Sometimes a movie is exactly as advertised and exactly what you want. If you love a good John Carpenter movie and are intrigued by a director’s ambitious attempt to create a worthy homage to Carpenter’s most memorable early work, then Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is for you. With pacing, cinematography, music, and characterizations found in Carpenter’s Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, The Thing, and Escape from New York, writer-director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) delivers more mood than scares, but it’s the perfect beginning to a video game franchise movie series and a fantastic throwback 1980s-style horror romp. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is available on physical media here at Amazon and currently has a $9.99 sale price for digital streaming at Vudu.
Milla Jovovich’s badass superheroine Alice in the Resident Evil franchise, from 2002’s first film through five sequels–Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)–has given us the 21st century version of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. And speaking of Connor, the trailers for the next chapter of Resident Evil, a prequel called Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, looks a lot like Terminator 3–plus lots of zombies.
Check out the first trailer and a profile on Hannah John-Kamen’s character Jill Valentine, below:
Milla Jovovich’s badass superheroine Alice in the Resident Evil franchise, from 2002’s first film through five sequels–Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)–has given us the 21st century version of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. The tie-in to the Japanese survival/horror-themed video game Biohazard (renamed for the U.S. market) is a staple in the action movie genre–not only one of the world’s bestselling game series since arriving in 1996, it’s the world’s most successful video game tie-in movie franchise ever. But Alice wasn’t a character in the Capcom Resident Evil games, and 14 years is a long run for any franchise, so it’s finally getting a reboot, and that yet-to-be-titled reboot is coming later this year with a great slate of some of our favorite genre actors. This new film (from Sony Pictures) will be in addition to an eight-part Resident Evil live-action television series and an anime series (titled Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness), both coming to Netflix.
One of the year’s best military sci-fi novels awaits you in the next Gears of War tie-in novel, Gears of War: Bloodlines. Author Jason M. Hough creates a gritty tale of an unthinkable mission by current lead game character and former Gear soldier Kait Diaz and a forgotten, impossible mission by her father, Lt. Colonel Gabriel Diaz. The story begins in the future at war, after the destruction of Settlement 2. Kait’s comrade J.D. Fenix is severely wounded. While Kait awaits his outcome, she is approached by an old man who claims he fought with her father years ago. The man slips her a secret file, which recounts a mission that determined the fate of her father, marked a turning point in his life, and may influence who she may become.
Under the direction of writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, Milla Jovovich has made Resident Evil truly her own. Loosely based on Capcom’s Resident Evil/Biohazard survival/horror video games from Japan, Jovovich’s action heroine Alice has led the series to become a billion dollar franchise, the highest grossing series of all time based on a video game, and the third highest grossing female-driven franchise worldwide.
After 14 years and five prior films, the final chapter of the Resident Evil series is coming in 2017.
Aptly titled Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the sci-fi/action thriller follows on the heels of the original, Resident Evil (2002), and its sequels Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012).
Haven’t seen the Resident Evil movies? It follows Jovovich’s heroine Alice, a former Umbrella Corporation security operative, as she attempts to take down the bioengineered drug corporation responsible for a zombie apocalypse. Many characters from Alice’s past are expected to return in the last installment. We loved the trailer back in 2012 for Resident Evil: Retribution, a lesson in how to make a great movie trailer. Here is that trailer followed by the expanded teaser for the next film in the series:
Every bit like a crazy and dark Sam Raimi production, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters takes an already creepy Grimm fairy tale and amplifies it into a bloody Rated R monster movie. It is as true as you could probably hope to get to the spirit of the original story of two kids who outwit a witch in a house made of candy. We even get to see the original tale laid out nearly verbatim to the centuries-old story, including the triumph of the kids who foil the witch and throw her into the oven.
But that is only the beginning of the tale, and this is the story after the story, a sequel where Hansel and Gretel become mercenaries who hire themselves out to small forest towns to rid them of the plague of witches who have stolen nearly a dozen children. Witch Hunters never takes itself seriously. Images of the missing children end up on printed broadsides on the 1800 version of a milk bottle. And after decades of consuming candy, Hansel is diabetic (he has the “sugar” disease) and must take an early form of insulin to prevent him from dying.
Harkening back to the German origins of the fairy tale, Witch Hunters is a German production with lots of German design influences. Like the original Grimm tales this is a violent and gory story. Witches are instantly the unsympathetic villains who are bad for bad’s sake. Led by the beautiful Famke Janssen, who for most of the film dons some impressive prosthetics, these witches are the stuff of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. A motley assemblage of Halloween-esque witches with brooms don dark garb on their own evil sabbath day and congregate in a spot in the woods in something strangely similar to an annual rally in Sturgis.
It’s like the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies said in their hit song: It’s all been done before.
But of course it hasn’t.
We sometimes tell ourselves that when we run out of ideas. But just as much as there are always going to be millions more stories for writers to tell, there are stories out there already created that are waiting to reach a new audience. Stories we love, but stories that we’d really love to see transformed into another medium– onto the TV or silver screen. These are the film adaptations. And they are a key part of movies of any genre. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences even has their own Oscar for adapted screenplay that often coincides with the Best Picture winner.
What are your favorite stories? Have they all been made into movies? Do you wish that any of them would be turned into a movie? Do you wish most of them hadn’t been made into movies? What stories would you like to see that have not yet been adapted to film?
You can adapt anything into a movie if you’re creative enough. The biggest source for adaptations are books. The result? Some are good (Jaws, Godfather, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jurassic Park) and some bad (like every live action film based on Dr. Seuss/Theodor Geisel, who must be turning in his grave at what happened to his franchise after his death), or even hopelessly bad (like The da Vinci Code, which should probably not have merited a novel in the first place). A painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer inspired a novel and then a film adaptation—The Girl with a Pearl Earring. The movie Ever After takes a fairy tale and merges it with a painting of Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of Woman to create both a retelling and an alternate history of sorts, placing Leonardo himself in the middle of the fairy tale.
The Phantom of the Opera was turned from a theatrical musical into a movie (and even the reverse happens, as Sunset Boulevard went from film to musical). The video games Tron, Doom, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider all have been adapted into movies (how about Pitfall?). Even the Parker Brothers games Clue and the Milton Bradley game Battleship have been adapted into film (wouldn’t it be great to try again with the characters in Clue?).
Wait long enough and even classic TV gets made into movies, like The Dukes of Hazzard, The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, and the new Johnny Depp adaptation of Dark Shadows. Last week the BBC reported that Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks is currently being made into a movie (and the album itself was even inspired by the short stories of Anton Chekhov), and the story of the song Amazing Grace (with Ioan Gruffudd and Benedict Cumberbatch) hit theaters only a few years ago. Then there are adaptations of a writer’s angle on some famous or infamous figure in real life, like Schindler’s List—the biopic or historical adaptation is everywhere–but usually starts with the novel. And even newspaper articles can end up as the original source for an award winning film, like All the President’s Men. Certainly last but not least, comic books and graphic novels are the current rage, with movies adapted from Road to Perdition to Cowboys & Aliens to the soon to be released Avengers.
Source material for film adaptations is virtually unlimited.
We’ve asked our four borg.com writers not what the best adaptations are, but instead what are their picks for what should be the next adaptation from Hollywood. What are the top 5-10 books, comic books, video games, or characters, etc. you’d like to see adapted into a movie—that haven’t been adapted yet? We’ll start with Art Schmidt’s take on would-be adaptations tomorrow.
