 2002 laid the groundwork for big things to come and over at Shock Till You Drop, we've taken a look back at a handful of films that helped define that transitional year. This is not intended to be a "best of" list but simply an acknowledgement of several films that proved notable in one way or another - whether they kicked off trends, put an end cap on an era, or tapped into the cultural mood at the time. In sizing up the Class of '02, Spencer Perry writes about Signs, Tyler Doupe takes on Resident Evil, Paul Doro considers the teen thriller Swimfan, while I take a look back at The Ring and Halloween: Resurrection.

Regarding Halloween: Resurrection, even though that movie will never be much good (no matter how much time passes!), I'll always regard it with some affection. Filmed prior to 9/11 (originally it was meant to come out in September of '01 but reshoots and schedule shuffles moved its release to almost a year later), Resurrection has the virtue of being one of the last horror movies to be filmed pre-9/11 and as such feels like a bittersweet keepsake of a time when a "killer shark in baggy-ass overalls" could be more easily touted as the epitome of Evil.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Resident Evil: Extinction is the worst thing to happen to Sin City since Robert Urich. Under the direction of the once-promising Russell Mulcahy (and he's not just the Highlander guy in my eyes - his 1999 Christopher Lambert-starring psycho-thriller Resurrection was pretty sharp, I thought. And who doesn't love Razorback, huh?), Extinction is a laborious piece of work that manages to take the pulp potential of an army of zombies gathered en masse in post-apocalyptic Vegas and turn it into so much dust and sand.

Having regarded the first two RE's as being slick and somewhat accomplished, I had no worries that this third film would deliver more of the same. Unfortunately, just as Extinction re-imagines the Entertainment Capital of the World to be a dry, barren wasteland, in turn the movie itself is just as arid.