Resident Evil: Extinction
Biohazard: The Road Warrior. A particularly crummy Mad Max ripoff, with final boss fight setting up the next film.
Suddenly, it’s years later and the T-Virus turns the US into a barren Wasteland. But the film is set in Utah and Nevada, that’s already a barren wasteland. They go for a Mad Max world, but it’s more similar to Fallout: the Umbrella corporation maintains it’s vast resources with biolabs, armies of uniformed goons. Not a very apocalyptic extinction…
Anyway, the opening sequence is sneaky. It’s a shot-for-shot remake of the opening of the first film that goes on for a couple minutes, might be stock footage even. It certainly fooled me, I thought I clicked the wrong button. But no, it’s just a clone of Alice trying and failing to escape. The Umbrella mooks dump her body alongside the ditch where they keep the other dozen dead Alices (like The Prestige with the tophats).
After that introduction, we get to the meat and potatoes of the film: a not very inspired Mad Max ripoff, especially of The Road Warrior. Alice is driving around in her product-placed BMW Motorrad until she finds The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
“But wait”, you cry out, “just because it’s a post apocalyptic road movie, doesn’t mean it’s a Mad Max ripoff”. Yes, but it features a loner heroine that uses a handheld a dart thrower, a convoy of ragtag vehicles scavenging for gas, using a school bus to hide the kids, and an oil tanker for the gasoline, an helicopter, a large fenced compound in the middle of a large plain, the heroes overlooking said compound from a ridge, the climax where a guy has to drive the tanker and eventually overturn it. It’s a clear ripoff.
On the other hand, it’s also a zombie film with explosions, and Alice still has psychic superpowers. Most of the heroes from the previous films are infected and die, so they either do a prequel, or Umbrella clones them. Claire Redfield is introduced, but there is no Jill sandwiches in sight.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.