In a world ravaged by a virus infection, turning its victims into the Undead, Alice, continues on her journey to find survivors and lead them to safety. Her deadly battle with the Umbrella Corporation reaches new heights, but Alice gets some unexpected help from an old friend. A new lead that promises a safe haven from the Undead takes them to Los Angeles, but when they arrive the city is overrun by thousands of Undead – and Alice and her comrades are about to step into a deadly trap.

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson

Cast:

Milla Jovovich … Alice
Ali Larter … Claire Redfield
Kim Coates … Bennett
Shawn Roberts … Albert Wesker
Sergio Peris-Mencheta … Angel Ortiz
Spencer Locke … K-Mart
Boris Kodjoe … Luther West
Wentworth Miller … Chris Redfield
Sienna Guillory … Jill Valentine
Kacey Barnfield … Crystal
Norman Yeung … Kim Yong
Fulvio Cecere … Wendell
Ray Olubowale … Axeman
Christopher Kano … Sniper #1
Tatsuya Goke … Sniper #2

Trailer:

Voracious D’s Review:
Let’s play a game. I want you to repeat after me – Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D, the IMAX Experience. Imagine trying to say that to a co-worker who asks you what movie you just saw. And there you have one of the two reasons not to see Wes Anderson’s recent installment of the Resident Evil movie series in 3D. I’ll get to the other reason later.

I’m not going to talk about whether or not this movie lives up to game series it’s based on or even the previous movies. The Resident Evil movie series, to me, is more or less an alternate universe that runs parallel to the games. Characters like Claire and Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker make appearances and familiar organizations like Umbrella and S.T.A.R.S. are used, but they are otherwise unrelated. That said, that doesn’t make this series and especially this movie an abomination like any video game license Uwe Boll is allowed to shit all over and why? Because unlike those movies, Resident Evil: Afterlife is at least decent as a movie. In fact, it is a more than decent movie. As to the other point, I’ve always found it a moot point to compare sequels to sequels. If a movie’s good, does it really matter what movie came before it? I mean, Dumb and Dumberer didn’t suck because it wasn’t Dumb and Dumber, it just sucked. Period.

Resident Evil: Afterlife didn’t suck. It was pretty kick ass. It was an action movie lover’s action movie: violent, explosive and fast. Plus, it has Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter and a relatively new face to US audiences in Kacey Barnfield. Three attractive women of their caliber more than meets the quota for beauty in a movie otherwise built on brawn. It also helps that Milla Jovovich is the primary proponent of ass kicking in this movie, but that’s been a staple of the film series. That’s like saying that in the next Friday the 13th, Jason will kill someone. I guess the question is how much ass she kicks, to which the answer is: alot. Her first scene in Afterlife alone has her inflict Godzilla-level damage on Umbrella’s Tokyo Headquarters.

The problem that always comes up with action movies, however, is if the violence overpowers the plot. This is an especially germane concern for a movie based on a game that’s primarily cerebral. Resident Evil was one of the first games to be classified as “survival horror,” a genre that meant less shooting, more thinking, not unlike the way the Metal Gear games put tactics first. When I mentioned before that comparing the movie and game series was impossible, this is why. The movies are action movies, and Afterlife is one of the more action-packed of the series. The only reason anyone in Afterlife runs from a zombie is if there are fifty of his buddies coming along with him and, even then, a good fifteen brainmunchers will get dropped before the call for a full retreat. That doesn’t exactly jive with the way the games work, where stacking the odds that way is a one way trip to a “You’re Dead” screen. What does jive is the use of martial arts ala The Matrix, which makes the film feel like, well, a video game.

As for the zombies, they are awesome. I don’t know who made the rule that the more awesome your zombies are, the more you avoid using them, but like Zombieland, Afterlife follows that rule. The first horde of the zombies doesn’t get screen time until at least halfway into the film. Even once they’re on the scene, they take at least ten more minutes to actually pose a threat. The horde includes two mainstays from the Resident Evil 5 zombie rogues gallery, but I’ll leave you to see which ones (not that the trailers don’t spoil that, anyway). In the end, it’s hard to gauge the hot zombie action. When there is zombie action, it’s pretty friggin’ hot, but this a movie that plays hard to get.

Now, the 3-D, IMAX Experience part of Resident Evil: Afterlife 3-D, the IMAX Experience. Aside from looking like a goon from Back to the Future II in those hideous glasses, the term “experience” is right. I’m not making a comparison to Avatar because this was meant to be made as an enhanced version of a movie, not a enhancement to how movies are made, posing as a feature-length film. At any rate, the 3-D in this movie works largely the way Avatar did, creating an environment. Believe it or not, this is more obvious in scenes with little to no action. As Alice creeps through around a pillar and you can see the depth that differentiates her from what she’s creeping around and what’s behind her, crazy thoughts start coming to your head, like “Why isn’t this how all movies are made?” It may not be the most polished stereoscopy, but it’s more than trying to jerk the audience through a series of “Oh my God, it’s coming right at me!” gimmicks, like some sort of Universal Studios ride. That being said, 3-D headshots are the best.

I had mentioned a second reason not to see this film in 3-D IMAX format and that reason is because for all the things gained in this higher definition version, there is one pretty important thing lost. Your money. Lots of it. Ticket prices vary in regions, of course, but they should all run on the plus side of exorbitant, venturing toward monetary rape. If you’re taking a date (lucky you, by the way) or your kids, good luck doing anything else and expect dinner to be free water and sugar packets from the nearest McDonald’s. Was it good in 3-D? Yes. Personally, I think the 2-D special effects and the quality of the action are such that I’d take the money I’d spend on a 3-D screening and see the regular version two or three times.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is a good movie. Like the cool kid at school, it knows what it wants to do and does it. It’s not a revelation nor is it reinventing the action flick, but who cares? It’s got kung fu, guns, decapitations, a half decent story and the soundtrack’s awesome. It crunches, pounds and just plain suits the film. In a final summation of the value of Resident Evil: Afterlife – see the damn movie.

Dr. Zombie’s Review:
Resident Evil: Afterlife was an excellent movie. Those of you that are fans of the movie series will certainly love this one. Alice is kicking zombie butt as she always does in this latest installment, however a little more screen time is shared with Claire then you saw in the previous installment. If you want to see Hot Zombie Action babes kicking butt, Afterlife will not disappoint. As to be expected the effects and makeup were great and the gore reached a whole new level with the 3D. I felt the zombies’ blood puss and eyes hit me in the eyes as their heads exploded. There were a couple of moments that made me cringe. You know that scene, in action movies, where the hot action babe does some sort of aerobatic feat of impossibility and then lands on her feet legs stretched out and ready to continue the fighting or shooting. Afterlife pulls one of those with Ali Larter while fighting the Ax Man from Resident Evil 5. It’s a stupid pose and I wish they would stop doing in it. It wasn’t cool in Barbwire, the Matrix, Ironman 2 and every other movie with some babe kicking ass. That being my only complaint go ahead and watch this movie, just be sure to let out a disgusted sigh when you see “The Pose”.

Taking the Living Dead franchise another step further, this campy sequel finds the survivors of the Necropolis reviving bad habits and snooping around Uncle Charles’s experiments. When they uncover a container filled with a substance called Trioxyn-5, they assume it must be safe and start selling it as a party drug. But when a Halloween rave transforms hundreds of Trioxyn-5 users into flesh-eating zombies, the scene gets way out of hand.

Director: Ellory Elkayem

Writers: William Butler, Aaron Strongoni

Cast

Aimee-Lynn Chadwick … Becky
Cory Hardrict … Cody
John Keefe … Julian Garrison
Jenny Mollen … Jenny
Peter Coyote … Uncle Charles
Claudiu Bleont … Aldo Serra
Sorin Cocis … Gino
Cain Manoli … Jeremy (as Cain Mihnea Manoliu)
George Dumitrescu … Artie
Maria Dinulescu … Shelby (credit only)
Catalin Paraschiv … Skeet
Radu Romaniuc … Brett
Sebastian Marina … Dartagnan
Violeta Aldea … Rainbow
Ricky Dandel … Coach Savini

Trailer:

Voracious D’s Review:

What can I say about Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave? Out of all the zombie movies I’ve seen, it isn’t the absolute worst I’ve ever seen. That’s not really helpful, though, as a benchmark of quality. That’s like saying “Yeah, I lost my kids and house in a messy divorce, but at least I don’t have leprosy” or “Of all the people I hate, I don’t hate you the most.” There’s always a margin for things to be worse. Still, when given the option between something bad and something even worse, bad is clearly the way to go. So it’s nice to know that Rave to the Grave isn’t the bottom of the barrel, it’s on the layer above.

One of my biggest complaints about this movie is the protagonist. He’s bad. As in, I fucking hate his guts. Now I know we’re in the age of the anti-hero and it’s better to be real than to be “good,” but this guy isn’t Patrick Bateman, Dexter Morgan or even Dylan McKay. He’s not even despicable, he’s just a dick. The first thing you notice about our lead male, Julian Garrison (John Keefe) is that he has no identity (and viciously bad sideburns). He is an “athlete.” What does he play? Fuck if I know. He does the same stretches I did in ninth grade to get prepped for dodgeball, has no idea how to dribble the basketball he carries around and wears shirts with “Baseball” slapped all over it. Does he need any athletic skill to battle the zombies? Nope, or at least he needs as much athleticism as his geneticist girlfriend (Jenny Mollen), who, in my opinion, kicks more ass per capita. He vascillates between being moody, bossy, useless and pretty uncompassionate. Julian has all the appeal of a sociopathic three-year-old and this is who I’m supposed to root for against the zombie horde? If this guy went to my college, I’m pretty sure I’d kick his ass and I’d damn sure never go to any party, even if his buddies sold me the best drug that would never exist.

I think the only think I dislike more than Julian is the writing. Though, let me clarify, I don’t dislike all the writing. I just dislike the writing that has anything to do with the plot or would in anyway be meaningful, if it wasn’t written by two chimps in two pitch black rooms on different sides of the globe. That’s the only way I could explain how bad the dialogue is in this movie. Am I expecting too much to have two characters talk to each other and not past each other? Probably. Remember, though, I said not all the writing was bad. For instance, I liked pretty much every scene with the two government agent characters, Gino (Sorin Cocis) and Aldo Serra (Claudiu Bleont). Sure, the guidos from Jersey Shore sound more Italian than these two would-be Goodfellas, but that just adds to their charm. They are meant to be part comic relief, part Deus ex Machina, with their Nissan with its bottomless pit of zombie-killing weaponry, but they were, for me, the movie. They drop puns, value nothing so high as a pool with a really big slide and have no concept of the word “overkill.” There’s a station wagon with maybe four zombies in it, should we reach for the assault rifles? Nah, that situation clearly calls for a rocket launcher. And yeah, they do drag. Overall, they’re funny and, more importantly, fun.

And that’s where this movie makes up a lot of ground: fun. The filmmakers have definitely captured the campiness of older 80s zombie flicks. Gratuitous is the rule, not the exception for Rave to the Grave. There is T aplenty and at least one hilarious moment of A. Violence is also done the way it should be in a zombie movie: over-the-top. Zombies maul the living with gusto and in several bloody chunks. The zombie killers are no slouches, either, wiping out the undead in myriad and entertaining ways. If you’re looking for where the effort went in the making of Rave to the Grave, it’s got to be in the special effects department, especially where gore and explosions are concerned. The zombies themselves are nothing special, but here’s where a little understatement is nice. They aren’t overdone, they just look like exactly what they are: zombies. They are gaunt-faced, pale, blood soaked and the good looks of someone who took two turns going face first down the ugly tree.

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave is a good bargain bin pickup and would fit perfectly in a cheesy zombie movie marathon. It’s a throwaway flick that’s ok to watch once and would be much improved by a six-pack of your favorite brew.

P.S. In case you were wondering, the rave sucks. It’s a good thing the zombies showed up.

Dr. Zombie’s Review

I liked this movie. The Return of the Living Dead franchise has always been the other part of what I see as a two part genre. There is the zombie movies, that make you say “Holy Shit” I better board up the doors and windows and then there are the ones that make you want to get drunk or high and watch some good old fashion 80′s cold war T’n'A Horror movies. Rave to the Grave is the later. Although I am a bigger fan of the “Holy Shit” zombie movies, I do enjoy these ones as well. The zombies actually moan “BRAAIIINS” and walk slowly yet have no problem catching their prey. Not only do the zombies look dead, but the seem possessed, and if that isn’t enough this form of zombism comes with Neanderthal like skull structure. If you are looking for a zombie movie in which you can take notes so you can send Max Brooks an suggesting new survival tactics, this is not your movie. However if you are the happy go lucky zombie fan, this one is certainly worth the watch.

When an intense meteor shower covers the countryside, it spreads an incurable infection among residents of a peaceful fishing town, turning them into flesh-eating zombies. Running for her life, a girl named Rene (Felicity Mason) finds refuge in an isolated farmhouse. There, she meets four others who survived the disaster. Together, they fend off the walking dead and learn the truth about those they’re fighting.

Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

Writers: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

Cast:

Felicity Mason … Rene
Mungo McKay … Marion
Rob Jenkins … Wayne
Lisa Cunningham … Sallyanne
Dirk Hunter … Harrison
Emma Randall … Molly
Steve Grieg … Agent
Noel Sheridan … Chip
Gaynor Wensley … Aggie
Eleanor Stillman … Ruth
Robyn Moore … Officer in Locker Room
Robert Jozinovic … Man in Office
Peter Mensforth … Cricket Batsman
Jacob Andriolo … Yougn Cricketer
Michele Steel … Screamer

Trailer:

Dr. Zombies Review:

Undead is a tongue in cheek zombie movie.  The acting isn’t the greatest (is it ever?) but it certainly wasn’t horrible. In fact with a couple of exceptions you can almost tell who is going to get eaten next by the level of acting.  This zombie movie was light and funny when it needed to be, with plenty of serious gore that any zombie movie enthusiast would love.  This one is certainly going in my thumbs up list of zombie movies to watch.  The special effects and gore were surprising good.