‘Resident Evil’ Absolutely Rips!

Get in, gang. We’re going to Raccoon City. Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to discuss Zach Cregger’s thrilling follow-up to his mega-successful ‘Weapons’ with his video game adaptation ‘Resident Evil,’ starring Austin Abrams. Before diving in, they react to a handful of movie news headlines, including Noah Baumbach leaving Netflix for Warner Bros. Clockwork, Quentin Tarantino publishing a new Cliff Booth novel, and John Leguizamo joining ‘Miami Vice ‘85’. Then, they giddily break down ‘Resident Evil’ and gush over the countless reasons why the movie is absolutely incredible. Finally, they look into what the future holds for movie video game adaptations, and take a look at the history of horror-comedy genre mashups and talk through why it’s so hard to pull off successfully. (0:00) We’re coming to San Francisco! (0:36) Intro (2:02) Noah Baumbach leaves Netflix for Warner Bros. Clockwork (9:15) Quentin Tarantino is publishing a new Cliff Booth novel (11:04) What do strange rollouts for big movies mean for their box office potential? (14:27) ‘River’ is the big acquisition out of TIFF (15:59) John Leguizamo joins 'Miami Vice ‘85' (18:49) ‘Resident Evil’ (35:36) SPOILER WARNING (1:08:51) Box office expectations and what’s next for Zach Cregger (1:17:57) The future of video game movie adaptations (1:30:49) A brief history of horror-comedy Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Quick reminder, tickets go on sale tomorrow or today, depending on when you're listening to this, for The Big Picture Live in San Francisco.

• 0:12Sean Fennessey?

  We'll be at ACT's Tony Remby Theater on Wednesday, October 21st, and tickets will be available Friday, September 18th, beginning at 11 a.m. Pacific time.

• 0:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Head to theringer.com/events for all the details. We'll see you there.

• 0:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about evil, Resident Evil. On today's episode, Chris Ryan joins me to discuss one of our most anticipated movies of the year and the official kickoff of horror movie season. It's Zach Craigers new adaptation of the long-running video game Resident Evil. It's a gory, goofy, and glorious movie, and we will break it all down, as well as the history of horror comedy on the show. But first, some movie news right after this.

• 1:02Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is presented by State Farm. You know the feeling, long day, good meal. You finally sit down, and now you're just staring at your screen. Slasher, rom-com, period drama, psychological thriller? But some decisions don't have to be that hard. State Farm is here to help. Like when you choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan. Bundling, just another way to save with the Personal Price Plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

• 1:34Speaker 02

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• 1:59Speaker 03

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• 2:11Speaker 04

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• 2:58Speaker 04

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• 3:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Ciara.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  What's up, brother?

• 3:07Sean Fennessey?

  How are you?

• 3:07Speaker 05

  I'm really good.

• 3:08Sean Fennessey?

  You're really feeling up for this?

• 3:09Speaker 05

  I'm still coming out on the, like, post-Resident Evil screening vibe. Like, I'm still vibrating off that.

• 3:17Sean Fennessey?

  I do want to tell the story of our screening, Together and Apart. But before we do that, I have some news that I want to talk to you about.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 3:24Sean Fennessey?

  Some of which I would consider very consequential, some of which feels minor. I think what I consider major, you might consider minor and vice versa.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 3:31Sean Fennessey?

  So, I want to start with Noah Baumbach. Noah Baumbach, who has been making movies for the Netflix Corporation for the last eight years, four features in eight years, on an exclusive deal. It was announced this morning he's leaving Netflix to go make a movie for Clockwork, which is the new indie shingle imprint at Warner Brothers. I mean, at least for now. Who knows what's going to happen with the merger?

• 3:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:52Sean Fennessey?

  But Clockwork, which is run by Christian Parks, who for years worked at Neon and is a figure in the LA movie scene.

• 4:02Sean Fennessey?

  You know, they made their mark initially by getting the restoration of Ken Russell's The Devils back in the theaters, which is coming in October. And they've announced a bunch of new projects with a bunch of new filmmakers over the next 14 months. Baumbach's the next name on the list. You say what?

• 4:17Speaker 05

  I'm excited to see Noah Baumbach tested by the box office. I think iron sharpens iron in a way, and I have no way of care, like, whether his movies make $2 million or $25 million. But there is a Netflix cocoon around a group of directors. And I'd like to see them out on, like, an even playing field and maybe singing for their supper a little bit more. Does that seem cruel to say that?

• 4:42Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's interesting that it's coming in the aftermath of two of Baumbach's more elevated productions, I would say, in White Noise and in J. Kelly, and two movies that were not received as well as a lot of his previous work. I think his first two movies for Netflix, My Little Story and especially Marriage Story, are very well liked, celebrated. I'm a fan of all four of those movies, and I'm really on a short list of people, I think, who are really, at least, interested in White Noise and J. Kelly. But this is interesting to me for a variety of reasons because it feels like shifting ties at Netflix when it comes to the movie stuff. This comes at the same time that Baumbach's partner, Greta Gerwig, there were some new announcements of the Narnia film, which I think Amanda and I will talk about more on Monday. But it feels like Guillermo del Toro and David Fincher are the last two guys.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Who are like in-house talent.

• 5:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, who are in that inner ring, that inner circle of everything that they do comes out of Netflix, and that they have a blank check to make whatever kind of a movie that they want. And they seem content with that. And there's a new film administration there. And then this comes on the heels of news that Skydance Animation, which is owned by Paramount, of course, is now severing its deal, or Netflix is severing its deal with Skydance Animation. So David Ellison is dragging that bit of property back after a couple of animated features that didn't totally work. Although they still have another one coming out this year called Raygun from Brad Bird and John Lasseter, who run Skydance Animation. And I don't totally, I mean, I feel like I've been saying this for seven years, but I don't totally know what Netflix film is right now.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think that there's probably, like, more chapters to be written in this story. I was sounding a similarly concerned alarm about their TV strategy maybe 18 months ago. And I think they've gotten some different folks in there and started to realize that they've left a lot on the table by ceding all of prestige to HBO and Apple. And I think that they're starting to do more and more projects. East of Eden is coming out in October. It was announced that Zoe Kazan's going to do Lonesome Dove for Netflix. I think that they are looking at a lot of, like, literary projects to develop that seem like what would have traditionally been in HBO's bailiwick. What I want to know about Clockwork is, like,

• 6:58Speaker 05

  how contingent is this on all of the things that are happening with Warner Mount?

• 7:02Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. Before we get into that, I feel like maybe Netflix is doing the inversion of what you're pointing out on the film side.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:10Sean Fennessey?

  Where a lot of the money and time that was spent on prestige on the film side is now being moved toward, you know, your programmer-style movies, you know, your Whisper Men.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  The Rip.

• 7:19Sean Fennessey?

  Your People We Meet on Vacation, The Rip, The Forthcoming Animals from Ben Affleck, which is more of just like a, you know, it's a programmer, it's not a high prestige. It's a movie that didn't play film festivals. And maybe you can put Narnia in that basket as well? It's unclear to me, like, what that proposition actually represents for the future of Netflix, so we will talk about it a little bit. But to your point about Clockwork, it's really interesting because they've got a bunch of movies now. They've got the new Mary Bronson movie, Nasty, which stars a reunion with Rose Byrne from If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, and Jenna Ortega's in it, and it's produced by Margot Robbie's Lucky Chap. Then you've got Tiamat, which is Sean Baker's follow-up to Enora, which is a pretty big movie. Then you've got The Brigands of Rattle Creek, which is some heavy me and you core.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Holy shit, dude.

• 8:05Sean Fennessey?

  Which is Park Chan Wook's first English-language film since Stoker, written by S. Craig Zoller, starring this cast: Austin Butler, Matthew McConaughey, Pedro Pascal, Adele Exarchopoulos, and Tang Wei.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, and Butler and Adele play married couple in this.

• 8:18Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, that's four really exciting movies when you tack on a new Noah Baumbach movie onto it. And it seems like all of these movies are coming probably in the next year and a half. What does Warner Mount happening or not happening mean for it? I have no idea.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, me neither. I mean, it seems like HBO on the TV side rolls along, encumbered by nerves about whether or not they're going to be operating out of Nashville in 2028 or whatever, so. I was asking you off, off mic, like, oh, how much of this is like saber rattling with like the announcement that Ellison was essentially looking at office space in Nashville and was like seriously, you know,

• 8:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, like filing paperwork.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  Suggesting that they're gonna move Paramount to Tennessee. It's just hard for me to imagine a debt laden company that is consolidating the Hollywood business map, being like, what we also want to do is have an indie shingle that is like auteur friendly.

• 9:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  There was one other thing I wanted-

• 9:15Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'll make a point about that, though, because if, if David Ellison is serious about 30 films a year-

• 9:21Speaker 05

  He's gotta get somewhere.

• 9:22Sean Fennessey?

  Not all, not all those movies can be $100 million event films.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 9:25Sean Fennessey?

  Some of them have to be $5 million movies that are being run by a studio, but that are getting relatively wide distribution. So you could make the case that Clockwork is actually a savvier business model heading into than trying to make four Sonic the Hedgehog spinoffs in two years to meet some sort of quota that they agreed to.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Wait around for Matt Reeves to make Batman movies, right?

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  So they've, as they sort of are trying to decide, like, is the reward versus the risk with maybe some of the DC stuff after Supergirl? The only other interesting note with the Bomback thing is that if I read Matt Bellany correctly over the last couple of months, Bomback and Gerwig are currently mired in negotiations to get a really good payday to come back to Barbie. That's a Warner Brothers property.

• 10:10Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Now Bomback is back with a part of Warner Brothers, but not doing Barbie with Warner Brothers?

• 10:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  It's just interesting, like, does one hand know what the other is doing? Is it kind of like all-

• 10:22Sean Fennessey?

  Usually it does.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I suspect that there's, I, the same thought crossed my mind, and I think there's a little bit to that, and it's reasonable to assume. And also Noah Bomback probably doesn't feel like he needs to make a $50 million proper Warner Brothers feature film. I mean, most of his movies are relatively scaled down and they fit nicely in this model. So I thought that that was fascinating, and this is also somewhat related to the Netflix film strategy long-term, but it was announced this week that Quentin Tarantino is publishing another novel, a new novel, another Cliff Booth novel, that is coming out on December 8th, which is between the Netflix IMAX theatrical release of The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth and the streaming release of the film, which is at the end of December. The logline of that book is, "The swinging 60s are long gone, but Clifford Booth keeps on keeping

• 11:08Sean Fennessey?

  on. War hero, stuntman, bartender, cinema projectionist, with the occasional clandestine services for his friends."

• 11:16Speaker 05

  Oh, you know, I was just talking with Chuck Klosterman on The Watch about his book Rock, which is coming out next week, and everybody listening should, should check that book out. It's awesome. I think it would actually really appeal to big picture listeners. And it's an alternative history of rock and roll if the Velvet Underground had basically usurped The Beatles in 1967 and become the biggest band. You know what I haven't really been thinking about with The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth? Is the ripple effect of Manson stuff?

• 11:44Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Like, of like, whether or not this movie is going to engage with the idea that, that that happened at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is sort of a stupid lore question. Like, I don't really care one way or the other, but is this a different America that this movie is made in?

• 11:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great question. I mean, the, I believe this new film is set in 1977, which is eight years after the events of the first film. And so is Star Wars coming out? You know, like, I don't, I don't know, in this world. Like, it's totally unclear what could be in play. And the same goes for the book, which we don't really know what it's gonna be, but obviously Quentin is, is content to fuck with history and how we understand it. And so I look forward to that. I really liked the, um, the novelization of the movie that he wrote a few years back.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, we did that together, yeah.

• 12:30Sean Fennessey?

  We did. Um, and we spoke with him about it, and that was a lot of fun. And so I, I will say, though, that the Cliff Booth thing in general is just bizarre. There's still not a trailer. There's a 12-second teaser that's available on YouTube.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  Something went up and got pulled down over the weekend, right?

• 12:43Sean Fennessey?

  I think something that was not meant to be published was published somewhere. Um, and we are-

• 12:49Speaker 05

  It's close.

• 12:50Sean Fennessey?

  Two months out from the movie. I mean, the movie's coming out in two, this is a David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt movie, coming out in two months on IMAX screens over the Thanksgiving holiday. I don't know, anybody's seen it? I don't really know anything about it, other than who's in it and what the logline is. It's fascinating.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  I'll just say that, based on our experience with Resident Evil, which had a teaser and a trailer, uh, the screening's happening just like 48 hours before the movie is released, that I have, uh, I've changed my tune about like how much lead time I need to get excited about a movie.

• 13:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  It's Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher.

• 13:26Sean Fennessey?

  Completely.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  If they wanna film like water running into an LA sewer, I'll probably be like, good movie.

• 13:31Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's smart, and, and I'm just addicted to knowing things. And I, I don't know what I, I don't know what to do about that. It's something that, uh, has become a big part of the show and just talking about what we're hearing about what's happening in the world. And I hear a lot now. That's the thing is like, I do, I'm here, I hear way more now than I did 10 years ago. Yes, I'm, I'm wind horsed in, but I'm not, I'm not a reporter. I'm just a person who is told things, not been told much about this one. So very, very curious to see what it's like. And, you know, obviously I'll be there opening day.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  I was wondering about this, because the tracking for Digger has come out, and it's pretty low.

• 14:04Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  And I'm starting to lose my ability to like, I can tell how I feel about a movie based on a trailer. I can tell whether I think it's got it or it doesn't have it. But I'm starting to not really understand, like, the Resident Evil box office predictions are like crazy good.

• 14:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Is that just, we'll get into that conversation, but like, I'm starting to lose my ability to sort of-

• 14:26Sean Fennessey?

  The Digger one doesn't surprise me.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  No.

• 14:28Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I think, one, you've got Tom Cruise unrecognizable. Two, you've got a very, um, ornate production style that looks very unusual with a, a tone that's really hard to pull off in a, like a strange Loveian satire. And I think people don't totally understand what the movie is about by watching the trailer. They were very circumspect about what the movie was for a very long period of time and confused people a little bit. Comedy in theaters these days is no sure thing and a little bit of a tough sell.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Have that on the poster.

• 14:55Sean Fennessey?

  And they put it on the poster. So I think there are a variety of factors that are technically working against it. I mean, Inaritu is not exactly, the revenant notwithstanding, a massive box office draw.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 15:04Sean Fennessey?

  So you put all that in a stew together and it's not stunning. To me, it's, this is actually a movie where word of mouth and reviews really matters. If critics like it and, and the first wave of people that see it dig it, then you could see it having some legs. If not, it's gonna feel like an awards play. You know, our buddy Zach Baron sat down with TC-

• 15:21Speaker 05

  He did.

• 15:21Sean Fennessey?

  This week. I mean, what an astonishing get by him. Fascinating conversation. Have no clue what the man was speaking about, but kudos to Zach for doing his damnedest to get him to say something.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  Do you have any thoughts about what TC was talking about with Taylor at the Chiefs game on Monday?

• 15:34Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I mean, I have to assume it's Kenneth Walker's usage, right?

• 15:38Speaker 05

  Frontier Labs? Like, what did it pull back?

• 15:42Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I don't know. I, I, I personally worry about what can happen when those two put their powers together, but I'm not gonna spend too much time thinking about it. Cruise, I think he's banking on a Best Actor nomination that might not be there.

• 15:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:55Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  We'll, we shall see.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's a tough race this year. A couple of other quick things. TIFF is happening right now. Naiman will be on the show on Monday to give us his full report. However, we are at effectively the one-year anniversary of Obsession being acquired by Blumhouse Universal Focus out of TIFF last year for $15 million. Blumhouse has bought another movie for $10 million called River. Have you been following any of this?

• 16:17Speaker 05

  I have been from afar, so I, give me, give me the download.

• 16:21Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, this is a new movie that apparently the independent film company already had and gave up on an auction.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  It was like on Shudder.

• 16:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  It was ready for Shudder.

• 16:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think it was meant to be a Shudder film, and they showed it, and now because of some of the response to it, they brought it to the market. And it stars Jane Levy and Jessica Roth, two horror final girls of some, of some note. Um, and it follows three siblings who are stranded on a country boat who are stalked by a faceless killer.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  Oh, let's do it. Good idea.

• 16:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You're stuck on a boat and there's a killer coming after you? Interested. Um, apparently this movie isn't getting nearly as good reviews as Obsession was. Obsession was a real sensation, and it seems like maybe the, the programming at the Midnight Madness section of TIFF this year is maybe not as strong as it was last year, but, um, I'm intrigued.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  You and I have been victims of a Midnight Madness delirium.

• 17:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  It's a, a case that affects many men around our age.

• 17:15Sean Fennessey?

  We all go a little mad sometimes.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  You're there at 1:30 and you're like, that's the best movie I've seen in five years.

• 17:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  And then it winds up on Amazon.

• 17:21Sean Fennessey?

  We'll never live down the long shot screening or Atomic Blonde or any number of movies we can recall from our South by Southwest days.

• 17:29Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay, last bit of news, very CR coded. John Leguizamo joins Miami Vice 85. Now, I am not really a Miami Vice expert. Um, I'm anticipating the film as a Joseph Kaczynski fan. What does this mean? Who is John Leguizamo playing? Is this good?

• 17:45Speaker 05

  I think the fact that it's called Miami Vice 85 is, focus on the 85. So Dan Gillroy wrote this script. It is set in the heyday of, of Coke Miami and also the peak of Miami Vice as a TV show. I, I am venturing a guess that John Leguizamo is playing Calderon, who is the legendary drug dealer cartel leader in the first season, I believe. Uh, second season, maybe, of, of Miami Vice. Got a two-part episode, Calderon's Return. I wonder whether or not they are pulling from that story. I am so excited for this movie, um, on a variety of levels.

• 18:24Sean Fennessey?

  Is it a, is it a good idea to treat this faithfully as IP?

• 18:31Speaker 05

  I think that they'll probably pull from it, but I don't think they're gonna recreate the two-part episode. I think it might just be, a drug dealer is targeting Miami Vice cops. Um, I have also heard one more casting rumor that I'm very excited about, and so

• 18:47Sean Fennessey?

  Much like you- You won't be sharing it.

• 18:49Speaker 05

  People are coming to me, they're telling me things, but only about you two and Miami Vice 85.

• 18:55Sean Fennessey?

  There are Vice cops calling you, saying-

• 18:56Speaker 05

  They pull me over, and they were like, hey, you know, you were driving perfectly. I just wanted to let you know.

• 19:03Sean Fennessey?

  I saw your visage through the window, through the windshield and I thought-

• 19:06Speaker 05

  I share your enthusiasm about Alden Ehrenreich getting cast.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  You can go on with your day.

• 19:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you were right that he's not playing the villain in the movie, that obviously he's playing a different kind of part. Um, yeah, I'm looking forward to this movie too. I'm, I've seen Miami Vice episodes, but I, I don't have the facility with that world like that you do or that Bill does.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a week to week show, so it's not really a necessary experience to go through and be like, did, did something happen in episode three that affects 11? But there are some serialized storylines and Calderon is, is one of the big ones. As Bill likes to also point out, there is like evil Crockett for a year where he like, you know, like loses it.

• 19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Like Bizarro Superman?

• 19:46Speaker 05

  Kinda, yeah.

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting, okay. It's good to know. Hopefully they don't pivot to that in the first film.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  I don't think so.

• 19:50Sean Fennessey?

  That would be confusing. Did we get any confirmation on White Tubbs, Black Crockett? Like, is that implied?

• 19:56Speaker 05

  No, that was just a little CR theory. I threw that out.

• 19:58Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  I hand out winners. Uh, and I don't know if that's going to come true. I think, I think we may get, I think we're, these are the guys they're playing.

• 20:06Sean Fennessey?

  Can you really put Michael B. Jordan's name behind Austin Butler's name on the poster?

• 20:10Speaker 05

  I just think Tubbs may have a more prominent role than Crockett.

• 20:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Or a 50/50 part.

• 20:15Sean Fennessey?

  Tubbs is revenge.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, Tubbs is revenge.

• 20:18Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Let's talk about Resident Evil.

• 20:20Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 20:22Sean Fennessey?

  Let me give you a little primer, primer for the, for the audience at home. So this is the new film from Zach Craig, it's his third feature film as director. The movie's co-written by Shay Hatton.

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  It's based on the 1996 Capcom game for PlayStation called Resident Evil, which has had many sequels and spinoffs. Uh, this is the eighth film adaptation of this game series. The first six were Mila Jovovich, Paul W. S. Anderson joints.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  And I love her work.

• 20:48Sean Fennessey?

  Talented actress. Not a big fan of those films personally, but they were pretty successful. And over those six movies, they made over a billion dollars and-

• 20:56Speaker 05

  And have a cult following.

• 20:57Sean Fennessey?

  They have a following for sure. Uh, there was a film in 2021 called Welcome to Raccoon City that Johannes Roberts made that did not lift off, especially because it was released during the pandemic and people didn't like it. So this is a reboot of a reboot.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  Steven Imel is in that one?

• 21:10Sean Fennessey?

  He is, yes. Um, and that one is much more faithful to some of the core characters from the game than this one is. This one is sort of an inspired by, not a strong adaptation featuring characters from the game. Couple of notes about it. One, the director of photography of this movie is 70-year-old Darius Wolski, who is best known, I think recently for his work with Ridley Scott, but who is really in his The Crow Dark City bag in this movie.

• 21:38Sean Fennessey?

  Ryan and Hayes Holliday are back doing the score. I love the score of this movie. Austin Abrams is our star. He's one of the only people we really see in this film, who's not, who's not a zombie. Uh, Callie Reese, Paul Walter Hauser, and a few surprises are also in the film. The logline is as follows. Brian, a medical courier, is in the process of making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital when an outbreak forces him to fight for survival. Now, Zach Craig was on the show last year for Weapons. And I took a little bit of an attitude with him. I have some regrets about the attitude I took, but I was like, dude, why are you making a franchise movie?

• 22:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:15Sean Fennessey?

  Like, you just made Weapons. You, this is incredible to do an original story that is, we didn't know it at the time, but I knew it would be such a success because I saw the response to the movie the first two times I saw it. And what he said is, this is not going to be at all like Barbarian and Weapons. It's going to be a rock'em, sock'em, it's for me to play and turn my brain off and just make an Evil Dead 2 style movie and get crazy with the camera. It's a weird, fun, wild story. I'm doing it because I think this movie is going to be fucking awesome. Now, you and I went to go see the movie at a screening at Century City earlier this week. And as they often do, they, they put us in, there were two screening rooms. Room one and room two. And you texted me, you said, we're here, we're holding a seat for you.

• 23:00Sean Fennessey?

  You're sitting in room one. And then they handed me my card and they said, you're in room two. And I tried to sneak into room one and they said, no, you have to go into room two.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were very strict about it.

• 23:08Sean Fennessey?

  I thought that was strange. Nevertheless, I had a nice time sat with Mallory and Joanna at the screening. But as soon as the movie ended, I walked out of the screening and we caught eyes and we both were wide-eyed and we knew we got one. Something had happened. It was a moment of great connection. Now, it's not surprising that you and I would like a movie like this. We've been thinking about seeing this movie for a while, but I ask you now, why were you so wide-eyed when I came out of that screening?

• 23:36Speaker 05

  Because I hadn't just experienced 90 minutes of feeling completely present with a work of art. If that's how you want to describe this, and maybe Zach Craig wouldn't because he's talking about it as like a thrill ride. I completely lost myself in this movie. It's so fucking awesome. And it made me feel, it really did grab that feeling of like youthful, like wonder at being inside of a movie. And I think I understand some of the mechanics of why that worked. Because I think rather than being IP, as in like, we're going to adapt the lore and we're really about servicing like all the fans who are out there of this franchise. It's not that, but it's not a Trojan horse.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  It is not like, I kind of pulled a fast one where I went into Sony and talked them into letting me do this, but what it's really about is this. It's not about that either. It's about what would happen if a medical courier hit a zombie with his car and then had to fight for his life through the craziest fucking night ever. And it rules.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  I want to be like, I have so many things to say about this movie and why I think it works, but like, do you want to laugh? Do you want to almost puke? Do you want to go crazy with fear? Like, do you want to feel every emotion you can feel as a person? Like, this movie does it in 87 minutes.

• 25:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's wonderful. I, I cannot remember the last time I was in a movie, and I see so many goddamn movies, but I cannot remember the last time I was in a movie and felt, God, this is moving too fast. I don't want this to end. Every movie feels too long in 2026. This movie's about 87 minutes and it is a go-go-go machine. I am not a Resident Evil player, so I'm not somebody who is watching the movie, looking for lore, looking for Easter eggs, hoping to spot things. But you have pointed this out to me, and this is something that I think Zach was attempting to accomplish, and for me, it feels like it works.

• 25:36Sean Fennessey?

  It does give you the feeling of trying to play the game. And maybe trying to play the game for the first time, where you don't really know what you're doing. You're not a trained operative. You're not someone who's ever held a gun before. You're certainly not somebody who's ever seen a zombie before and you're terrified of the dark and what might be around the corner. And it's such a great evocation of that, while also having a regular guy charm and sense of humor to it that is extremely difficult to pull off.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Insane. Here's the thing though. I think the reason why the central performance of the movie and the movie itself works is that what this guy experiences is so insanely traumatizing, like by any, any factor of the imagination. But the way he reacts to it is the way that you react to it if you were playing the video game. Where you're like, oh my God, did I just fucking shoot that thing? That's how Austin Abrams reacts to doing it. And it's like, you're alarmed and you're like, that's weird. I, I just did that. But it's not like, now I need to go process what has happened to me and I can't believe that like, I thought I was going to be a father and now I'm a killer and all. It has nothing to do with that.

• 26:49Speaker 05

  It's like that weird, I'm, I've had four coffees over the course of the day and now I've had three beers over the course of the night and I'm three cigarettes in and I'm playing Max Payne and I'm unloading on dudes. But like, I feel catharsis, but I also feel shame and that's what's happening in this movie.

• 27:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Do you know what I mean?

• 27:09Sean Fennessey?

  I do.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  It's like the experience of playing a video game rather than the adaptation of the video game.

• 27:14Sean Fennessey?

  I read it a little bit differently than that, but it's, it's connected, which is that I found that Abrams's character is sort of, it's sort of a coping mechanism because of the absurdity of the circumstances. The way that you would think about if you were just a guy, as you are, a man who records 2.2 podcasts per day and goes home and then is confronted with a zombie apocalypse.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:35Sean Fennessey?

  You wouldn't be like, you certainly wouldn't be thinking about your own trauma.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  No.

• 27:39Sean Fennessey?

  And you, probably you being you and you're Abramsian, I would say in some ways.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Nice of you.

• 27:47Sean Fennessey?

  Would probably be using your sense of humor to deflect from the horror of everything. And I, it feels like this is what this guy is doing a little bit, where every time something happens and some wild shit happens in this movie, he witnesses some grotesque, bizarre, terrifying things and is subject to like crazy violence and all sorts of outlandish gore.

• 28:12Sean Fennessey?

  But he, there's always like, and it's not a Ryan Reynolds style quip.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  It's not glib.

• 28:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's not glib, but it is funny. And then there's the secondary thing, and some of this I presume is, you know, that Craig, who was in The Whitest Kids You Know, and is a, you know, long time comedy person, really understands comic timing for not just somebody having a funny line, but the sequencing of a moment or how gore can be comedic versus how it can be terrifying or the way that a body should land and what's scary versus what makes you laugh. And then that thing, and I talk about this all the time when we do our horror episodes, that, you know, the, the union between those two feelings is so tight. And that whenever I see something that I find really scary and disgusting, I always laugh at it. I never close my eyes. I never look away.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:03Sean Fennessey?

  I'm never really even grossed out. It just, I have an involuntary chuckle when I see somebody really get that feeling out of me. And at this moment in time, he's the GOAT of that thing. I mean, he's the best doing that thing.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  He's also pushing that, that incredible horror tension of like, no, no, please don't, please don't, but actually please do, yes, give it to me.

• 29:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  You know, like-

• 29:25Sean Fennessey?

  I believe we call that the, the Dion Waiters.

• 29:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. But there is the, the moment where you're, like, there are several moments in this movie where you're like, well, that would be beyond the pale. He can't do that. Right? Like, this can't happen. This can't happen. He's not going to go into that room, but I really want him to go in there. And he always goes in there.

• 29:44Sean Fennessey?

  We, we'll start wading into spoiler territory by getting into this, but this is one of my absolute favorite things about this movie, is that it breaks every rule that you know that filmmakers are told when you're making a conventional studio movie, that there are certain things that are off limits. Off limits, animal death, child death, babies. What happens to your hero and how?

• 30:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:09Sean Fennessey?

  The sense of resolution versus no resolution. All of these big ideas that are this kind of dogma of movie making.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:18Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is like, fuck all that dogma and fuck that dog.

• 30:20Speaker 05

  You know, I don't know that there's a selfless act in this movie.

• 30:24Sean Fennessey?

  No. In fact, every time one of the characters attempts that, they pay for it.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:30Sean Fennessey?

  They really pay for it.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, there are, there are gestures towards it. I think that the character of Brian is a good dude, you know?

• 30:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And he does have an emotional arc in the movie that I think pays off really well, but is not, is not, none of that like psychobabble that you're talking about.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  It kind of reminded me, a lot of people have compared this character and this performance to Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead. And I think that's a wonderful, he's not as cool and he's not as accomplished with a gun, but he kind of reminded me a little of John McClane at times.

• 31:01Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  Where a lot of the humor was manufactured out of like this experience.

• 31:06Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Now, there's a lot more story to Die Hard and there's a lot more stuff for him to be reacting to and he's obviously like a selfless character, even though he's just trying to save his wife, but like he's also trying to save everybody else and.

• 31:18Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's true. And like in Die Hard 2, when he's like, same shit happened to the same guy twice, you know? It's like, it's got that same energy. To me, the actor that Abrams reminded me of most is Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Now, Back to the Future is not a horror movie, but that feeling of like, whoa, this, this little guy who's all so spirited and a little bit snarky, but a little bit sweet, and he keeps finding himself in this ridiculously outlandish situations, but you know what? He's kind of got the gumption to pull it off.

• 31:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:43Sean Fennessey?

  And that's, that's rare air, you know, like to be in the Michael J. Fox conversation. And then the other thing too is I, I don't know if Zach was thinking about this when he was making the movie, but there, there's so much Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to me in the design of the movie and the idea of the sort of like slip and fall, ne'er do well, silent film star who you're rooting for, but can't quite do it.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  As a, as a, he is instantly one of my favorite runners in movie history. And he spends most of the movie running.

• 32:10Sean Fennessey?

  He does. And that's another thing about the movie that is so special is, and you can see in that, the comments that Zach shared last year when he was making the movie, he's just having a ball with what he can do with a camera in a way that I think a lot of these movies don't usually exploit in ways that I find exciting. Some of it is, as you pointed out, what's in the darkness and what's in the doorway? And where like, where shouldn't we go that we know we're gonna go? And some of it is the camera not just being a perspective of a character's eye, but how you, what you fear for the character? And the way that the camera moves around the character to make us the most scared we can be while waiting for something to happen.

• 32:53Sean Fennessey?

  And there are times when he uses very conventional jump scare tactics where you don't see something out of a corner and then it pops up in someone's face. But then there are other times where.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  It's different though. I mean, we could start talking about some of the actual sequences if you want, because it's hard to describe this without getting too into spoilery territory, but in one of the first set pieces, Brian is, has hit a woman and this is in the trailer, so he hits this woman on the icy mountain road and is gotta try and help her and a cop comes along and the cop is like, "Did you strike this woman with your car?" And he's just like, "Yes, but I also have to make a very important medical delivery. So like, can I, can we talk about this, you know, a little bit later?" And the cop is like, "Follow me. We're gonna go to the hospital. She's gonna get help. You're gonna make your delivery." Cop's car pretty soon flips over because the woman in the car is obviously a zombie.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  The ensuing action sequence and shootout that happens, I kind of want to say I've never seen something like this before, even though I have seen so many car accidents and so many shootouts evolving out of car accidents. But the specific way he uses POV and the amount of times in that, I'm like, "She's on the roof." No, she's not on the roof. Where is she? Did she go back around the, wait, she's somewhere, like, you're just, you're so wrong footed 15 times. And also they do an amazing job of being like, he's not like, "I've never seen a gun before," but he's like, "I've never fired one." He crucially plays video games, so he knows the mechanics. He's like, "Where the fucking safety?" He knows what his safety is.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  But he doesn't know, he doesn't know everything about them. He just knows like the, the cliff notes of guns.

• 34:33Sean Fennessey?

  And it's a movie that nods at all of the notes you might feel while watching a horror movie. No service on your cell phone, trapped somewhere where a car won't start and you don't know why. The safety on the gun, which comes up multiple times. These are all tropes that we sometimes ding horror movies for, for being like, oh, come on. But because Abrams' character has such a sense of humor about it, it works so well.

• 34:54Speaker 05

  One of the things that's really cool about playing Resident Evil, lots of people love it for horror, lots of people love it just because like, you find some cheat code in the back of a gaming magazine and just get yourself unlimited ammo and just unload on dudes. It's got a lot of puzzles and that was something I really responded to in this movie is how many times he goes into a house and needs to find the bullets. So where does he look? Or he's trying to get out of a house, but there's a lock and how does he get this lock off? And sometimes it's played for laughs and sometimes it's actually like this inventive detective stuff. But in terms of being an adaptation, I thought it, it, it did have some of the spirit of the feeling of playing the game.

• 35:35Sean Fennessey?

  It does. You know, we watched a playthrough yesterday.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  Did you?

• 35:38Sean Fennessey?

  Of Resident Evil 2, just to get the vibe of the game.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:41Sean Fennessey?

  Not the whole thing. I didn't sit for an hour quietly by myself. I'm aware of that. And, and you know, there's some people online who are very mad this isn't Leon's movie or whatever. I could care less about that, but the thing is, is it did remind me of, of course, I played a lot of games like Resident Evil, which is a, a third person shooter.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 36:00Sean Fennessey?

  You're in control, but they're sort, they're slow. You know, it's, the pace is only as fast as you can make it by moving through each space in the appropriate amount of time, shooting enough zombies, discovering the right doorway to go in to acquire whatever talisman you need, whether it be bullets or some sort of key that helps you go somewhere. The great thing about movies and the reason why a movie can always elevate a video game is because it can go faster. It can get you more involved more quickly in a different kind of way, in a way that I think is more of a cortisol spike rather than that sort of like, I don't, how would you describe the feeling of shooting up a million zombies while playing the game? Like it's, it's a slight, it's a, it's more of a muted.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  It's like.

• 36:45Sean Fennessey?

  Experience. It's like a dulled pleasure.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:47Sean Fennessey?

  Whereas movies.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Energy drinky, you know, you know, like.

• 36:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  You know, it's bad for you, but you're kind of like, I need this to sustain.

• 36:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  Kind of.

• 36:56Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and the other thing, of course, in a movie is, I want to see what happens next. I can't wait to see where this goes. I'm so curious about this. And yet the movie also dispenses with that in a very interesting way. So let's just put a big spoiler warning around the rest of this conversation for anybody who doesn't want to hear anything else about Resident Evil. I think it has our highest recommendation. Fair to say?

• 37:16Speaker 05

  One of my favorite films of the year. You should see it as soon as possible.

• 37:20Sean Fennessey?

  So halfway through them, well, two things. One, the title credits don't appear until after the 20 minute mark, after that sequence that you described. Of the car flipping, the police cruiser flipping.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  And most of the trailer is drawn from that first 20 minutes.

• 37:35Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. We saw a tease of the movie at CinemaCon in April and they showed us about five minutes from that part of the movie. And what I thought of with that scene was sort of like if they had shown us the crime that happens at the very beginning of Fargo, that Marge Gunderson arrives at. It almost is like he's recreating that. And I wanted to ask you how you feel about this being a snowbound Raccoon City story. If that means anything to you, if it matters, because I guess it's not, I, it's not similar to how the games.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think it, I'm sure it had some storytelling value to Craig or beyond this, but blood just looks awesome on the snow.

• 38:14Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. Snow horror is cool.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  That's why we wet down streets, you know, like that's why sometimes we just do things because they look good.

• 38:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It seems like it would have been a motherfucker to make this movie.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  It sounds like this was, for as much as he's like, "A rock'em, sock'em good time," he's like, "It sounds like he was awake for seven months in Prague."

• 38:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah. It seems really challenging. He pointed out in an interview with THR that, um, you know, once you step in snow, how do you erase those steps so you can redo a take?

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know how you do that. I guess you clean it up in digital, but, um, yeah, I mean, the movie also gives you a confrontation with a character and, and Abrams' character does get bit about halfway through the movie. And when he gets bit, I was like, okay, this is a nihilist paradise.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:02Sean Fennessey?

  Like this is not going to be a happy movie. And I felt a great sense of relief about that. I, I find it quite annoying when horror movies are like, but everything's okay at the end. I don't think that that's actually what the genre is really about. It doesn't mean that, you know, Laurie Strode can't overcome Michael Myers, but at the end of it, she's usually pretty destroyed.

• 39:22Speaker 05

  I mean, he can't be the final girl if there's only one guy. You know what I mean? Like, it made sense to me that there's, the, the body count can only come from one place as far as we know. You know, there's like a great, when he gets bit, he gets bit by a little girl. And there is like a brief second when Craig shows us that this person is human and it's like, there was a quick second where I was like, is this gonna be fucking Wolf in the Cob again?

• 39:49Sean Fennessey?

  Is she gonna get on the journey with him?

• 39:51Speaker 05

  Is he gonna spend the entire movie like taking care of a seven year old in a zombie apocalypse? Like, that's not what I was told, you know?

• 39:57Sean Fennessey?

  And he does the exact opposite.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  Yes, he does.

• 39:58Sean Fennessey?

  He blows that fucking girl's head off. I wanted to stand and applaud. As the father of a daughter, I salute that choice because whatever these sacred cows are, it's a fucking Resident Evil movie. Like, if you're gonna do it, do it.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  Well, also the reveal of the girl. So she's like hiding in a RV's bathroom stall. And he's just like, oh, yes. Like, you can even tell, like, he's like, another human being. This is amazing. And then the camera pans down and she has a genetically mutated lizard foot that is basically tentacles swirling around that eventually leap out at Austin Abrams, as does this girl who turns into the dog from the thing. And you're just like, fuck, yes, brother. Like, you did it. Like, you, you, you completely tricked me on that. Like, I thought that that was like, probably where the movie is like, jumps up even into the

• 40:55Sean Fennessey?

  It elevates. I agree.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  It's the first thing that happens in the movie that isn't indicated in the trailer that you're like, oh, so that's what you had in your bag?

• 41:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. In the previous sequence, after he evades the zombie woman who's, who he hits with his car, and the police officer has been killed, he goes to a farmhouse and there, he looks for, he finds a shotgun, he finds an old man who's been infected, who attacks him. There's a very violent explosive moment with the shotgun. Then the woman who he's hit comes back to life. We see this incredible, what I'll call a Craigersque shot of her racing down a hill with no shoes on and a dress, ferociously coming toward the house as fast as she can, while he is scurrying to find shotgun shells.

• 41:44Speaker 05

  We hear her coming up the stairs. Yeah.

• 41:45Sean Fennessey?

  Sound design in this movie is excellent. The sense of, again, the sense of pace, the sense of like, the ticking clock is always going against Brian. That whole sequence is really, really exciting, and I like it a lot. However, it is not really anything new. It's not really anything you haven't seen before. You can see the homage to Carpenter's The Thing and all this part. The same goes for the dog that he encounters at the barn. All of that stuff is really fun and really well executed, but it's just like, it's just table setting. And I think because that's the only stuff we had seen through the first 25 minutes or so, I was like, okay, cool. What else you got? And you're right, when we get into Abrams' character, who thinks he's going to be able to drive through a gate that is padlocked, the car hilariously gets caught in the gate, the giant truck,

• 42:30Sean Fennessey?

  the first of many padlocks that stymie him throughout this movie. And then he has to walk through the tunnel and into that RV that you described. The movie, you know, at about the halfway mark, it goes to another place. And it like, it really takes off, it takes its safety off, and it gets really fucking crazy. And yet, the whole time, I was laughing, and I feel like people were starting to feel like they could laugh at this point, because there's a little bit, because the movie is, it's not just that scary horror laugh, it is actually funny as well.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  In the screening room that I was in, full theater mixture of like, you know, I know, people, critics, and probably like, fans and folks who had gotten invitations. When he comes across the little girl in the RV, she's, and she's adorable. She's like, scared kid. Someone shouted out, kill it! And that like, broke the seal in the theater. And I think everybody was just like, ah, that's what we're doing today. And it just was like, people laughing. And I think that the thing that makes this movie so good, I can't wait to see it again. I also can't wait to watch it alone, because I want to see how it plays when I'm not being encouraged to laugh at certain things. Like, for instance,

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Abrams, a couple of times this movie lets out like, basically a scared squeal.

• 43:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. He screams like a girl. Yeah, kind of purposefully.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  It got laughs, but I was like, I'd probably scream like that, too. You know what I mean? If I had to shoot an old man in the head, and then his body went into the body of another woman I had killed, and they formed a giant snowball of monster, I'd probably be pretty nervous and screaming and squealing. So it's, it's interesting to watch it in that group format and kind of be like, what are we laughing at versus what's just fucking terrifying?

• 44:26Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I had this really funny experience of watching it, because I watched it with, sitting right next to Mallory. And

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Who's like, four movies deep on her horror experience?

• 44:34Sean Fennessey?

  She just started watching horror movies. And she's only really been watching movies that have been made in the last few years. And there's something so funny, because this movie, you know, you've already mentioned Bruce Campbell, Craigersites Evil Dead 2, it's very obvious the way that Carpenter looms over a movie like this. And there are a lot of other strands that you could pull. You could pull the Romero zombie movies, you could pull 28 Days Later, you could pull, you know, certainly Alien, the tentacle stuff has some possession in it. Like, there's a

• 45:03Speaker 05

  A lot of Cronenberg bodies.

• 45:04Sean Fennessey?

  Body horror. It's extremely disgusting at times. And that's a fun way to watch the movie. Like, it, to me, and it didn't feel like it was homage for homage's sake, it wasn't blenderized, it wasn't a synthesis of stuff, but it was acknowledging that it's part of a lineage of something. But Mallory doesn't know about any of that stuff. And so like, I'm kind of cracking up at the dog.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, she's like, is the dog hungry?

• 45:32Sean Fennessey?

  And she was just devastated. But at the same time, that, that dog kill at the beginning of the movie, it gives you license to accept what kind of movie it is. If you're not on board with it, I would say if you didn't like that scene, maybe walk out of the movie. It's not gonna be for you.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely a couple of scenes. Look, if you're scared of something, he's gonna find it in this movie. Like, I don't like rats. And there's about, one of the more gross rat scenes I've seen in a really long time in this movie.

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  The whole sequence is absolutely disgusting. I don't know how much in, in, you know, when we talked about Barbarian on the pod, we very famously

• 46:14Speaker 05

  Just recapped it.

• 46:15Sean Fennessey?

  Recap the whole movie for Amanda. And one of the magical things about an 87-minute movie is that you can really remember everything that's happened. And you texted me immediately after the movie, and you just sent me 12 beats. They're just the 12 scenes from the movie. And I was thinking about the exact same act on the way home, to prepare for our conversation. And I wouldn't say it's the most sophisticated movie analysis to say, and then this happened, and then this happened. But he makes movies that make you want to think about the movie that way. And I really feel like that's a compliment to his work, because weapons operated very similarly, and it was harder to do because of the way that he chopped the story into different perspectives. And he told it through different characters' eyes across the timeline. This movie is as linear as they come. It's just through this guy's eyes the entire time.

• 46:59Speaker 05

  Honestly, I started by just trying to write down my favorite sequences, and then I realized, I think I can write down the whole movie from here.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  It reminded me of trying to prep for the Boogie Nights rewatchables, where I was like, most rewatchable scene is every scene. You know, like, there's just, there's no fat here.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  But there's like, you know, suicide jumpers, maternity ward, barf man, rat guy, you know, like, rat guy. It's like, the things you're writing down are not, and this is when Brian realizes that the only way for him to survive is for him to help others survive. Like, there's no, there's no story. There's one expository scene with Paul Walter Hauser. There, or I guess two, because if you count the end. And there are two scenes of Brian trying to communicate with his girlfriend, who he's having an argument with at the beginning of the movie, over the course of the, over the course of the film. Other than that, you're asked to draw as much or as little out of this film about what it's about as you want.

• 47:59Sean Fennessey?

  And honestly, why are more movies not like this? Especially genre movies? Why are we so worried about psychologizing our characters and having them reckon with what's happened to them or what they've done? There can be a little bit of it in this movie, and there's one sequence near the very end of the film before, waiting outside of an elevator, where he literally records a voice note and reflects on the one thing he did that he regrets. And he's done some heinous stuff in this movie to stay alive. But the one thing that he regrets, which is personal and sincere and specific, and feels rooted in some real life experience. But the rest of the movie is just incident.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  Also, that confessional moment is immediately played as a joke, because the intercom starts and is like, hey dude.

• 48:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, someone's been watching him.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, crying guy. Can you, can you use the intercom?

• 48:50Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious how you feel as somebody who's more familiar with the games, when the movie starts to sort of acknowledge its Resident Evil-ness, when Paul Walter Hauser and Callie Reese's characters show up, when it becomes clear that the Umbrella Corporation is responsible for this outbreak, when it becomes clear that the package is in fact not, say, a child's heart, or an older woman's liver, but is part of a potential antidote?

• 49:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:17Sean Fennessey?

  Did you like that stuff?

• 49:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I thought, I did not go back through and play any of the games, so I don't want to call myself any kind of scholar. I have played Resident Evil over the course of my life a couple of times. I happen to really like the one that's set in Spain, where the guy is trying to rescue the president's daughter from a cult. That one's cool.

• 49:36Sean Fennessey?

  Right. I was reading about this last night, four, yeah.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  But

• 49:39Sean Fennessey?

  You're always about special ops. That's your space.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  And I love travel, you know? I love Spain. La Liga, you know?

• 49:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You've been to Spain?

• 49:51Speaker 05

  I have, yeah. But I was, there was like, a cool cutaway when he's going through the house. He looks in one room, and I think there's a typewriter on the table, and it, it feels very much like, when you're looking at a screen in Resident Evil, or in any of these kinds of third-person shooters, like, the light will be a little bit different over an object that you're supposed to go over towards. And so there are like, little visual keys, and I thought that this movie played with that a lot. I thought that when Paul Walter Hauser says, we're going to Raccoon City, the crowd cheered. No recognition. Maybe I was just with RE, RE heads.

• 50:33Sean Fennessey?

  You might have been in the RE room.

• 50:36Speaker 05

  I thought his scene was very funny. His character is hilarious. His character is, it's, it's just like, he is like, we did this. Like, I am responsible for this, and we need your help. So it was kind of like a funny, like, almost like, it was sort of exposition and sort of IP service, but also kind of like, taking the piss out of that.

• 50:56Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that's the whole movie, right? The whole movie is, I really enjoyed that aspect of it. And this is true of, of the finale of the movie as well, when you get into that space where everything is just a little bit

• 51:09Sean Fennessey?

  And sometimes a lot bit tonally comic.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:11Sean Fennessey?

  And so you're not worried about revelation about whether they're going to get something right, or they're going to teach you something about this story that you didn't already understand. There's some acknowledgement of the ridiculousness of the premise of the game and the kind of person who would be responsible for an outbreak of this sort. Also, it just helps that Paul Walter Hauser is very funny.

• 51:30Speaker 05

  If they had made that scene, the two of them talking in the car when Callie Reese goes to go look for whatever she's looking for, 45 minutes, I would watch.

• 51:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Austin Abrams trying to load a machine gun while like the nozzle is pointed at Paul Walter Hauser's face the entire time and he'd be like, no, turn it, no, flip it, flip it. Now it's the other one.

• 51:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's really, really good. The other thing too is the Callie Reese character getting out of the car is one of those classic like, what the fuck are you doing moments in a movie where you're just like, don't, there's like 14 zombies there, where are you going?

• 52:03Speaker 05

  And those guys just be like, man, she's really lighting them up. Like, she's great.

• 52:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's so unusual for, um.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  I think this is what she would have wanted.

• 52:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's so unusual for a movie to have so much confidence, to be able to lean into the cliches of the genre. And like Evil Dead 2 doesn't really do that. That's not exactly what it's, it's comedy is about fusing comedy history, not about upending horror history. It does have some nods towards horror history, but it's working in a different register. And so making comparisons to the movie, I think is fairly difficult because making fun of horror usually leads you down the road to scary movie. It doesn't lead you down the road to an actually funny movie that is also actually scary. And I mean, we could talk about this after we get done talking about Resident Evil, but I'm kind of amazed by the tonal miracle of the movie.

• 52:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's the thing that I think is my major takeaway from it.

• 53:02Speaker 05

  If he had missed five degrees to the left or right, it just would have been, maybe not a disaster. I think it's like a really fun movie to watch, but you would have been like, oh, that was cool, but he played it. And the, the thing that threw me off was going into this, one of the few things I had read about the film in interviews with him was that he was like, I took a lot of jokes out. So I was like, oh, I wonder if this is going to be.

• 53:24Sean Fennessey?

  He tested the movie with audiences and he felt that it was played too much like a comedy. But the movie is a, I mean, it is a comedy. It is a gross scary comedy, but it's a comedy.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:34Sean Fennessey?

  And it's not being sold that way too. I do wonder a bit about the general audience reaction to it with that in mind. I don't think the people are going to be mad that it's funny, but it is, there is some wrong footing going on in that way too.

• 53:44Speaker 05

  I think the comedy is like essential to the movie because it is the release valve for the blood. It's a release valve for the gore. It's a release valve to the terror. You have to have this balance because otherwise it's like you're watching Green Room, you're watching, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You're just like, I'm terrified.

• 54:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  Get me out of here.

• 54:03Sean Fennessey?

  And it's just so upsetting, every single incident.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Uh, I wanted to ask you a little bit about what I thought was some, I don't know if it's pacing or structure or dynamics, but I found it really delightfully unconventional in that I more or less found each set piece and each scare or each level of the game pretty equally terrifying and involving. It wasn't like we were building up to something. The skybridge at the end, the kind of like massive thing that happens at the end is certainly like, it feels more chaotic and crazy.

• 54:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  And I think he ups the gore, but there was something kind of fascinating about the, the boss at every level kind of feeling and you're going to have your favorite depending on maybe what you like, snow, you like sewers, you like heights, what are you scared of?

• 54:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  But what did you think of like the construction of the film as a series of, of tasks that he had to?

• 55:03Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it almost feels like he's checking more boxes very knowingly about these spaces that we find to be scary in horror movies. You know, that the, the lonely road where you have no service and you might get into an accident, um, you know, Get Out very famously more or less opens with an accident like that on a, on a lonely road on the way to it that sets an ominous tone. So that's one. A haunted farmhouse is another one. A terrifying tunnel amidst a zombie apocalypse, you know, all the way up to scaling a diehard style haunted building that has like, you know, all kinds of, you know, sort of like the more elevated later Romero movies where it feels like an entire city has been taken over.

• 55:48Sean Fennessey?

  It gives you that sensation. So I, it felt like he's kind of going through this various stages of expectation through those movies, but never kind of gives up on his tone. I do think that the sewer one is particularly accomplished because him going into the sewer is just so stupid and he keeps doing things that are just so stupid. And it's not just that he, he doesn't find himself trapped with a hundred other zombies. He finds himself trapped with the most disgusting zombie of all time that can't move.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:16Sean Fennessey?

  But then explodes into hundreds of rats.

• 56:18Speaker 05

  The only thing saved, that saved me in that scene was that the rats did not become a king rat.

• 56:23Sean Fennessey?

  But they were going to.

• 56:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  And then he mercifully escapes.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  But if they, if they had formed a king rat, I honestly.

• 56:28Sean Fennessey?

  You would have fell out.

• 56:29Speaker 05

  I think I might've needed to like, take a, a quick sack.

• 56:33Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about your rat fear.

• 56:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:35Sean Fennessey?

  Where does it come from?

• 56:36Speaker 05

  Um, two unfortunate mouse infest, not infestations, but apartment buildings. Like you're, you're really at the mercy of what you're at, you know, in New York.

• 56:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  And I just, just, just gross mice, you know? And like not being able to stop them.

• 56:52Sean Fennessey?

  Is it the disease that they carry?

• 56:54Speaker 05

  I just don't like the idea of them being everywhere. I don't like the idea of like it just being like this unseen force, you know?

• 57:00Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think there's ever been a time in your life when you've been asleep in your bed and a mouse has crawled across your face?

• 57:04Speaker 05

  Uh, not me. It did happen to my wife back in New York and one time in Boston, I woke up and now it sounds like I'm just like a tribe of mice have been following me up and down the eastern seaboard.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  But one time in Boston, I.

• 57:18Sean Fennessey?

  What are their names?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  I think I was pretty high. I woke up or was trying to fall asleep and a mouse was on my turntable and I was just like, I gotta fucking get out of Boston.

• 57:27Sean Fennessey?

  What, was it Edge of the Wu-Tang? What was he, what was he getting into?

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. Promised ring, very emergency.

• 57:36Sean Fennessey?

  It was an emotional mouse.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. He was wearing a cardigan.

• 57:40Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think of the suicide jumper scene?

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Um, oh God, it brings a tear to my eye to think about it.

• 57:48Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty cool.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. I thought that the, my favorite element of it, this might actually be the part of a movie where people are like, this is too CGI for me. Or it was like, it was almost like a painting rather than a visceral experience. I thought it was incredible. He turns around when he's sort of run through this canyon of people leaping off of these tall buildings and exploding near him. I think they're trying to hit him obviously. And he goes, oh, so you can die. Like, and you think that that's going to be this important piece of information. There's a couple of, uh, revelations or, or, or discoveries that this character makes that serve him no purpose whatsoever.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  They really don't like, it's, it's a really interesting storytelling style. There is not a lot of check offs, anything in this movie. It's more like he, there's runner jokes like the padlock. There are frustrations that he has that are recurring, but like when it's like, who's the rat king guy in the sewer? I don't know. Why is that guy just like a giant white fat guy who's like sitting on his ass? I have no idea. Why do those people jump off the buildings and seemingly to their deaths rather than reconstructing into a giant zombie running after him? I have no idea. So I thought it was just completely operatic and amazing. I kind of wish it hadn't been in the trailer.

• 59:12Sean Fennessey?

  The, the suicide jumper specifically?

• 59:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's an interesting point you're making though about the accrual of information that doesn't matter.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:20Sean Fennessey?

  And maybe we can use this as a way to talk about the kind of final set piece where after he escapes those suicide bombers, he eventually arrives at the Raccoon City Hospital laboratory space that Paul Walter Hauser's character is attempting to get him back to. And.

• 59:35Speaker 05

  This is my favorite part of the movie.

• 59:37Sean Fennessey?

  The elevators don't work. And so he's, has a moment of reflection. We know that his girlfriend is pregnant, although it's not super explicit, it's clear what's happening in their relationship. And there, he sends her a voice note to apologize for the way that he talked to her about what they should do about this pregnancy. And then a voice comes over the intercom. It is in fact, someone who's all the way up at the top of the building and he's like, hey dude, you have the package?

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Sean Fennessey?

  Come on up. Don't take the elevator though, please take the stairs. Takes four flights of stairs.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  He's like, fuck that.

• 1:00:10Sean Fennessey?

  Fucking exhausted. As somebody who recently climbed four flights of stairs can relate. Uh, so he decides to get on the elevator. And a movie that is extremely gross gets that much more gross. And this is really where a lot of the Alien and Aliens stuff starts to come in because we have a giant barfing.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  Zombie.

• 1:00:29Sean Fennessey?

  Zombie. Who keeps vomiting down the elevator shaft.

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  Acid, vomiting acid.

• 1:00:34Sean Fennessey?

  Acid that is melting the elevator all around him. Coming up in the other direction is this.

• 1:00:40Speaker 05

  Snowball zombie.

• 1:00:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So a zombie that is comprised of what looks like a dozen or more bodies that have all.

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  The limbs of all the people, all these people. Yeah.

• 1:00:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The surviving non-survivors. And so it's, it's just like a classic Rube Goldberg machine where he's like, gotta try to find a way to get to the top, evade the barf, not get caught by the giant snowball zombie and find his way to the top of the lab. It's all, now this is, I'm usually pretty hard on CGI heavy sequences like this. And I thought it was pretty effective and well done.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  Uh, cause every single thing matters because he's got, it's very video gamey, but it's like, he can only, he's got the floor of the elevator. He's got the corners of the elevator. And once that stuff goes, he can't be on the elevator anymore. So he's got a certain amount of time to do that. Then he has to use the barfing guy to kill the other zombie. Then he has to throw the barfing guy off. The entire ascent up to the top of the skyscraper is as laid out for him. Like you have to go up to floor 24, then go to a sky bridge, then cross the sky bridge. It's exactly like it is in video games. And his reactions to these obstacles is exactly what happens when you're playing a game the first time where you're like,

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  I, I did it. I fucking did it. And then you're like, wait, what? The lights are off now? Like what happened? It's so invigorating to kind of experience it cinematically rather than like my controller isn't really responding the way I want it to. But the.

• 1:02:14Sean Fennessey?

  You have that wonderful diehard nod where his shoes are starting to melt and he has to take his shoes off.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  I held my fist aloft.

• 1:02:21Sean Fennessey?

  I loved it.

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  I was just like, if he walks on broken glass, we've achieved it.

• 1:02:25Sean Fennessey?

  Not only that, but he enters a maternity ward.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. I wanted to talk about this.

• 1:02:30Sean Fennessey?

  And what I will call one of the most audacious things I've seen in a horror movie. It is a maternity ward that is strewn with red blood. Every single baby bay is full of clearly a zombie baby of some kind, or some sort of bir- like birthing.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Sean Fennessey?

  Bubble that also recalls Alien and the sort of the pods.

• 1:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  And Austin Abrams' character, of course, has to move through the maternity ward to get to the sky bridge, to get to the lab, to deliver the package so that they can develop the antidote and finally stop this.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  And save him. That's the thing is that as he's going, his, his arm is getting more and more infected.

• 1:03:14Sean Fennessey?

  And honestly, as someone who loves gross stuff, I was like, this is so fucking gross.

• 1:03:21Sean Fennessey?

  It is gnarly. And the, the giant bubble, which you compared to.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  A sourdough.

• 1:03:27Sean Fennessey?

  A rising sourdough loaf.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a very funny visual is foul.

• 1:03:32Speaker 05

  That explodes.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  This is the most sacred and beautiful place in human life. A room full of newly born babies.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  Girlfriend's pregnant.

• 1:03:39Sean Fennessey?

  And his girlfriend's pregnant. And the movie has a series of motifs like this. Obviously him being confronted by an eight-year-old girl is a manifestation of his girlfriend being pregnant. Him being confronted by all of these babies in the maternity ward is a manifestation of this fear.

• 1:03:52Speaker 05

  And Scott also got like lots of Craig or tropes that are quickly becoming like kind of signatures for him. The terror of a doorway, uh, the weird anxiety of why is this person running at me?

• 1:04:05Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Uh, there's, somebody once ran at Zach Craig or, and it's never forgotten it, or that's a dream. It's a nightmare he has.

• 1:04:16Sean Fennessey?

  And this, it's the same thing with the, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't do that. Don't stop, go the other, stop, wait, don't do that. Like he goes towards the, why is he walking towards the bubble?

• 1:04:27Sean Fennessey?

  Is he an idiot?

• 1:04:28Speaker 05

  Part of it though is like, cause he's like, I, I think it's kind of like that video game thing of like, but the bubble's glowing.

• 1:04:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What's in it? Yeah. I want to see what's inside. Um.

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  When this bubble bursts though, the entire room turns basically into a, a log flume of blood and.

• 1:04:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Although it did remind me quite a bit of all of the xenomorphs coming out of the wall in Aliens where it's like, everything is kind of descending upon him and he has to race full speed out of a maternity ward across the sky bridge. However, there are some issues there. The sky bridge is falling apart and the giant snowball human conglomeration.

• 1:05:06Speaker 05

  He has returned.

• 1:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. He's climbing up the side of the building in epic fashion. And he eventually gets his ass all the way over there. After landing one of the more epic video game scores against the giant snowball.

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Sean Fennessey?

  And he gets into the lab and it turns out that there's a bunch of scientists in the lab. And, um, one of them is Zach Cherry, very funny actor from Severance. And the movie again kind of shifts back into a kind of clear comic register. And then one of them is Griffin Newman, our friend.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Sean Fennessey?

  Um, the co-host of Blank Check. And unfortunately for me, I knew Griffin was in this movie. And so I didn't get that.

• 1:05:43Speaker 05

  Waiting for him to show up.

• 1:05:44Sean Fennessey?

  I was waiting for him to show up. Um, and I knew a little bit about what he was doing in the movie and I really wish I hadn't. But for, for those of us who are in the movie podcasting world and enjoy movie podcasts, there's a little bit of extra pixie dust on this sequence, watching him get involved in this final scene. What did you think of the big finale of the movie?

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  It's the most surprising gear shift in the movie. Of course, like the entire lighting scheme changes. It's in this completely antiseptic white lab, bright white lights.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  It's for scientists, like for bookish nerdy, not, not like wanting to get down and fight people. But what they really need is this antidote. And Austin Abrams has now crossed over into a mutating, uh, territory. And I think he's holding out hope that they can make this cure and he can be the first test subject. And he gets so close and it's right around here that I was pretty certain I understood why Zach Craig was like, I'm never making another one of these because I was like, cause you're going to shut the fucking door. You're going to fucking burn it down behind you. Somebody wants to make another Raccoon City movie. If you guys want to have Claire show up and look for something, go for it. Leon can show up.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  But he was like, I'm done and we're going to make, we're going out in an absolute blaze of glory.

• 1:07:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's such a good choice. It's such a relief. It's the, the final like broken rule of like, there's no redemption. There's no safety. It does set up some obvious opportunities to, to retell the story and to bring in a lot of the canonical characters to, to enter Raccoon City and to kind of fight their way through. It feels like the story is mostly taking place simultaneous to the events that are transpiring in the first few games. Where like the outbreak is starting, doesn't the first game start with like a cop is late to work one day?

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Sean Fennessey?

  And he's got a, he wanders into the station and there's a bunch of fucking zombies there.

• 1:07:43Speaker 05

  Probably make Resident Evil 1.5 off of this. I have a question for you about that, um, based on what it looks like to be a huge box office success for this film.

• 1:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, I, I love the ending. I thought it was a tremendous amount of fun. It also, it slips into, um, like science lab horror and you get a little bit of like reanimate or you get a little bit of, uh, freaked. Like actually when he becomes the monster near the end, it looks like Alex Winter's is monster from Freaked. And there's just some great creature design. Again, Abrams giving a really good monster performance.

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  I thought he was, he was heartbreaking. Yeah.

• 1:08:16Sean Fennessey?

  It is heartbreaking. You really feel for him. There's like a little bit of.

• 1:08:19Speaker 05

  Even as he tears his heart.

• 1:08:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Sean Fennessey?

  And some of the great, the choreography of the antidote kind of slipping away, just out of grasp, just not connecting. Like all that stuff is so great. And that also has that feeling of a video game where you just like, can't quite jump through the loop or cross over the bridge or that the being consistently stymied in a moment when you're trying to achieve something.

• 1:08:41Speaker 05

  I immediately thought of, oh, how many movies have I watched in my life that sold out their third acts? Because they weren't sure if they were going to make another one, or like what they were worried about, what people would feel about the, what they had done if they ended it in a certain kind of way. And you've seen so many movies where a guy gets blown off the top of a building or has a massive car crash or, you know, blows up the bomb so that everybody else is saved, but then walks out of the rubble and is just like, well, it looks like another one for us partner. Like so many films are just like, in the last 10 minutes, you're allowed to completely suspend your disbelief.

• 1:09:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  We just want a happy ending. And the happy ending in the, the movie is that like, no, like this is a fucking horror movie. Like there is no escape for this guy. Like even if he had gotten the cure, how the fuck are they getting out of Raccoon City?

• 1:09:33Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely right.

• 1:09:34Speaker 05

  And it's like, what, like, do you think they would have let this guy out if he knew the truth anyway? Like there's something.

• 1:09:40Sean Fennessey?

  Even the science corner on you have six other human bodies attached to your body and you've taken the antidote.

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  They just get expelled? Like.

• 1:09:49Sean Fennessey?

  It completely dispenses with that, which is wonderful. Um, I thought it was a great choice. I completely agree. It is, it's one of the greatest get in and get out IP jobs in the history of movies. And to, to have the gall to just be like, I'm done.

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  One of the great cut to black last shots of a horror movie in recent memory of like this guy waving his tentacles in the air, screaming as the national guard helicopter is, is bearing down on him. Bang out. That's cra- that's so awesome.

• 1:10:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's great. It's fantastic.

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

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• 1:10:49Speaker 04

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• 1:11:28Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:11:50Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is a huge success. I'm curious to see how huge of a success a movie like this can and will be.

• 1:11:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Sean Fennessey?

  It is, I guess, tracking for an $80 million worldwide weekend, which is a huge weekend for any horror movie. It is also a video game adaptation and it's a well-known video game. It's one of the very few video games that has been adapted multiple times over the years.

• 1:12:15Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like they're kind of undershooting how well it's gonna do over the weekend.

• 1:12:20Speaker 05

  I also think just the word of mouth is gonna be extraordinary because it's not only is it gonna be, you really gotta go see this. I feel like it's gonna be like a really, you gotta go see this now. You gotta go see this before.

• 1:12:30Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want anything spoiled. Yeah. You wanna listen to the big picture episode.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  I can't tell you anything about it because I don't wanna spoil anything for you. There's not much more they can really advertise about this movie.

• 1:12:38Sean Fennessey?

  I know. Its length is such a benefit, too. It's so easy to get in and get out.

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:12:42Sean Fennessey?

  And most movies where you're like, oh, God, I've gotta carve out four and a half hours and I gotta get a sitter and all that shit. None of that.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  Now, the question is, one, Mallory aside, can you in good conscience recommend this to people who don't like horror movies? Would you tell Amanda to go see this?

• 1:12:56Sean Fennessey?

  She is seeing it, which is gonna be interesting and we will talk about it on Monday.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:13:02Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's a real test of her new open-mindedness because it is so gory.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  I think she'll think it's funny, but I think that there are parts that she might not like.

• 1:13:11Sean Fennessey?

  Because it is breaking some of those rules, you know? And it is disgusting in a way that many movies are not. It's different from your typical slasher where someone's throat is slit or they're stabbed in the heart.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  It's not even the maternity ward stuff as much as it's just really fucking gross.

• 1:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  It is really gross. As far as like, can you recommend it to just like Moms on the Playground? I think is maybe like a good comp for me at this stage of my life. And I don't really think you can. I think you need to be an avowed fan of this genre, but here's the thing, that doesn't matter. Everyone's a fan of this genre. Yeah. I mean, look at Obsession, you know? Obsession is also disgusting at times and it is a huge sensation. So I don't really think that that limits its ceiling. And then when you start thinking about the movie and you're like, okay, can this movie like realistically make $300 million in America? I think it can. And if something like that can happen,

• 1:14:00Sean Fennessey?

  we're in extremely rare territory for Krieger. I mean, this is not, this has only been, happened four or five times in movie history where somebody who's making material this intense and raw and gross and fun is at the absolute center of the business.

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  I had been thinking about his career in terms of PTA's early career. I don't know how useful that is anymore because this would be his Punch Drunk Love. And I don't really know, like Punch Drunk Love was like a complicated movie that I don't, did it do well? Like it was Sandler, but did it, were people like, what is this?

• 1:14:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it was a bit of a curio to people. Did well for me.

• 1:14:37Speaker 05

  I think that's a movie that he made maybe similarly to why Krieger made this, which is like.

• 1:14:42Sean Fennessey?

  Just to strip down.

• 1:14:43Speaker 05

  I did Magnolia and now I wanna try something a little bit more direct or a little bit more.

• 1:14:48Sean Fennessey?

  And, and you know, you can, you can hear him talking about Weapons, that there's so much personal feeling in Weapons and so much that he brought to that movie about his own experiences and loss that he experienced. And, you know, I think a lot of the stuff about addiction is really fascinating in that movie and.

• 1:15:01Speaker 05

  Is Krieger a dad?

• 1:15:04Sean Fennessey?

  I think so.

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:15:06Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't know that for sure. I do think it's fascinating, though, that there are still.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  He does not have any children.

• 1:15:12Sean Fennessey?

  No children, okay.

• 1:15:13Speaker 05

  This film explores that.

• 1:15:16Speaker 05

  If you're like, what's, what's Resident Evil about? It's, it might be like parental anxiety, you know?

• 1:15:21Sean Fennessey?

  For sure.

• 1:15:24Sean Fennessey?

  There are still ideas in the movie, that's to your point, but they're not, it's not weighed down by anything. And Punch Drunk Love still feels a little weighed down by some feelings, you know?

• 1:15:33Speaker 05

  I'm trying to think of the comp for, is it, is it, what's Tarantino's third movie? Is it?

• 1:15:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's Jackie Brown.

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  Jackie Brown.

• 1:15:41Sean Fennessey?

  It is kind of like Jackie Brown.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  Gonna get out of my own head. Yeah, just gonna go do a, do a Elmer Leonard book.

• 1:15:48Sean Fennessey?

  More tightly focused.

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's source material. I think that's a good comp.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  But, you know, I, this, this dude now is like his own business. Like what'll be really interesting in discerning the, the success of this film is how much of it, first of all, he's already done what Nolan did, which is apparently just like smash through the like fake concern troll online, like they don't, they don't respect Raccoon City.

• 1:16:12Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely love how he's handled that.

• 1:16:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Sean Fennessey?

  Where he's like, if you're trying to please everyone, you're pleasing no one. That's absolutely the right attitude.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  It's like, this is the movie I made. You guys should come see it, but if you don't want to, just don't see it.

• 1:16:23Speaker 05

  Like to what extent is a film by Zach Krieger now like the business card? It's the call, it's, it's the, it's the sell it in and of itself.

• 1:16:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's so interesting because obviously Weapons is now gonna be a franchise because they're making the Gladys prequel, which he is not making. And this movie, you know, there was an interesting interview with the guy who runs Constantine Films, the German film production company that owns the rights to Resident Evil on The Town last week, talking about, you know, I mean, they hit the jackpot. Zach Krieger came to them and was like, I have an idea for a Resident Evil movie. And they were like, oh, word? That's amazing that that happened for them. And, and we can talk about video games and what their viability is as movie properties in a moment. But he's now making a giant sci-fi action movie with The Flood for Warner Brothers. That's his next film. And then he says he's like doing a reset.

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Sean Fennessey?

  Right? Where it's like, after that movie, these are all the things I had been thinking about for a really long time. And then I'm thinking about what's next. The thing that it reminds me of the most is Jordan Peele. I mean, what he's doing now reminds me a lot of the first three Jordan Peele movies.

• 1:17:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Sean Fennessey?

  Which came in a pretty short window of time, it was about five years. He made three movies, all of which were increasingly more ambitious than the next, accomplishing different things, kind of gliding between horror genre with huge Carpenter influence, but also a lot of social and personal emotional ideas inside of them. And then I just remarked this to you last night, Krieger's released three movies since Peele's last movies come out. It's been four years, more than four years since Peele put a movie out. And so.

• 1:17:48Speaker 05

  And their two careers are somewhat intertwined. I mean.

• 1:17:51Sean Fennessey?

  Comedy and horror.

• 1:17:52Speaker 05

  But also Peele wanted to produce, was it Weapons or Barbarian?

• 1:17:56Sean Fennessey?

  I think it was Weapons that he wanted.

• 1:17:57Speaker 05

  And he changed his management company because he did not get that opportunity and.

• 1:18:03Sean Fennessey?

  Two guys who come from sketch comedy.

• 1:18:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Sean Fennessey?

  Who bring that, those tools to making horror movies.

• 1:18:08Speaker 05

  We're not falsely like linking them in some sort of competition.

• 1:18:11Sean Fennessey?

  But just in the arc of horror, they're totally connected to each other. I mean, they feel almost inextricable right now and they're, they're kind of both jockeying for, you know, I think because in the aftermath of the slasher movies in the seventies and eighties movies, we, we started to identify Craven and Carpenter and Hooper and, you know, a handful of other filmmakers. And you're like, well, these are the masters of horror. And then there's the Masters of Horror anthology series. And then you're like, well, there are these like 10 guys. And so you start to think of horror in a way, the same way you think of baseball trading cards. And so I, and my brain just naturally ends up doing that.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:18:48Sean Fennessey?

  But Krieger is in such a unique position here where there's a part of me that wants him to like elevate and take on a big movie like The Flood, but there's, there's another part of me that's like, could you make 12 87-minute movies?

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  I think in a perfect world, he would be

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  what we imagine it was like to be like our age when Carpenter was putting out a movie every 18 months.

• 1:19:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  And that you would just be like, I just, I just can't believe I get to see another fucking haunted house with this guy.

• 1:19:17Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's what I'm, I'm thinking about is sort of like the consistency over 12, 15 years.

• 1:19:22Speaker 05

  Like I respond very strongly to his films. Like Weapons was one of my favorites of, of, of that year and.

• 1:19:29Sean Fennessey?

  Last year, it's only last year.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  I know. And I found for, for all the, what is, Weapons is not about anything. I was like, you're completely wrong.

• 1:19:38Sean Fennessey?

  I couldn't understand that criticism at all.

• 1:19:40Speaker 05

  A ton of stuff. And it's not explicit, but it's there. And it's very, I think, clear what it's about.

• 1:19:48Speaker 05

  I support his right to like do four movies and take a beat. And, you know.

• 1:19:53Sean Fennessey?

  Of course.

• 1:19:53Speaker 05

  That would be probably like for Quentin, that would have been like the Kill Bill and then the Stop Down after that, right?

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. Good comparison.

• 1:20:03Speaker 05

  But I am fascinated to know what he wants to do outside of this genre because he is tiger when it comes to fucking shooting some of this stuff.

• 1:20:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Speaker 05

  You know, you're like, if you can hit a six iron like that, would you ever stop? Like.

• 1:20:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's the other reason why I really link he and Peele together is I just think they both have such strong visual imagination.

• 1:20:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Sean Fennessey?

  What they wanna show us that I really, really enjoy. And that's something that I don't always have the right vocabulary to communicate what it is that they're doing, but I know how it makes me feel.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  Well, that's, one of the reasons why I'm so happy he made this is because I could imagine after Weapons, a guy torturing himself to be like, how can I top that? What can I do that feels like a bigger tapestry or a more important movie or saying something? And, and instead he was like, what if I blew up a baby?

• 1:20:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's great shit. This is a great movie. Uh, video games.

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Sean Fennessey?

  I wrote about this today in the newsletter. Thanks.

• 1:20:59Speaker 05

  Great newsletter.

• 1:21:00Sean Fennessey?

  I'm trying to, yeah, I'm, I'm trying to figure it out, you know, because I'm, I'm a little bit behind the eight ball on this one where I don't know really any of these games well at all. So I don't know what is and is not viable.

• 1:21:09Speaker 05

  I thought it was, it was funny. I, I know what you mean when you were writing about this in, in productions where you're like, I kinda can't do it cause I, I can either be a completionist or I can be a passive like observer, but I can't have three games.

• 1:21:23Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I made a joke on House of R like a year ago about how like, I will play Elden Ring and I will, and everybody was like, good fucking luck buddy. How dare you think you could ever try to do anything, you fool man?

• 1:21:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36Sean Fennessey?

  Um, yeah. And you know, I would like to try, but I genuinely don't really feel like I have time.

• 1:21:40Speaker 05

  I've usually had a console so that I can play FIFA historically. Like, so I've, for most of my adult life have had a PlayStation.

• 1:21:49Sean Fennessey?

  Were we, were we friends when I was still playing PS2 at my apartment?

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Where was the apartment? Orchard?

• 1:21:56Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, no, cause you were coming to the place uptown.

• 1:21:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Sean Fennessey?

  And I, and I had a PlayStation at that time for sure. Cause I played Madden every day in college, but I don't remember if, like, when did I really kick the habit? Was it just like adult life started and I'm stopping?

• 1:22:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. I don't remember ever playing PS, anything at your Brooklyn place. So it was probably sometime earlier, earlyish in New York for you.

• 1:22:20Sean Fennessey?

  So then we're.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  And I had one, I think I might've given it to Zach. I can't remember.

• 1:22:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  And then Amanda was not happy about that.

• 1:22:28Sean Fennessey?

  You would, you would talk about playing PlayStation.

• 1:22:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. I had, well, that was like early on in my relationship with the woman who I would go on to marry. We would just like sit around and I would play Max Payne and then she would be like, can I play Crazy Taxi?

• 1:22:41Sean Fennessey?

  Right. I remember this very well.

• 1:22:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Sean Fennessey?

  And you know, I've heard you speak of Red Dead Redemption, you know, a game that many people talk about should be adapted and is so cinematic in the first place. And that's a real challenge with a lot of these properties. And it's like, you know, um, Bioshock or Mass Effect or all these games, you know, we've got Fallout as a TV show. You've got a lot of TV shows that are coming out of this work right now. We can talk about some of those things.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  Noah Hawley's making Far Cry. Yeah.

• 1:23:04Sean Fennessey?

  Right. So there's, there's gonna be plenty of that stuff going around. I've talked about it a few times over the years on the show, talked about it with Ben Lindbergh a couple of times. Just what a, what a sordid history of video game adaptations there are. And it feels like Hollywood has kind of figured it out, or at least one component of it, which is that, Sonic and Super Mario and Minecraft is video games for kids that have a little bit of that nostalgic feeling for parents. If done well, can be a home run.

• 1:23:34Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:23:36Sean Fennessey?

  Everything else creatively and for the most part commercially is kind of a coin flip. And I see this movie as a huge breakthrough. I see this movie as it's, it is the last of us four movies where it's like, this, this is going to be a huge movie that's going to have like, whatever, a, a 92 on Metacritic. Like, which is just crazy. I mean, it's just like never happened.

• 1:23:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Sean Fennessey?

  And you know, it's not going to win awards probably despite Craig or, you know, getting a little nearer to the awards race with weapons last year. But in, it does a similar thing to weapons where like, that's a movie where at the end, a bunch of kids tear the flesh off of a witch.

• 1:24:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Sean Fennessey?

  And made it respectable. And this is like, gonna kind of make movies like this respectable. And I'm, it's, it's just an interesting turning point.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  So what's, what do you think the lesson is going to be? This is gonna, what's gonna happen to also is, I think, I don't think it's gonna come out until 28, but Garland directed, Alex Garland directed Elden Ring. So on one hand, a lesson could be give great filmmakers creative license to adapt these things the way they see fit. And you might get a baseline of very interested people like to prop this movie up commercially. And then also like this, you know, who knows what the artistic and critical ceiling of these things can be. So that's one way. Another is make these things hard fucking ours because people want to see their imaginations fulfilled when they watch them. So especially for stuff in the more of the horror genre like Resident Evil is.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  A lot of the bigger games over the last decade, this is like a very, very general statement. So please don't hold me to this. Feel to me like part of the popularity is based on their, uh, explorability. So GTA, the Red Dead movies, games. I play Red Dead to ride my horse around.

• 1:25:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:32Speaker 05

  I'm, there is a story, but I like riding my horse and I like getting off the horse and being like, do you need water? You know, like you can play that for hours without engaging in a gunfight, you know, like.

• 1:25:45Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think this is a huge part of the success of Backrooms and the idea that Kane Parsons was hugely inspired by Portal, which is another game that is like that, where you are moving through space kind of at your own pace and you're not bound by the conventions of at least movie narrative storytelling. Resident Evil, again, kind of by breaking movie orthodoxy, it also nods to, but it also ignores video game orthodoxy. And so I, I think that first thing that you suggested, I think would be a great outcome. And it's the thing that I always hope for. And you know, when, what's, what's the example that you and Andy have always cited for, um, I mean, I guess and or sort of like, that's the, the, the potential upside.

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:26:30Sean Fennessey?

  Of exploring valuable IP is a strong creative goes down an unusual path and gets to build something that is, you know, defined by genre and a little bit outside of the expectations of the commercial sphere in which it operates. Craig did both, you know? He was like, I'm making a mainstream, down the middle genre movie that also has lots of craft and art in it. And I think that this movie only exists because he wanted to make it, because he pitched it to them.

• 1:27:00Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:27:00Sean Fennessey?

  So there has to be creatives and we're gonna see, you mentioned Garland, Garland loved Elden Ring, and that's why he's doing the movie. Michael Sarnoski is adapting Death Stranding. That's a thing. You know, Peter Berg, say what you will about him, is doing Call of Duty.

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  Taylor Sheridan's writing the screenplay.

• 1:27:14Sean Fennessey?

  There's never been a Call of Duty movie. And I don't, you know, I'm not above enjoying a Call of Duty movie directed by Peter Berg. Like he made Lone Survivor. I like that movie. Like that totally seems credible to me. And he does have a strong artistic vision, no matter what you think of its politics or whatever. So.

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think that there's a, there's a world where it can be that, but it's more likely going to be trusted studio hand comes in on a $200 million movie.

• 1:27:40Speaker 05

  Five Assassin's Creed's for every one Resident Evil. And maybe the ratio will be even worse than that, but I don't think,

• 1:27:48Speaker 05

  I thought what, what you wrote about today with the,

• 1:27:53Speaker 05

  the sort of calcification of the process of DC and Marvel where they're like, we're, we're 10 years out. We know what we're doing. It seems to take Matt Reeves five years to make a movie. We've got the gun verse. We're, we're ramping up to X-Men. There's not a lot of room for surprises and experiments right now.

• 1:28:12Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:28:12Speaker 05

  So maybe the video game adaptations, this is like, it dwarfs comics in terms of its,

• 1:28:23Speaker 05

  the relationship it has with an audience already. So if the idea with comic book stories was like, well, people already know, they know Superman. They love Batman.

• 1:28:31Sean Fennessey?

  That was the point that I made.

• 1:28:32Speaker 05

  Fucking love Red Dead Redemption.

• 1:28:34Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  You know, like they love.

• 1:28:36Sean Fennessey?

  Well, think about the amount of hours that you've poured into that experience. That's the thing that makes this such a unique gambit. And it, it, in a way, I mean, video games for the last 20 years, this has been true, maybe even for the last 30 or 40 years. But I mean, it's been, just been putting movies to shame in terms of the cultural import that it has, the value it has financially to the entertainment industry. I mean, it's just operating in a totally different plane. So you can't compare the two, but I genuinely think

• 1:29:03Sean Fennessey?

  that this is so helpful to the Resident Evil brand and it makes it feel so special.

• 1:29:09Speaker 05

  Resident Evil games now. Like I, I, and you can play remakes for, for different consoles, or you can play kind of like the old school versions of them, the more Capcom-y versions of them. But you know, I, I think the fascinating thing with video games is that.

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  Like, a lot of the fun for me of playing them are not narrative based and they're not lore based. Like, it's kind of interesting. I think Last of Us was a real revelation because it has so much story. I'm not too proud to admit, I'm a big skip the cutscene guy, you know?

• 1:29:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure. I was too when I played games.

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  Let's go. Like, I want to get back to killing people.

• 1:29:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I didn't care either.

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  And so...

• 1:29:51Sean Fennessey?

  But that's, I think, most gamers now are the opposite.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  Maybe it's generational. So, it's kind of funny to me to be like, did we honor the Umbrella Corporation properly? It's like, that had never occurred to me while playing Resident Evil, you know? And the tension between games that have a lot of story and a lot of lore, and how that translates, and what liberties you allow people like Alex Garland to make, take, versus somebody who might be a little bit more of a lunch pail director, who's like, "I don't have the pull to take over and make Assassin's Creed, you know, a weird black comedy."

• 1:30:29Sean Fennessey?

  You just made me realize, though, I think, why it was so easy for me to shed video games, which is that my entire life, I'm always worried about control. That's a hangup of mine, as you well know. And I think about it in everything that I do, except when I'm at the movies. In the movies, somebody else is in control.

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, you want to get dominated.

• 1:30:50Sean Fennessey?

  I do.

• 1:30:50Speaker 05

  And that's what this movie does.

• 1:30:52Sean Fennessey?

  It does. And I wouldn't want to spend my free time, my free leisure time, being in control of a character, the way that I am when I play a video game.

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Sean Fennessey?

  And maybe I'm intellectualizing it, but I think it's probably the truth. And a movie takes you away, and it frees you from that concern in a way that is very special. Now, there are some, most video game fans, I imagine, they want to be in control. They want, they like that feeling, because maybe they feel powerless in parts of their life.

• 1:31:22Speaker 05

  To your point about how they watch the cutscenes, I think maybe it's a hybrid. I think it is, it's like, I get to control what feels like cinema. I mean, it's almost going back to putting a dollar seventy-five into Dragon Slayer and being like, "I'm playing a cartoon."

• 1:31:35Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Like, a real, real cartoon for a second, like, and then die. You know, like, but, you know, you think about, like, why didn't Halo work? Why didn't Assassin's Creed work? Why didn't some of these bigger efforts?

• 1:31:47Sean Fennessey?

  Prince of Persia, Uncharted.

• 1:31:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. And maybe it is just they weren't good. And maybe it is that there's this tension between, "I don't want to watch him be Master Chief, I want to be Master Chief." Like, I don't know. Like, the coolest execution for some of this stuff would be, to your point, Backrooms-esque explorations of the Old West, or, you know, GTA, like Vice City, and just being like, "What if this character just, like, walked around for a while?"

• 1:32:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. That's the giant, white polar bear looming as the GTA 6 comes out in two months. And when it comes out, it has a chance to kind of blot out what you and I spend a lot of time podcasting about, for a huge segment of the audience, for a while.

• 1:32:37Speaker 05

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:32:38Sean Fennessey?

  Because there's only so many hours in the day, and this seems like the most anticipated movie of all, or, excuse me, most anticipated game of all time. And there's never been talk of a movie, a GTA movie, and playing GTA, I have played GTA, so I certainly was playing various iterations of that game over time into the 2000s. And I similarly was, like, not super interested in the cutscenes, but that felt like a more novel execution of control, because you could just fuck around so much.

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Sean Fennessey?

  But there's a part of me that, deep down, thinks that in the next ten years, we will have a GTA movie. I don't know what you think about that.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  I don't know why we don't already. I mean, I think probably people who really play games, and, you know, if you, if you were, if you like playing Fortnite, you're probably, like, Fortnite's bigger than the movies, you know?

• 1:33:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 05

  GTA's bigger than the movies. Like, it's not, did the movies finally gain to, like, make a movie out of this?

• 1:33:33Sean Fennessey?

  That's the thing is Rockstar Games.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  Does Rockstar say, "Final, okay, we're gonna see if this will work, and we'll let, you know, does Ryan Coogler want to make GTA? Let's make it," you know?

• 1:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  Would be interesting.

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um, can you just tell me a little bit about horror comedy, since we talked so much about it?

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 1:33:52Sean Fennessey?

  Just, just very briefly. Because this is something I have always loved, and it's a big part of my gateway into horror. And I think when you're, when you're a kid of our generation, you get a bunch of movies like Gremlins, and Monster Squad, and Ghostbusters, that hold your hand into the world of horror. I was the kind of kid who would go to the library and, like, look at books about, like, monsters and myths, and just read about them all the time. But I think I got those ideas from seeing these movies. And there's two versions of it. There's movies like that, that are for kids to make them laugh, that adults might like too, if they like Dr. Venkman. And then there's, like, this movie is for adults, but it's funny.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:34:31Sean Fennessey?

  The latter, I think, is impossible. I think it's like, there's...

• 1:34:35Speaker 05

  What Resident Evil is.

• 1:34:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. There's, like, five movies like it, that are, like, actually great.

• 1:34:40Speaker 05

  Although I will say, one of the things that made me so elated while watching this movie is that I have been feeling the same thing that I know you have been feeling, which is, horror movies are becoming a drag. And I still will go watch almost anything that is a horror movie. But I am more often than not sitting through forty-five minutes of ponderous, like, self-examination and sadness, rather than, "Is this scary and fun? Like, can we have, like, a fun genre experience?"

• 1:35:13Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:35:13Speaker 05

  And the pendulum is fully swung. Like, when I started watching horror movies, I didn't really like watching Joe Dante movies. I didn't really like watching, like, goofier kind of horror.

• 1:35:23Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  I wanted to be scandalized and terrified. And then, the sort of, however you want to describe elevated horror, I think that the long tail of that being, "This is, like, a haunted house movie, or a possession movie, or a scary guy in the woods movie, but we're, like, talking about, like, why is he scary, though? Why is this guy in the woods?"

• 1:35:46Sean Fennessey?

  The sad and darkened tone of...

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  And why were you in the woods in the first place? Did your mom die? Like, you're probably pretty sad about that. Let's talk a lot about that.

• 1:35:53Sean Fennessey?

  Family history, intent, all of those things that fuck those movies.

• 1:35:56Speaker 05

  I'm just tired. I'm just tired of it. And it's, it's nothing against any individual film. It's just, like, we have now hit, like, a breaking point where I think they're just filling out movies with, like, lots of really rote kind of introspection. So, to have this, and to have this maybe be like, "Is a changer coming?" You know? Are we gonna get back to, like, spraying blood everywhere, and just, you know, maybe having, like, an amazing mindless time at a movie? That would be kind of cool if that swung. Because I think it would only make the elevated stuff that much more powerful if it was less dominant.

• 1:36:29Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there's just so few examples, though, of combining the gore with the comedy in a way that is effective.

• 1:36:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Sean Fennessey?

  Like, to me, it's an extremely short list. Like, it's like Fright Night, and American Werewolf in London, Shaun of the Dead.

• 1:36:45Speaker 05

  Do you think Evil Dead is too far in the other direction?

• 1:36:48Sean Fennessey?

  No. I think Evil Dead 2 is a masterpiece. I think Army of Darkness is awesome, and I like the original Evil Dead, of course, landmark movie. I think those movies have been, like, ripped off so many times that it's almost, it's like Casablanca at this point, you know? It's so foundational.

• 1:37:03Speaker 05

  That franchise is really illustrative of what I'm talking about.

• 1:37:06Sean Fennessey?

  And they fuck, completely fucked it by making it so serious.

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  But, you know, I liked Rise enough.

• 1:37:12Sean Fennessey?

  I liked Rise as well.

• 1:37:13Speaker 05

  But Burn is a real drag.

• 1:37:15Sean Fennessey?

  Sucks.

• 1:37:15Speaker 05

  And it has, like, some good shit in it, but it is, like, really sad.

• 1:37:20Sean Fennessey?

  Individual kills are good, but yeah. The tone of the movie is way off, and it is exactly what you're describing. There are, like, a lot of examples of horror movies, to me, that I think are fun and funny, but are not great horror comedies. You know what I mean? Like, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is, like, a super funny movie, and very effective, and a great zag away from the original, you know, twenty years later. Same for, like, The Return of the Living Dead, or Creepshow, or, I mean, Barbarian is kind of like this. You know, Barbarian is like, the hard cut to Justin Long singing along in the convertible after one of, like, the biggest, like, what-the-fuck-is-about-to-happen scares in a movie in some time, is brilliant.

• 1:37:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Sean Fennessey?

  But sustaining that feeling for the long time is really tough. Like, I find Cabin in the Woods very clever and amusing, but I don't know if I laughed while watching it. You know what I mean?

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  I think what, I think I laughed at the twists, and I think I laughed at, especially on rewatch, when you know what you're seeing. There's stuff that's funnier, because you know it's, like, playing a trope, kind of, and that they're not really in control. Yeah, I mean, like, I rewatched Lake Placid recently. I wouldn't necessarily call that, like, a horror movie, but it is something that is, like, every scene is basically written comically.

• 1:38:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:38:32Speaker 05

  But it is, there's a lot of gore in it. I mean, like, people get eaten by a giant gator, you know?

• 1:38:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Speaker 05

  Or a crocodile, yeah.

• 1:38:39Sean Fennessey?

  I never know how to put my arms around the genre, because there's obvious stuff, like, I've been trying to figure out if Alice can watch Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, and whether she would enjoy that, or, like, get it. And I'll follow up with you about that soon, when another movie comes out, that is related to that. But, you know, Frankenstein is no longer, like, really scary to little kids, the original Frankenstein, but I don't know if young Frankenstein is funny to people either now. And so, kind of, that's the other thing, is that, obviously, comic sensibilities really change over time. And I could imagine a twenty-year-old hearing us say the words Fright Night, and watching the original, and being like, "This junky old thing?" You know, like, I really don't know, it evolves a lot.

• 1:39:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I saw Yelchin's Colin Farrell remake of Fright Night, is actually, if you're, like, maybe that earlier comic sensibility is not for you, like, the...

• 1:39:29Sean Fennessey?

  That one struck me as more serious.

• 1:39:31Speaker 05

  But it's still, it's still got some funny parts, yeah. I mean, you know, like, look, I think, I think it's a balance. I think weaving it together is the hard part. In Scream, trying to think, Scream 2 probably is the, among the funnier ones, I suppose.

• 1:39:46Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's more jokey, but not as funny as one. Like, one, Jamie Kennedy and Matthew Lillard in one actually make me laugh.

• 1:39:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:39:54Sean Fennessey?

  Two, you can feel Williamson leaning into the kind of clever, like, laugh lines.

• 1:40:01Speaker 05

  Two is Oliphant, and...

• 1:40:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Right. Okay. Um, so, you know, it's a really, I mean, Little Shop of Horrors is maybe another movie that, like, is, like, kind of funny, is kind of horror. Certainly was scary to me when I was in third grade and saw it. But it's, it's a very unusual territory. And so it's so funny for a huge video game adaptation from one of the most talked-about directors of the last five years, that also happens to be horror, is also one of the funniest movies of the year.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Sean Fennessey?

  Very unusual. Any, any closing thoughts?

• 1:40:37Speaker 05

  I was wondering what you think the backlash against this movie would be. Or not even the backlash, but what's the, what's the?

• 1:40:42Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, for everything we do, it'll be you guys oversold this.

• 1:40:45Speaker 05

  What's the first real, like, the problem? That's not even like the problem. I don't even want to do this. I was gonna say like, let's like, let's, let's.

• 1:40:53Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there was a sharp backlash to weapons that seemed like very online and not very real world to me. And I think some of it will just be about like, I thought it was too gross or I didn't think it really, there was anything to really hold on to.

• 1:41:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've seen people be like, there's no characters, you know, and.

• 1:41:12Sean Fennessey?

  Again, I think it asks an interesting question about that very concern, which is who cares?

• 1:41:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can you name a single person in like these 10 horror movies? Like what, what did they want?

• 1:41:21Sean Fennessey?

  It's not really the point, you know, it's a ride. Uh, this has been a ride. You feel good?

• 1:41:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, I feel like this is gonna be in like my top five. Like.

• 1:41:31Sean Fennessey?

  Probably, I mean, that's not surprising because.

• 1:41:36Speaker 05

  I know.

• 1:41:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, it's tic-tac-toe. Yeah. It's the most, it's the most tic-tac-toe movie of the year for me. Where I'm like, you made a laugh out loud funny movie that is utterly disgusting with incredible craft.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  I say it just because I don't remember the last time a director has had a, one of my favorite movies of the year, year after year, in successive years.

• 1:41:55Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's, it's just as bad as TV where you have to wait 24 months between seasons. You know, most of these people are not working that fast, but that's the other upside of moving quickly and making your movies not two hours and 42 minutes. Um, CR, thank you.

• 1:42:09Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:42:09Sean Fennessey?

  You're the goat. Uh, thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for his production support. Next week, Adam Naaman returns to the show to break down everything that he saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. That, of course, augers the start of the Best Picture power rankings here on this show, which Amanda and I will do.

• 1:42:26Speaker 05

  Adam, you better like Resident Evil.

• 1:42:29Sean Fennessey?

  No promises there. You know what? Maybe Zach Craig will stop by on Monday, too. We'll see. You'll have to just tune in and find out. See you then.