Resident Evil (2002)

This week, Chris & Lizzie try to figure out how Paul W. S. Anderson saved his career, his love life, and Constantin Film (maybe just in the United States) with a lovable clunker of a zombie movie. They trace the origins of the hit game Resident Evil is based on (and the game that game was born from, and the movie that game was based on), untangle a creative love triangle between Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their director, and work through the complicated, mostly fruitless attempts to find synergy between the movies and video games. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that begs the question, when do the raccoons come out? I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what did you make me watch for today?

• 2:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I gave you the privilege of watching the first installment of the you can't kill it, shoot it in the head Resident Evil franchise, which bears some resemblance to the games upon which it's based. And we're going to spend a lot of this episode actually talking about the games. It's got an interesting history, how the first game was developed, and then it led to this unusual film that kind of birthed a weird B-movie subgenre of its own. So I'm really excited to talk about it. It's got some fun characters, you know, kind of some folks who needed a break and caught it at the exact right moment. But Lizzie, we got to start with, what a treat it must have been for you to watch this last night? And what was your experience watching it? Had you ever seen it before? You know, talk us through it. Give us the blow-by-blow.

• 3:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So I had not seen this before. I thought that I had, maybe because-

• 3:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You may have seen parts of one of them. There are many.

• 3:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And also, her outfit in this is so iconic that I think that was burned into my head. You know, the asymmetrical red dress with the knee-high, black, flat boots. Great outfit, very impractical for killing whatever the hell those things are, but she looks great doing it. Although she doesn't actually do much of it in this movie.

• 3:31Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk about that. There's a funny reason for that.

• 3:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. So yeah, I had never sat down and watched this all the way through. And, you know, I started this pretty late last night. I was very tired.

• 3:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you texted me, I saw the timestamp of your text, and I thought, wild choice to start this that late the night before recording.

• 3:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Didn't have an option. We have been moving into a new house, many states away from where we used to live, and 9:30 PM was the only time I could start watching Resident Evil. It is a movie. It's, uh, first of all, it's deeply confusing. I didn't know what was going on for like 70% of this movie. For something that is seemingly so simple, it almost felt like you had to have played the game to kind of know what was hap- no? Chris is shaking his head, no.

• 4:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think playing the game would help you that much. As we'll learn, this is not a direct adaptation of the game.

• 4:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, then what was happening?

• 4:29Chris Winterbauer?

  What do you think happened?

• 4:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. I don't know. Honestly, like truly, I was so confused. I still am so confused.

• 4:38Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a Wuhan lab leak, they send in the team.

• 4:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That part I got. The lady gets her head chopped off by the elevator. That was fun.

• 4:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Mila Jovovich's Alice has memory loss from the halide or whatever comes out of the smoke detectors.

• 4:52Lizzie Bassett?

  But who is she? Why is she there? Who is James Purefoy? What the fuck was their relationship? Also, what happened to James Purefoy? I liked him a lot when he was around. He's very good in Vanity Fair, that movie with Reese Witherspoon. And then he just disappeared off the face of the earth, and I don't know why. So anyway, where did he go? He's not great in this, but that's not his fault. I just found it to be both stupidly simplistic and deeply confusing at the same time. That being said, it has fun performances. I love Mila Jovovich, always. I think she's a very good actor and she, you know, holds this down as well as anyone possibly could. If anyone's never seen The Messenger, where she plays Joan of Arc, she is actually like great in that.

• 5:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Kind of a mess of a movie, but she's very good. And yeah, I was just, I was just blown away by how little sense it makes. You know, like, I'm okay with there not being a lot of logic in movies like this, or rather, I'm okay when the logic doesn't relate to our real-world logic. But I expect some logic to exist within the world itself, even if they're making it up. And that just doesn't happen here. Like, it was bizarre.

• 6:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you want me to explain a little bit of what happened?

• 6:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 6:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it seems like it never really connected for you. They do hide the ball for most of the movie, but they do eventually explain what's going on.

• 6:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Do they?

• 6:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a compooper, there's a computer.

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Eric Maybius's sister, the police officer's sister, works in the lab.

• 6:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 6:23Chris Winterbauer?

  She was secretly meeting with Mila Jovovich.

• 6:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 6:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Who has a front with James Purefoy as the couple that owns this mansion, right? That's actually the secret entrance to the facility that goes under Raccoon City. Mila Jovovich and the scientists were working together to expose the corporation. James Purefoy heard them coming up with this plan, so he decides he's going to steal the T-virus for himself. That kicks off the events of the movie. He infects the entire lab, he then escapes, but before he's able to escape, he's knocked out by the gas, which causes a memory loss. And so he and Mila Jovovich wake up as the star's team, Special Tactics and Rescue Services, bust in and bring them down to exterminate the viral infection down below and blow up the whole thing eventually, get the antidote and leave. That's the setup.

• 7:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. I understood like 95% of that. I think actually the part I was most confused by was James Purefoy and like what-

• 7:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, they don't do a great job explaining him.

• 7:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No. I understood that he was some sort of double agent.

• 7:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of.

• 7:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I, it just, it's like, I don't know. Also, why is everything so fucked up when she gets out? Is it because the virus got out?

• 7:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 7:36Lizzie Bassett?

  When did that happen?

• 7:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you don't see it, but it did. That's presumed. I mean, they bring Eric Maybius is infected when they bring him out at the end.

• 7:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but-

• 7:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're saying like, get him to the nemesis program, but so he clearly must have infected someone.

• 7:48Lizzie Bassett?

  But they didn't feel like they needed to show. Anyway, whatever. Um, okay.

• 7:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think that was necessary. I, this movie's very confusing. That part of the movie, I don't think is confusing.

• 7:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, fine.

• 7:58Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was very late. It was very late.

• 8:00Lizzie Bassett?

  It's late in the game. They do a big reveal, like you're saying, very late in the game. I didn't love it. I didn't love it. I thought I would have loved it.

• 8:07Chris Winterbauer?

  What if you turned that corner to, but it was great?

• 8:09Lizzie Bassett?

  No. It was not great. And I like this kind of movie, so I was actually quite surprised by how little I enjoyed this movie. I do always enjoy a Michelle Rodriguez action movie performance. She is always great. And I like Eric Maybius a lot. Where did he go? Also, two of these guys, where did they go? They were great. They were fun. I would say he and Mila Jovovich really hold this movie down. Anyway, Chris, that's enough of me being incredibly confused by what I watched at 9:30 PM last night. What about you?

• 8:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw this movie, when it came out, roughly around this time. It is kind of one of a litany of post-Matrix science fiction ripoff films, I would say. You could throw Equilibrium in there, Aon Flux, perhaps with Charlize Theron, the Karen Kusama film that we covered, Ultraviolet, also with Mila Jovovich. There are many of these films that I think came out after The Matrix and were deeply influenced by The Matrix and yet felt candidly like bargain bin versions of The Matrix to a certain extent.

• 9:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time. This is like a bargain bin 28 days later.

• 9:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it came out before 28 days later, so I don't think you can technically say that.

• 9:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm still going to say that.

• 9:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So I didn't love it. And yes, in relation to something like 28 Days Later, this fell distant second. However, as more and more of these came out, Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, The Final Chapter, The Final Chapter, Final Chapter, you know, whatever the version is, there is, I find, sort of a guilty B, C, Z movie pleasure in these movies. And the downside of this one is it's actually not ridiculous enough. The movies start to become so absurd that I enjoy them more and more, the more ridiculous they get. You know, Mila Jovovich ejecting the magazine from her gun, or dropping her gun, and then jumping to the ground to grab it and shoot the bad guy before they react. It's the most ridiculous move in action movie history. We need more of that.

• 10:01Chris Winterbauer?

  But I think they realize that eventually, you know, when they're making these movies, and we'll talk about kind of the continued evolution of these movies during the legacy portion, all to say, I still enjoy, again, the time passed quickly for me watching this movie, even though I agree with you, it feels a little shoddy, you know, throughout, even though I like sequences and I like, I mean, the whole beginning feels like it's something out of Final Destination or Ghost Ship or something like that. It's very fun. And then the movie kind of grinds to a halt for a little while, and you kind of wonder why are we withholding so much information? And then I do think the ending gets pretty fun when it just becomes a creature feature with the liquor, you know, at the end, the big tongue creature.

• 10:38Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Beginning and end, totally fun. The beginning, I was actually excited because I was really enjoying it. It was giving like bootleg contagion, which I'm always here for, very much enjoy that. But yeah, that middle, like, the middle two-thirds of the movie are pretty rough. I'm surprised.

• 10:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think this is the hardest thing about adapting a video game is what do you do with act two? The second act of a video game is the character either defeating increasingly difficult bosses, or completing increasingly difficult puzzles. But they're not marked typically by remarkable story turns, right? It's a linear progression through a sequence of escalating challenges. And I think that that's a really tricky thing with video game adaptations. I don't think they cracked it here necessarily. We'll talk about the process of writing the script. I think that's the section of the script that they struggled with the most. And we'll talk about a couple of other writers and their approaches, and maybe they would have worked better. And I read other versions of the script, Lizzie, and I can pitch them to you, and you can tell me if you would have liked them more. But all to say, I still kind of enjoyed it. Do I think it's good? No. Would I ever recommend it to someone? No. But if it comes on, I probably wouldn't

• 11:39Chris Winterbauer?

  turn it off. And that's where I land with Resident Evil. And so I'm excited to get into it today.

• 11:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I'm excited to hear about this process, too. And, you know, you make a good point about when this came out. I think now, because this type of movie is so ubiquitous, it's easy to be like, wow, that was not good. But considering it came out before 28 Days Later, that makes more sense to me as to why this did end up spawning a film franchise. I was very confused about that when watching it, because it just seemed like a bit of a dud, if you will. But tell me more, Chris.

• 12:10Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, let's talk about it. Before we get there, the details. Resident Evil is an action zombie science fiction video game adaptation, written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson.

• 12:22Lizzie Bassett?

  The other one?

• 12:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It was adapted from the Capcom game of the same name, produced by Bernhard Eichinger and Constantine Film of Germany. It stars Mila Jovovich as Alice, Michelle Rodriguez as Rain, James Puerfoi as Spence, Eric Mabius as Matt, Martin Cruz as Kaplan, Colin Salmon as One and Many, well, a few more. It actually has a pretty contained cast.

• 12:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I say not that many.

• 12:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It was distributed by Screen Gems in the United States, and it was released in the United States on March 15, 2002. As always, the IMDb logline reads, "A special military unit fights a powerful, out-of-control supercomputer and hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident."

• 13:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, you know what? I know what it is. I know what the part of this movie is that confused me the most and felt like such a redirect. It's the computer.

• 13:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 13:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I was just very deeply confused about what proto-mother's-

• 13:20Chris Winterbauer?

  The files are in the computer?

• 13:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Yeah, I felt like Zoolander in this movie, about what her motivations were and what her function was. Yeah. I mean, it seemed like it was to contain the virus, but then at other times, it did not seem like that. That, I think, was the biggest sticking point for me, is what is mother doing? I know it's not mother, but-

• 13:38Chris Winterbauer?

  There are some kitchen-scent qualities to the way this was written, and we can get into perhaps the motivations for the inclusion of specific elements, especially given the success of films that immediately preceded Resident Evil. So the sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, we had a really fun time deep diving this one. Resident Evil Oral History: Set Secrets From Its 15-Year Run from Inverse, that also includes a lot of really fun facts about the later films, which we're not going to talk about. Fangoria Magazine's 211th issue from April of 2002. Phantom Limbs: Dissecting Horrors: Lost Sequels and Remakes by Jason Jenkins, this is a really fun book. PlayStation Magazine, May and June of 1998 releases. Resident Evil: Behind the Scenes, the DVD featurette. Also, I just want to recommend the director, the audio commentary

• 14:22Chris Winterbauer?

  for Resident Evil is very funny. It's Mila Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez and Paul Anderson. And Mila Jovovich, like, forgets to do her commentary at one point, and it's just like, wait, what are we doing here? Is this a commentary on this movie? She, at one point, I believe she says that if enough people see the movie, she'll get implants at one point in this thing. It's very funny. So if you guys are interested, check it out. Also, many, many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. So, Lizzie, let's talk about how a relatively straightforward, I would say, computer game, video game, console game, became one of the most confusing movies you've seen in recent years.

• 14:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I will preface all of my complaints by saying that I was very tired. So it may be mostly my fault.

• 15:05Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no, no.

• 15:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I'm not that dumb?

• 15:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It is kind of unnecessarily convoluted. There's no reason to withhold certain reveals as late as they do in the movie, in my opinion, too. Well, Lizzie, in some ways, you could trace Resident Evil back to a seminal film of the late 1960s, shot in black and white for almost no money on the East Coast. What am I talking about?

• 15:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, oh, oh, Night of the Living Dead?

• 15:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Night of the Living Dead by George Romero. And if you're interested in the evolution of zombies as monsters, you can listen to our primer episode, just search "zombies!" exclamation point, in our feed. We will put a link in the show notes. But practically speaking, Resident Evil was actually born far east of where we are right now, far from the American East Coast, in Japan. Okay, that makes sense. It's based on a Japanese video game. But that video game, Lizzie, never would have existed if it had not been for a video game that preceded it called Sweet Home, which was not sweet, but it did take place in somebody's home. And this video game was based on a movie. So in January of 1989, Toho, which we talked about during our episode on Seven Samurai, released a

• 16:14Chris Winterbauer?

  horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, no relation to Akira Kurosawa. I mentioned Kiyoshi Kurosawa briefly, Lizzie, when we were doing our review of Obsession, because there's a couple of shots in Obsession that are direct homages to Kurosawa's film Pulse, which was adapted in the United States with, I think, Kristen Bell at one point, and wasn't great.

• 16:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 16:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Kurosawa is one of the masters of kind of slow-burn J-horror of the late 90s and early 2000s, whose movie Cure is pretty amazing. But Sweet Home was much earlier in his career. 1989, it was produced by Juzo Itami. Now, Itami is also a big producer. He's an actor. He's a director in his own right. He actually has a role in this movie as kind of the gas station attendant who warns our heroes from going to the haunted mansion. It has a lot of Western themes to it. Yeah, he's wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. You go, why is this, like, 40-year-old man dressed like a 70-year-old? So, the IMDb logline reads, "A TV production crew is making a documentary about the infamous painter Mamuya Ichiro. When they start filming at his old home, they come under attack from

• 17:18Chris Winterbauer?

  the ghost of the painter's wife." So I watched this movie in preparation for this episode. It's very fun. It's basically a pretty direct ripoff of Robert Wise's The Haunting, if you've seen the 1963 version of that film.

• 17:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I may have seen a remake, but yes.

• 17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there was the remake in 99, I believe. But anyway, so, you know, camera crew, five people, basically, they go to this house. It's a haunted house. They're looking for these frescoes that are supposedly in this house. This painter's died 30 years ago. They find this beautiful fresco, but then in other rooms, they find these really horrifying frescoes. And what they slowly realize is that the spouse, the wife of Ichiro, was opening the furnace to, you know, heat up the house in the morning. And when she wasn't looking, her child, her toddler, crawled into the furnace. She started the furnace, accidentally burned her child to death, went insane, and then started luring other children to the home to burn them in the furnace so that her child would have friends

• 18:16Chris Winterbauer?

  in the afterlife. And then the townspeople murdered her by throwing her in the furnace. It's gnarly.

• 18:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa, all right.

• 18:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's also, for the first hour, I would say it's pretty tonally jarring, because musically, it plays almost comedic. But then, for the last 40 minutes, it's great. And it goes full Poltergeist, and it is so fun.

• 18:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice, all right.

• 18:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I would highly recommend it. If you guys are, you know, fans of Cure or Pulse or, you know, Kurosawa, try to check it out. It's on YouTube. This is, again, a little more down the middle. It's like Poltergeist, The Haunting, Alice in Wonderland, but it's got a few unique elements. So producer Juzo Itami's father was Mansako Itami, who mentored Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote Seven Samurai, fun connection. Second, Oscar winner Dick Smith did the special makeup effects, and they are great.

• 19:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Amazing. Yeah, he's an absolute legend.

• 19:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, The Exorcist, we talked about recently. Guillermo del Toro, you know, wrote to him to become his mentor. Third, the movie's got a tie-in video game. It's going to be released the same year- For the Japanese console system, the Famicom. That stands for Family Computer. And it was Nintendo's original console, released in 1983. The American version, Lizzie, released in 85, was eventually called the Nintendo Entertainment System, or the NES.

• 19:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 19:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So in the United States, video game tie-ins at this point had a pretty bad reputation, and they would for a long time. There's a really notorious example that we have actually mentioned on the show, which was the ET, the Extraterrestrial tie-in game for Atari.

• 19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  So this was released in late 1982. I actually read that they had to develop it in something like six to eight weeks in order to make it to market in time. And it was a massive flop. So released in 1982, same year as the film, ET becomes the highest grossing movie of all time. And then there was a rumor that this game sold so poorly that they actually dumped all the extra copies in a landfill.

• 20:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  That actually ended up proving somewhat true. The magnitude of the number of cartridges dumped was exaggerated. However, they did dig them up eventually and realized, well, there's a lot of cartridges down here.

• 20:23Lizzie Bassett?

  An excavation of the ET cartridges.

• 20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Some historians have even cited this game as a contributing factor to the 1983 video game crash, which sent the industry in the United States into a recession through 1985. This recession was bad, Lizzie. So home video game revenue dropped more than 90% from 1983 to 1985.

• 20:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Listen, if you're gonna make a bad video game, you wanna make sure it's

• 20:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, take the market.

• 20:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Tank the market. Make sure it's bad enough to literally ruin it for everyone.

• 20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So again, very broadly speaking, video game tie-ins have historically been considered, you know, low-quality cash grabs. I would put them a level or two below novelizations of films, for example. When video game designer Tokuro Fujiwara joined Capcom, he wanted to design arcade games. So arcade games, Lizzie, often used high-end, custom hardware, way too expensive for the average home to buy. But they then had better graphics. They could do more sophisticated things. Consoles were cheap, but consoles were kind of starting to win the market. So Capcom had started in the arcade space, but with the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System, they started to pivot. So Fujiwara had worked on 1985's Ghosts and Goblins,

• 21:36Chris Winterbauer?

  which was an arcade game that we don't believe featured any ghosts, but did have a lot of zombies and maybe some goblins. It was a hit on arcade, and then it was a smash when they ported it, meaning they transferred, they made a version for the console system. So they have to make a version that works on the lower-quality hardware of the console system. Street Fighter is released in arcades through 1987. That gets ported. And then all of a sudden, around this time, Capcom gets split into two departments, arcade games and console games. This is a bit of a surprise, because before it was just, look, we'll develop it for arcades, and then we'll create sort of a downstream version for consoles. So now they're saying, no, we're gonna develop stuff straight for consoles. It would almost be like a studio saying, we're gonna do stuff for theaters, and then we're gonna independently do things for home video. Perhaps a way to think of it.

• 22:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So Fujiwara was apparently pretty stunned. They were gonna make games for the Famicom system. And then he got assigned to run the console division. Not exactly what he's hoping to do at this point in time. He's working on Mega Man 2, and he hates it. Quote, "I wasn't earning a daily income. We didn't do any location testing. We didn't get to interact with players. The hardware was a step down from what I was using before. Not to mention the fact that I'd originally wanted to make arcade games. All this made it hard for me to see the change in a positive light at first."

• 22:53Chris Winterbauer?

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• 25:07Chris Winterbauer?

  This podcast is sponsored by Drip Drop. Guys, if you live in LA like me, honestly, if you live anywhere right now, El Nino is a Bruin, and it is so hot all the time. It has been 100 degrees again here in Los Angeles. And honestly, my energy just dips with this weather. And that is where Drip Drop comes in. I drink it, as you know, when I run. But honestly, I have been just drinking it every day just as a little pick-me-up to keep me going. Drip Drop is proven fast hydration, because hydration isn't just something you do when you're behind, it's how you stay ahead. Drip Drop is used by over 90% of top college and pro sports teams, and their Zero Sugar Plus is a breakthrough, fast-absorbing formula with an advanced blend of six key electrolytes, 15 essential vitamins and nutrients, and no sugar or artificial sweeteners.

• 25:50Chris Winterbauer?

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• 26:10Lizzie Bassett?

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• 26:54Lizzie Bassett?

  helping over 500,000 owners and solopreneurs run their business confidently. Right now, my listeners can get FreshBooks for less than $3 a month for your first four months. That's 90% off. Head to freshbooks.com/podcast to get started. That's 90% off, under $3 a month for four months at freshbooks.com/podcast.

• 27:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So Fujiwara is working in the console division, and they get the assignment to make the Sweet Home video game tie-in, which from one perspective could be seen as the ultimate demotion. Not only are you not making arcade games, but you need to make the weird video game tie-in for this random horror film. And then all of a sudden, Fujiwara realizes something. With horror, the limitations of the hardware became an asset. So as one interviewer of Fujiwara wrote, "Even though primitive hardware makes for poor graphics, it means that you don't run into issues when making games with extreme content. With advanced hardware, you can show off more realistic graphics, but the better the graphics get, the stricter the censorship becomes."

• 28:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 28:01Chris Winterbauer?

  When it's somewhat obscured what you're showing, or maybe you're implying you're not gonna be censored as strictly as if you're working with a more high-fidelity graphics system, and it's more clear what you're showing. It's a little similar to the way Alfred Hitchcock tried to hide the ball with Psycho, for example.

• 28:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 28:17Chris Winterbauer?

  These aren't the breasts you're looking for.

• 28:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. They're black and white breasts. You can't see them.

• 28:22Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Black and white biddies. So in Sweet Home, players can burn maggots, for example, something he pulled from the movie. And the creative freedom didn't end there. So Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Sweet Home, told Fujiwara, "Look, don't worry if the game follows the movie exactly." So he wasn't just porting the movie to the home video game console, he was adapting it with his own voice. So the game was released just under a year after the movie, in December of 1989. Now, we weren't able to find specific information about how much money either of them made, but some sources suggest the game was generally considered better than the movie. And it was well-received by critics in Japan. And if you wanted the true, original version of Sweet Home,

• 29:05Chris Winterbauer?

  you had to go with the game, because producer Juzo Itami went behind Kurosawa's back and reshoot and recut portions of the movie after the theatrical release.

• 29:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 29:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So for context, he was married to the movie's star, Nobuko Miyamoto, who's great. She becomes kind of the unexpected heroine in the third act of the film. There's a lot of aliens imagery as well. She does not have children, but she's going to save the surrogate child from the queen, you know, at the end of the movie.

• 29:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 29:34Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a big aliens riff in this film.

• 29:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Let's argue there's quite an aliens riff in Resident Evil as well.

• 29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, we'll talk about how it used to be even more before.

• 29:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, okay.

• 29:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So Kurosawa sued Itami for these changes, which according to Tom Mez and Jasper Sharps, The Midnight Eye Guide to Japanese Film, very fun book, that was something you did not do in Japan at the time. And Kurosawa, actually, I read, was somewhat blackballed in the industry for a little while. So the theatrical cut remained unavailable, and I believe to this day remains unavailable. Also sidebar, Itami had a tragic end. It was believed that he died by suicide in the late 90s, but I think they later revealed that he was murdered.

• 30:14Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 30:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That somebody faked his suicide.

• 30:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it unsolved?

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I think there was something of a confession, but I don't know if it's ever been 100% officially solved. But yeah, it's, it's pretty nuts. Fujiwara's vision, though, reached homes untouched. And according to Fujiwara, nearly everyone agreed that the game was scarier than the movie. But neither of these versions of Sweet Home reached the United States. One possible reason was that the gore that Fujiwara was hyped about including didn't go over well in the US, which was starting to favor more kid-friendly games, like what super famous pair of Italian plumbers?

• 30:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Super Mario Brothers.

• 30:53Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Mario and Luigi, Chris Pratt and Charlie Day, which Hollywood wanted to turn into a movie. And Lizzie, that movie released in 1993, which your husband and I covered, didn't do so well.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's insane.

• 31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  You can check out, Bob Oskin as Mario is still the weirdest casting choice of all time. You can check out our episode for more details, but just to know for now, it grossed less than half of the nearly $50 million it cost to make.

• 31:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Chris Winterbauer?

  And the LA Times review of the film started with, "No offense, Nintendo," and closed with this. "Does it make sense to make movies from video games? Of course, it makes commercial sense. Given the massive international popularity of the four Nintendo Mario Brothers games, this movie is virtually pre-sold. But a built-in audience should be a challenge as well as a reassurance." I would argue they took that challenge too far because the problem with the Super Mario Brothers movie is that it is unrecognizable, I would say, to the fans of the game. However, in the span of 11 years, the video game industry had taken the highest grossing film of all time, E.T., and turned it into a game that tanked the video game industry.

• 32:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And Hollywood had taken the most successful home console franchise of all time and turned it into a movie that tanked the careers of its directors.

• 32:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 32:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe video games and movies just didn't mix. So back in Japan, Sony's gearing up to release its fifth-generation console, the Sony PlayStation. Like the Sega Saturn and eventually the Nintendo 64, 3D graphics are the key to these systems, Lizzie. And Fujiwara sees an opportunity. What if he could make a horror game that was not hamstrung by graphical limitations? What if he could do everything he'd wanted to do with Sweet Home but hadn't been able to do? What if he could do something so scary that survival horror games could be a genre in and of themselves? So he enlists a game designer, Shinji Mikami, who loved Sweet Home but didn't think this type of game would sell well. In fact, nobody at Capcom did. The studio would apparently assign new hires or people with extra time on their hands to work on the game, just called the horror game at this point.

• 32:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It reminds me of Shrek, where they just get the sort of bench warmers constantly on this project.

• 32:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 33:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Mikami described the experience as the opposite of getting special treatment. But Fujiwara didn't care. He had a vision. And that vision was zombies in an old mansion. Now, Mikami claims that the zombies were his idea. He said that initially, he thought it should be ghosts, but then he realized there wouldn't be any real feeling of exhilaration if you were shooting at or attacking ghosts. That makes sense. Bullets probably aren't gonna stop a ghost. So he needs a monster, and that's when he remembers what seminal late 60s black-and-white movie shot on the East Coast of the United States, Lizzie?

• 33:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Night of the Living Dead.

• 33:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Actually, the sequel.

• 33:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 33:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I tricked you. Dawn of the Dead, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which is in color. And that wasn't the only cinematic inspiration. He also loved the idea of pulling from jaws for the combat system. Specifically, at the end, the boat sinking, Brody gets the oxygen tank into the shark's mouth. He shoots it, blowing up the shark. He wanted the player to feel cornered. Basically, he didn't want the player to be on the offensive. The player should be on the defensive throughout the entire game.

• 33:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 33:55Chris Winterbauer?

  There was also one more direct inspiration that we should credit. Roughly a year earlier than this, a French game studio, Infogames, or I believe it's Infogrammes, released a game called Alone in the Dark.

• 34:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Infowars.

• 34:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Infowars.

• 34:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Infowars, the video game.

• 34:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. It took place in a haunted mansion full of creepy crawlies, and it drew a lot of inspiration from Romero, but was mostly based on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. It's a very sort of Cthulhu, Lovecraftian survival game. Alone in the Dark is considered by many to be the first 3D survival horror game. And according to its designer, Frederic Reynal, they took the game to the Japanese publishers before it was finished to explore a Japanese release, including Capcom. And Mikami played it. And basically, years later, admitted, when he played it, he realized, oh, Resident Evil shouldn't be a first-person game. It should be a third-person game, where the environment would be presented with a fixed camera, and then the 3D character would move around it. And that got around the hardware limitations that they were running up against in trying to make it a first-person game.

• 34:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The point is, for the first six months of development, Mikami works on this game by himself. He gets another planner, then he loses him. But after nine months or so, people started coming around. And eventually, they have more than 50 people working on what is now being called Biohazard. And then they made another creative choice that may have led to some belief that the game could perform well overseas. All the characters in the game were gonna speak English. So the Japanese version includes subtitles, but the game is set in the United States, technically, and all of the characters have American names. So Capcom actually did record Japanese voices, but they ultimately shelved them because, quote, "They did not fit with the horror setting in a Western-style building." So by late 1994, PlayStation gets release.

• 35:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Capcom US's office starts mapping out their marketing strategy for the game. They're gonna call it Biohazard, until Chris Kramer, who works in PR at Sony at the time, says, "It's not gonna work in the US. There's already a game called Biohazard in the US." So they hold a company-wide contest to come up with a new name. And there's a ton of submissions. And the marketing team loves Resident Evil.

• 36:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a great name.

• 36:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Chris Kramer hated it. He was like, "Put zombies in the title. What is Resident Evil? Is it about an evil doctor? What are we talking about?" But the marketing team convinced Capcom Japan, and the name stuck. Kramer says the person who came up with the name was a designer in the Capcom Digital Studios, the first US-based development group at Capcom. But we actually could not find this person's name. So if they are out there and they would care to share or take credit, send us an email, [email protected]. Anyway, March 22nd, 1996, Biohazard is released in Japan. It keeps the name Biohazard in Japan. Roughly a week later, on March 30th, Resident Evil is released in the United States. They expected it to sell 200,000, 300,000 copies. It's exactly what happened. Only, it sold 200,000 copies immediately

• 36:46Chris Winterbauer?

  and reached a million units in the first year. The game spreads like a zombie plague. People would play the game. They'd tell their friends how terrifying it was. There were other horror games released that year, including Overblood. But as one critic put it, "Why isn't it a better game? One word: mood." Resident Evil was dripping with it. All right, so Lizzie, the plot of the game. You play as either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield. You are, you know, special operatives with stars, special tactics, and rescue, I believe it's services, and then they changed it to squad for one of the movies. You go in because there is some sort of outbreak in these woods. You make your way to the mansion. The first military team was killed. You get into the mansion. And there are all of these zombies at first that are scientists that have been mutated by the T-virus. But it's not just zombies.

• 37:31Chris Winterbauer?

  There are lots and lots of different monsters. Giant snakes, giant spiders, zombie sharks, hunters, giant superhuman dudes called the tyrant at the very end. It is a monster mash.

• 37:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 37:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Capcom rushed a sequel into development, Resident Evil 2. They're like, "Let's crank this out one year later." They said, "That's too fast." So they said, "Fine, you can have until January of 1998", which seems basically just as fast. It's a huge hit. People love it, including director Paul Anderson, who at this point is going by Paul Anderson.

• 38:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Gee, why did he have to change it?

• 38:05Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll talk about that. At this specific moment, Lizzie, he may have had a lot of time for video games. So born Paul William Scott, I like the idea that he also could have been Sean William Scott. Born Paul William Scott Anderson in Walls End, England. The man we now know as Paul WS Anderson originally just went by Paul Anderson. He'd broken into the British television scene in the early 90s. He was a writer on the crime dramedy series El Cid. I've never seen this, but it sounds really fun. Actually, Alfred Molina plays a recently retired criminal investigation department officer who moves to Spain to run a bar with his older detective partner. Turns out there's all these British expats living in Spain, including some of the ones that they'd previously jailed. And so they end up kind of watching over and investigating these guys and continuing

• 38:49Chris Winterbauer?

  to do their investigative work in Spain, even though they're supposed to be retired.

• 38:53Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Funny riff on the El Cid title. 1992, he and his producing partner Jeremy Bolt co-founded a production company. They raised $2 million and they make Paul Anderson's debut feature film Shopping. Lizzie, have you ever seen or heard of Shopping?

• 39:08Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I have not.

• 39:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It takes place in a sort of dystopian version of the UK where everybody is either a cop or like a dilapidated thief slash Mad Max style car thief. It exists along the axis of films that kind of arc toward the matrix over time. I would include something like Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, you know, in that range, for example. I think it's notable for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's Jude Law's first dramatic lead role.

• 39:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh.

• 39:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He is very young. He's very cute. It has a crazy cast, Sean Bean, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee, Ralph Ainison is in this movie as well, Sadie Frost.

• 39:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, Jason Isaacs. Am I wrong or does?

• 39:46Chris Winterbauer?

  He's in Resident Evil at the very end.

• 39:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, okay. I thought I saw just his eyeballs above his mask.

• 39:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's just his eyes above the mask. So recognizable.

• 39:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, well, cause he's in Event Horizon too, right?

• 39:57Chris Winterbauer?

  He's an old collaborator of Anderson's.

• 39:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 39:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And he also does the voiceover at the beginning of Resident Evil, explaining the Umbrella Corporation. So this movie, you know, I watched it last night and on the one hand, it feels like a first feature in that the story's pretty aimless for much of it. It doesn't kind of congeal until the end, but I think the actors are all very good. It's a truly stacked cast. It's ahead of its time. He clearly has an eye for talent and given the $2 million budget, it's got an incredible amount of scope. This has some pretty remarkable car crashes. It's basically about the subculture of disenfranchised, you know, British youth who steal cars and then drive them like through the front windows of stores after hours and then rob the stores.

• 40:39Lizzie Bassett?

  They Blues Brothers it.

• 40:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And then they rob the stores and they leave, but they just don't play music. And it's got a pretty nihilistic downer ending. I gotta be honest, I enjoyed it. I actually, in a weird way, I think it has more personality and style than a lot of Anderson's later films. It feels like it has a little bit more of a perspective. There's some funny jokes, you know, as well. There's a part where Jonathan Pryce plays the cop in it and Jude Law is talking to him as Jonathan Pryce is like tossing, you know, his van to try to find something to pin on him. And Jonathan Pryce says like, what do you think this is? And he goes, I know my rights. I've seen LA Law. And he goes, is that funny to you? And he goes, well, no, it's more of a comedy drama. And like, just totally missed the interpretation. But anyway, according to Anderson, he said the movie was very controversial. I'm not sure how true this is, but he did say that the BBFC censors had a problem with

• 41:24Chris Winterbauer?

  the film and it kind of struggled to get a release and it kind of eventually gets a release in the UK. It only goes straight to video in the United States, but the point is it did lead to him eventually, I believe, getting representation in the United States and a very important screening at CAA. So it screens at CAA and according to producer Laurie Appelian, who was looking for a director to direct a specific movie, they could not believe how good this movie looked for the budget. But Appelian said that they thought it was shot for something like $100,000 on the streets of London, which is a lot different than $2 million. Now, maybe they're being hyperbolic. I'm not sure, but it seems like they thought, wow, holy crap.

• 42:06Chris Winterbauer?

  This scrappy kid out of the UK made this very impressive Blade Runner-esque, Mad Max-esque movie for almost no money. And Lizzie, the movie that they were looking for a director for was the adaptation of Mortal Combat.

• 42:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 42:21Chris Winterbauer?

  The video game. Have you seen Paul Anderson's Mortal Combat adaptation?

• 42:25Lizzie Bassett?

  No. I have a confession to make to our audience, which is that I did not grow up playing video games at all.

• 42:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, I presumed you didn't.

• 42:34Lizzie Bassett?

  So I tend to not have a strong connection. This is a pretty big blind spot for me in movie genres is video game adaptations.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, well, just let it wash over you today, Lizzie. Just let the knowledge wash.

• 42:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I did. It washed over me and right through.

• 42:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there it is. It's all going down the drain. Mortal Combat, Lizzie, is very silly. I think that's actually its strengths. It knows it's ridiculous. I think it's pretty fun. It's very absurd. It, you know, it's a fighting game. It's a fighting tournament game. There's not much more you need to know than that. There obviously were the two more recent remakes that they did with Carl Urban. In the most recent one, Anderson pitches on the movie and says, I know tons about CGI. CGI? CGY? CGY? I'm the CGI guy. And then he goes to the store and he buys a bunch of books on CGI.

• 43:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So he can learn the terms of CGI. One funny story to illustrate kind of how little he knew at this point, apparently, according to the Hollywood Reporter's sort of oral history on this production, and we'll cover this film at some point. When they were shooting the fighting scenes, he didn't fully understand that you didn't use the wide shots beyond just establishing the geography of the fighters. And so he kind of assumed, well, we have to get the whole fight right in the wide shot. And so they kept doing all these takes of the wide until finally one of the stunt coordinators or someone turned to him and said, Paul, do you know what coverage is? He goes, oh, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. Let's go in for the close up. And then they just kept going through it.

• 43:57Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, you gotta learn somehow.

• 43:58Chris Winterbauer?

  You do. And I think he learned a ton. Anderson was given 10 times the budget that he'd had on his first film, but that $20 million was about half of what Steveni D'Souza had to make Street Fighter, the other fighting game turned into a movie the year prior. There were a lot of rewrites on Mortal Combat. There was a lot of improvisation and it made a lot of money. Lizzie, Mortal Combat made $120 million against its $20 million budget.

• 44:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 44:22Chris Winterbauer?

  The critics were mixed, but like for a video game film, honestly, pretty decent reviews, especially at the time. And the fans seemed to generally like it. I believe it had an A minus cinema score, which remained the highest adaptation of a video game score for quite some time, I think until 2018. It outperformed Street Fighter, which was also financially successful. And all of a sudden, there's this one-two punch of video game adaptations that worked in the market. So the question remains, Lizzie, why would Paul Anderson have time for video games in the late 90s if he just helmed the most successful video game adaptation of all time in 1995? He should have been the busiest guy in Hollywood. And the answer is he turned down the sequel, Mortal Combat Annihilation, to direct a couple of science fiction films.

• 45:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So the two movies here, I think you may have seen one of them. The first ended up being Event Horizon. Have you seen Event Horizon?

• 45:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I've seen that.

• 45:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I actually quite like Event Horizon.

• 45:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very fun.

• 45:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's somewhat underrated.

• 45:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Chris Winterbauer?

  This movie was destroyed by Paramount in post. The studio cut a half hour after some of the test screenings went poorly. They pulled the release date up drastically to make room for Titanic on the schedule. They stripped out a ton of the gore and graphic content due to some of the not so great test screenings and it gets dumped in August of 1997. It bombed. And then even after it did well on home video, Paramount tried to get Anderson to do like sort of a director's cut, but the footage was lost or destroyed because some of it was stored in a salt mine in Transylvania.

• 45:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 45:48Chris Winterbauer?

  But that's fine. He's got his next film ready to go. In fact, he was gonna shoot it first before Event Horizon. It's called Soldier. Kurt Russell's gonna be the lead. He's been training for a year. They start shooting. Kurt Russell breaks his left ankle and then the top of his right foot during the first week of filming.

• 46:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Just snaps it right off? Didn't need it.

• 46:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Didn't have his feet anymore. He's had fake feet for years. So Soldier bombed even worse. It made $15 million against a $60 million budget.

• 46:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 46:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. This is a big bomb. So Anderson, who'd made the most profitable video game adaptation ever, all of a sudden was on a two film losing streak. And he got obsessed with Resident Evil. He disappeared into his apartment. He did not return phone calls and he didn't just play the first game, he played the second game too. He emerges from his fugue state and calls up his producing partner, Jeremy Bolt, and says, we have to make this into a movie. There's only one problem, Lizzie. The movie was already in development. How do we know this? There was a sticker on the cover of Resident Evil 2 that literally said, win a part in the movie! Exclamation point.

• 46:52Lizzie Bassett?

  He missed that sticker.

• 46:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he saw it and said, can I win the directing part?

• 46:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles, but they also have salty snacks, easy to make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter M&M's. And because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven layer dip using Ben's original ready rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q.

• 47:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Mars knows he needs a celebration too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited time Halloween offerings.

• 48:06Speaker 02

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• 48:47Speaker 02

  That's G-A-B-B dot com forward slash get gab. Gab, tech in steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for parents.

• 49:34Chris Winterbauer?

  In early 1997, German film producer Bernd Eichinger caught some of his employees playing video games in the office, specifically Resident Evil. Now, he's the CEO and chairman of German film studio Constantin Film. Technically, new Constantin Film. So Constantin Film, founded in West Germany in the 50s, was actually behind a lot of really successful American releases. It was a distributor for a lot of American films. And then, they released a lot of German films, became their kind of own little studio system. They co-financed a bunch of spaghetti westerns. They actually provided financing for the Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Man with No Name trilogy. But they'd gone bankrupt in the 70s. They get bought out by Eichinger and his partner, Bernd Schaefer. They then have a bunch of success in Europe, not so much in the United States.

• 50:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Neverending Story would be one bright spot in the United States, but that had come out in 1984. And their attempt to get in on Hollywood's early 90s superhero craze had resulted in the unreleased Fantastic Four that they made with Roger Corman. Technically, they only made it to retain the rights to the characters. The point is, they're looking for a way to expand Konstantin's presence in the United States. And Eichinger sees horror-action thrillers as the perfect vehicle to do this. And these movies, there are a number of successful examples that are relatively affordable, they perform well overseas, and they do well in the United States. Like Tremors, for example, Army of Darkness, From Dusk Till Dawn, even something like Cube. Blade hadn't come out yet, but Blade would fall into this model. Same with Alien 3, or even Alien Resurrection.

• 50:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So in early March of 97, Konstantin buys the live-action rights to Resident Evil. They've got a plan. It does not include Paul Anderson. So they hire Alan B. McElroy to write the script. Now, he was behind one of the more successful comic book adaptations of the 90s, Spawn. Did you ever see Spawn with Michael J. White?

• 51:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Long, long time ago, yeah.

• 51:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, look, amazing special effects, some great action. I don't know if the story, you know, kind of completely works, but I do think it was kind of an early prototype of what a comic book movie could be. You could certainly see Blade as an evolution of Spawn in a lot of ways.

• 51:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 51:31Chris Winterbauer?

  So McElroy's on the rise. He'd just gotten new agents. The call comes in from Konstantin about Resident Evil. Turns out Constantin's film offices are across the street from his new agency. Walks over for a meeting, pitches producer Robert Coltsor. You know, his take, according to McElroy, is very faithful to the game. Within a day or two, he's hired. He writes two drafts. In September of 97, he tells Starlog and Fangoria that they're building a logical spine for the story of the game. A strategic rescue team that has to go to a medical research facility where something has gone terribly wrong. And in June of 1998, a writer at PlayStation Magazine claims to have gotten their hands on a copy of McElroy's leaked second draft of the script. And then, this writer leaked the story in PlayStation Magazine. Here's a 30,000-foot view.

• 52:16Chris Winterbauer?

  "Raccoon Forest: Strange Animals Are Mutilating Campers and Park Rangers. A SWAT team, not Star's team, is sent in and quickly destroyed. The government gets involved. They recruit Wesker, who's in an insane asylum, who recruits a team based on specialties." We get some of the characters from the game, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, but they're different than in the game. They touchdown in Raccoon Forest, they get attacked by mutated dogs, they get to the mansion, things ratchet up, there are giant wasps, tarantulas, and of course zombies. Apparently, in the first draft, they weren't zombies, they were psychopathic cannibalistic scientists who could still talk. Ammo runs lower and lower.

• 52:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Chud.

• 52:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's chud. They find the scientists they were supposed to rescue, but it's a trap. The scientists are trying to spread the T-virus to the world, and they're gonna use the rescuing SWAT team to do so. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Jill and Chris get the antidote, they escape before the building explodes, they get chased by the tyrant, who's a mutated Wesker. The tyrant is a big bad from the game. They defeat him, take the antidote, and they walk off into the sunset. Okay, it's somewhat like the game. There are weird changes. Star's from the game becomes a SWAT team, they omit the Umbrella Corporation from this draft for some reason. And the reception seems to have been mixed. Here's the biggest problem with the draft. I read another summary of this online. They don't get into the mansion until like 60 or 70 pages into the script.

• 53:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Dumb question. When you say "the mansion," because they also don't really do anything in the mansion in the movie that I watched.

• 53:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it actually happening inside of the mansion, or is it the same thing where it's kind of underground underneath it?

• 53:44Chris Winterbauer?

  It's both.

• 53:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 53:46Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a mansion section first, and then the medical facility underneath it.

• 53:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 53:49Chris Winterbauer?

  But there's more in the mansion in this version. So I think the big problem is they're spending a lot of time, they introduce the team. Honestly, the way it's described, it feels so much like Armageddon structurally. So if you remember Armageddon, Act One Break, "I need my boys."

• 54:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Fun and games. "I found my boys, doing all their things, everywhere." They're all totally unqualified for this.

• 54:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Somehow, they got halfway across the world in the last 24 hours.

• 54:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. One hour in, we're launching for the asteroid. That is the structure that this version of the movie seems to more or less be following.

• 54:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I liked Armageddon, so I can't say I wouldn't like this.

• 54:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. Armageddon's two and a half hours. I don't know if I want two and a half hours of Resident Evil, but...

• 54:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No, you're right, I don't. I barely made it through an hour and 40 minutes.

• 54:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So that may have been a problem, the leak may have been a problem. Another problem is that the second game was released, as we mentioned, on January 21st, 1998. And it seems like, because the second game really opens the world up, it's not limited to the mansion. We move into Raccoon City, we introduce additional characters. Because it's opening the world up, I think the adaptation that McElroy has written just of the first game perhaps feels too small, too contained, may not feel big enough ultimately. As producer Robert Coltsor later said, "McElroy did a pretty good job. You read it and said, 'I've seen this movie before.'" Then the second game comes out, and all of a sudden, your movie based on the first looks really dated and boring. And you say, "What do we do now?" So, what they do is they go to the guy that revived the zombie genre to begin with.

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Enter George Romero.

• 55:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes!

• 55:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Turns out, Lizzie, George Romero was already involved in Resident Evil. Back when McElroy was getting started on his adaptation, Romero was directing the live-action commercial for Resident Evil 2.

• 55:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  He shot it at Lincoln Heights Jail, which is a famous decommissioned jail in LA that we've talked about on the show. It's been used in a ton of films and music videos. American History X, The Roof, Con Air, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Boiler Room scenes. It starred Brad Renfro. It's fine, it's very 90s, it's very fun. A fun thing about Resident Evil is that in the first game, they actually shot live-action cutscenes for the game, and they starred a number of American actors. And so there was sort of a cinematic lineage with Resident Evil already. So I think McElroy later kind of nailed the appeal of Romero, when he said, "Maybe they thought that Romero's name value would give them more of a marketing push," which I do think is entirely fair. The godfather of the zombie genre, which inspired the game to begin with, is coming in to direct the film.

• 56:16Chris Winterbauer?

  In a sense, Konstantin was actually throwing Romero a lifeline. As we discussed in our primer, zombies movies had fallen out of favor by the late 80s. And in the early 90s, they're pretty much direct-to-video fare. His last two films, his first post-Day of the Dead, had flopped. So you had Monkey Shines and The Dark Half. And according to documentarian Rob Koons, Romero had this 10-year period where he was basically paid a development deal at New Line Cinema, and nothing he developed ever came to fruition. Everything kept falling through repeatedly. And video game movies are suddenly the hot thing, following Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Got Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem, Interstate 76, Wing Commander, which would eventually get made. Did you see Wing Commander with Matthew Lillard and Freddie Prince Jr.?

• 56:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I didn't. But you know, the one video game adaptation that I have a real soft spot for is Lara Croft's Tomb Raider. And weirdly, I like the second one with Jerry Butts.

• 57:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Pandora's Box.

• 57:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Pandora's Cradle of Life, yes.

• 57:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Pandora's Cradle of Life. Doom is also funny, if you've never seen it, with The Rock. It's a pretty, pretty wild one. McElroy actually wrote a draft of Doom. Final Fantasy, which they would eventually make The Spirits Within. And of course, Resident Evil. So after a decade in development hell, I'm wondering if Romero thought, "Look, Resident Evil could be a sure thing, or you know, as close to a sure thing as I'm gonna get." But apparently, he was hesitant, and I wonder if it was in part because this movie had to be for a broad audience. And his zombie movies were extreme. I mean, Night of the Living Dead was unrated, Dawn of the Dead was rated X, and Day of the Dead, which was shot on a lower budget, was unrated. And part of the reason it was shot on a lower budget is that he wouldn't commit to an R rating. And so Romero finally relents, he comes on board. His plan is to go for a hard R rating in the United States, and quote, "Shoot it balls out.

• 57:55Chris Winterbauer?

  So somewhere in the world, there will be a harder version of the thing, and maybe we can put it out on a director's cut, or release it in certain countries where restrictions aren't as tight." End quote.

• 58:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, like you, he did not play video games. So he watched his assistant play through the game. And then he sat down to write. You can find this version of the script online. He wrote it with Peter Grunwald. It's pretty darn fun. It's a pretty faithful adaptation. It's 96 pages.

• 58:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 58:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It is a tight hour and a half. Like the game, it's set primarily in the Spencer Mansion. He does make some changes. So Chris Redfield, who's originally one of the Stars members, he changes to a local half Native American man who's in a romantic relationship with Jill Valentine, who is a Stars operative, like in the game. But the general arc, you know, Stars team is overrun in the woods. Second team, led by the eventual bad guy, Wesker, comes in after them. They all end up in the mansion. They fight a bunch of monsters. Eventually, a bomb's gonna go off and they have to escape. It's all there. And there's some fun self-referential moments. Like one character, Speer, says, "Christ, this is like Night of the Living Dead" at one point, which I thought was pretty funny. I think it's closer to the game than McElroy's draft. And it's basically got all of the monsters from the game. So you've got the zombies, the T-virus-infected scientists.

• 59:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Great, give me more monsters.

• 59:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, you've got Cerberus, that's the Dobermans, who do end up in the Anderson version.

• 59:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Those I did enjoy.

• 59:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they're very fun. You've also got infected crows, the hunters, which are these giant ape-like lizards, zombie sharks, and the BOWs. These are bio-organic weapons. There's like a room-sized snake called Yon, which is just a great name. A room-sized plant called Plant 42. And then the final big bad, the tyrant, who's this nine-foot-tall, superhuman monster with one enormous claw hand, who will come into later Resident Evil movies.

• 59:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it does feel like the 28 Days Later franchise is pretty heftily borrowing from the game, not so much the movie.

• 59:47Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get into that at the end of this. They are absolutely ripping this off more than I realized. So Romero's script is not super original. The first act, have you ever seen The Crazies? His movie about small town, the infected water supply from the downed military plane. They did a remake with Timothy Olyphant that was pretty good. The point is, the first act really does feel like The Crazies. Right, you've got the military coming into a small town to cover up some sort of accident that's gone wrong.

• 1:00:09Lizzie Bassett?

  That's fine, that's so many movies.

• 1:00:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, the aliens vibes are aplenty. There's Vasquez, here called Rodriguez, which will eventually be Rain, played by Rodriguez in the Anderson version.

• 1:00:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Michelle Rodriguez.

• 1:00:23Chris Winterbauer?

  There's the sort of Bill Paxton-esque character. You know, it's got deep blue sea scene, it's got an anaconda scene. There's so much of these other movies running through it. But it's, I think it's fun, it's funny, it's quippy, it's very silly. It's 95 pages, it's action-packed, but I think it would be extremely expensive. This is a creature feature with a half dozen enormous monsters. Romero apparently wrote multiple drafts and the project stalled. Now Romero claims that Capcom liked it, the LA branch of Constantine liked it, but Bern Eichinger did not like it. That's certainly possible, that's one version of events. Robert Coltsor believes that Romero's version was just too extreme. They wouldn't be able to get an R-rating, they wouldn't be able to show it on television. It would have landed in the X section of the video store,

• 1:01:08Chris Winterbauer?

  not the expansion in the US that Constantine was looking for. I mean, I think that's open to interpretation. There was nothing about the draft that felt more extreme to me, but maybe if I had seen the way that Romero planned on shooting it, that might be true.

• 1:01:19Lizzie Bassett?

  It just sounds like it's very expensive. I mean, the number of monsters you're talking about.

• 1:01:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It sounds extraordinarily expensive.

• 1:01:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So one secondary source claims that Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto told Electronic Gaming Monthly that, quote, "Romero's script wasn't good, so Romero was fired." I don't think that's the case, because Romero's script seems just as good as Anderson's to mine, just in terms of being a script. But that's just my opinion. My guess is that all of this may have been true, but that The Matrix is what changed everything. So The Matrix was released in March of 1999. Resident Evil is dying, and all of a sudden, what an action-science fiction film is, has changed. The bar has changed. Constantine has likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing this material. They can't keep paying writers. It's not like they can keep, and then Paul Anderson just said, "I'll do it for free, do you want it? I'll do it for free."

• 1:02:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Did I mention I'll do it for free? I'll do it for free. Sorry, that was Paul Anderson interrupting. Okay, it wasn't exactly a clean handoff. Anderson has implied that there were a number of filmmakers in the mix, and that they may have kept Romero on until they could find a replacement, which wasn't immediately Anderson. So director Jamie Blanks also pitched on the project. Lizzie, he just directed Urban Legend, which was critically panned but commercially successful. He brought a couple of screenwriters on, Cormac and Mary Ann Wiberley. They did Charlie's Angels Full Throttle. They'd eventually do National Treasure.

• 1:02:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:02:42Chris Winterbauer?

  According to Blanks, they get a little bit down the road, but then the Wiberleys bail when their agents say, "Look, our clients aren't gonna work for free." And Paul Anderson just says, "This is no problem. I'm gonna keep working for free." So here's kind of the timeline we've pieced together. It seems like Anderson got in contact with Constantine. He had a relationship with them. They talked about developing other material. And they said, "Look, we're doing Resident Evil with Romero." And so Anderson decides to write his own spec script in parallel, called Undead, which he described as a, quote, "terrible ripoff of Resident Evil." Quote, "It's like I was going to make a version that would probably get me sued. It had exactly the same elements, the mansion in the woods, underground laboratory, big corporation doing genetic testing." Here's me reading between the lines.

• 1:03:26Chris Winterbauer?

  It seems like Anderson wanted to write something that ideally, if things fell apart with Romero, he could slide in and say, "Constantine, let's go." But if Romero's version worked out...

• 1:03:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's different enough that he could do something else with it.

• 1:03:40Chris Winterbauer?

  He could do something else with it.

• 1:03:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe that's what's happening here. There's a suggestion that he may have known that things weren't going well with Romero at this point in time. Again, this is just a suggestion, we could not confirm it, but there is a suggestion that maybe he knew there was a pretty good chance it was gonna fall apart. And that if he had a script ready that was specked, he would have a pretty good shot at getting it in there, in the door. Now, his script, because of this, is a wild departure from the games and from the earlier drafts. It doesn't contain any of the human characters from the game. Aside from a couple of the monsters, it's also much more limited in who the bad guys are. So you've got your zombies, you've got your Cerberus, your Dobermans, and then eventually you've got the Licker, who is a creature from Resident Evil 2, not Resident Evil 1.

• 1:04:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Anderson claims that his version is a prequel to the game. That's what he says. He says that he did it so that he wouldn't have to honor any continuity of the games, that it would be surprising if they killed certain characters who are not in the game. I don't entirely buy that. I think that he wrote it not as a prequel, but as a standalone.

• 1:04:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he just called it a prequel later. That's, again, that's my interpretation. He says that it was intended as a prequel. But what's interesting is, there are homages that he's putting in this movie that Alex Garland uses in 28 Days Later. So the story's centered around Alice, an homage to Anderson's favorite book, Alice in Wonderland. We talked about how Boyle and Garland used Alice in Wonderland as a reference for the third act, the mansion sequence. When Hannah and Selina are wearing the dresses, I believe Hannah's wearing a red dress as she's running around the mansion at the end of that movie.

• 1:05:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So his justification for Alice's memory loss at the beginning of the movie, I think is actually pretty interesting. He said that he wanted to recreate what a gamer feels like, waking up in an environment where they know nothing about what's going on, and then arcing toward becoming a kick-ass commando who has to save the day. I, again, actually think that's a pretty good justification.

• 1:05:33Lizzie Bassett?

  So, I've never played this, Alice did not exist.

• 1:05:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Not in the game.

• 1:05:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Great, got it.

• 1:05:37Chris Winterbauer?

  None of the main characters existed in the game. Rain, not in the game, Spence, not in the game. Now, they hint at other characters, you know what I mean, from the game, but they are not characters from the game.

• 1:05:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:48Chris Winterbauer?

  He cites Alien as a reference. I, again, think Aliens is the reference that he's looking for here, but he says Alien, specifically Tom Skerritt dying, and that being surprising.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and the computer.

• 1:05:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, the mother. This is where, again, I see The Matrix as such an influence. The way that Anderson introduces his world, where the ubiquity of the Umbrella Corporation is so pervasive, it feels not unlike Morpheus saying, "The Matrix is all around us," as he's talking to Neo, and using the idea of a malevolent AI that manifests as a child, you know? It feels like both a horror trope and a Matrix trope. And again, I think that what Anderson is doing by kind of shoving cyberpunk elements into this story is trying to fit it into a post-Matrix world, where this is the type of material that a lot of producers are looking for. That's not a quote from him, that is my guess, based on what I've read. So Anderson claims Constantine is very excited about his script.

• 1:06:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't doubt it. His script is also far more contained and budget-conscious than the Romero or McElroy drafts. It just is. I mean, just the elimination of all those big bads alone, the giant spider in the McElroy script, the giant snake, the giant plant, like, one of those would be enough for one movie at this size, you know? And so his, I'm guessing, is gonna be half as expensive. He apparently signs his contract, he flies straight to Japan to meet with Capcom for their blessing. Now, before he was even attached, there were a lot of rumors about who would star in Resident Evil. Would Samantha Mathis play Jill Valentine? Could have been cool. What about Jason Patrick or Bruce Campbell?

• 1:07:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Zombie maestro, as Chris Redfield, also would have been cool. We can't confirm any of those rumors. But we do know that Anderson and Constantine did not seek out Mila Jovovich. Mila Jovovich sought out Resident Evil.

• 1:07:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:07:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Kiev-born, model-turned-actress Mila Jovovich broke out with what movie in 1997 that we covered and you were not a huge fan of, Lizzie?

• 1:07:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Didn't love it. Fifth Element.

• 1:07:47Chris Winterbauer?

  But by the late 90s, things had cooled down because her second collaboration with her then-husband, Luc Besson, which you just mentioned-

• 1:07:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Luc Bu- song. Hmm?

• 1:07:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Which movie did you mention with Mila Jovovich that you said you thought she was good in?

• 1:08:02Lizzie Bassett?

  The Messenger.

• 1:08:03Chris Winterbauer?

  The Messenger, the story of Joan of Arc, was released in 1999. Lizzie, some quick hits. We're gonna give this movie its own episode. Originally, Besson was an EP on Catherine Bigelow's take on this movie, Company of Angels, which we talked about when we were covering Tank Girl. According to Bigelow, eight weeks before filming, Besson realized that Jovovich, his then-wife, was not going to be cast as Joan. So he dropped the movie and pulled financing.

• 1:08:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:08:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Bigelow threatened to sue him. They settled out of court, and then Besson started his own Joan of Arc project with Jovovich as the lead. Bigelow's movie fell apart. They made The Messenger. It underperformed financially, received mixed reviews, and Jovovich was actually disappointed in how her performance was edited in the final film. She did not feel that the movie represented what she'd brought on set.

• 1:08:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm. It's a weird movie. Have you seen this in-

• 1:08:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I have. It's kind of like a very artistic interpretation of Joan of Arc in a lot of ways.

• 1:08:58Lizzie Bassett?

  That's generous. Yes. I do think she's good in it.

• 1:09:01Chris Winterbauer?

  She is good.

• 1:09:01Lizzie Bassett?

  But the movie itself is a total hot mess. Also, do you remember that this, for some reason, there were like multiple Joan of Arc? There's also the Lily Sobieski, like, made-for-TV one that came out around the same time?

• 1:09:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder what was in the water that we were all about Jeanne d'Arc at that point?

• 1:09:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. It seems like Jovovich wanted some more control over her career. She and Besson divorced in 1999.

• 1:09:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yay!

• 1:09:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, good. Thank God.

• 1:09:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Chris Winterbauer?

  She's about to get a big upgrade in her life in a couple of ways, I think.

• 1:09:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 1:09:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So she and her younger brother were big fans of the Resident Evil games, and she actually didn't want to just be in the movie. She wanted to produce it. But when she saw the cover of the second game and it said, "Win a part in the movie," she realized, "Oh darn it, it's already in development." So she learns that there's a, quote, "really hot, young director attached." That's the quote, and I just love, I wanted the Hansel. He's so hot right now. Like, that's how people are describing Paul Anderson. So she calls up this hot, young director.

• 1:09:50Lizzie Bassett?

  He's very cute.

• 1:09:50Chris Winterbauer?

  He is very cute. She says, "I wanna be in your movie." And he says, "Great. Why don't you come in and read?" And she goes, "Excuse me? I was the lead of The Fifth Element. You're gonna ask me to read for this movie?" And he goes, "Yeah." She goes in, and she goes, "Well, he's pretty hot and young." And I was like, "Oh." And that was the beginning of the rest of my life, end quote.

• 1:10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  So Mila Jovovich lands the role of Alice. She's an obvious fit for the material. I can't think of anyone who looks better with a gun in her hand, except maybe Michelle Rodriguez.

• 1:10:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So Michelle Rodriguez had just broken out with her big-break film, Girlfight. Have you seen it?

• 1:10:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, I have. Yes.

• 1:10:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Really good movie.

• 1:10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:10:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Performed very well at Cannes. She had shot The Fast and the Furious, but had not released it yet. She liked the game, but she also wanted to learn how a science fiction movie was made. It's very interesting. She's like a very curious person who was really interested in the mechanics and the business of filmmaking as well. So she tells Paul Anderson, "Look, I don't care," and I love this speech, I can't do a Michelle Rodriguez voice, "I don't care if I'm selling a hot dog as a zombie in this movie. I have to be there for the experience." And it turned out to be the best three months of my life. It was fierce and liberating. And Anderson was smitten, not romantically, but creatively. He totally fell in love with Michelle Rodriguez. Quote, "Michelle is just an incredible acting talent, and she looks great with a machine gun in her hand."

• 1:11:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:11:08Chris Winterbauer?

  She loved the video game and is so passionate about the film. So he starts to rewrite the script with her in mind. He gives Rain a little bit more to do. He gives Rain a little bit more to do, until, according to Jovovich, quote, "Paul rewrote the script for her. It pretty much made my character the girl and Rain was the guy. She got all of my big action scenes and she became like Alice, and then Alice became this tag-along."

• 1:11:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:11:31Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote.

• 1:11:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's true. Michelle Rodriguez has almost all of the action in this movie, and she's very fun. It is a little strange. Alice does just kind of like drag her hot, red dress through this movie and does almost nothing. She kills some dogs.

• 1:11:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Apparently, it was actually more extreme than that. So she read this new draft on a flight from Canada, where she had just wrapped another project. She's on her way to Berlin, where they're gonna shoot the underground scenes of Resident Evil, and she lands, and she is pissed. She goes to Anderson's hotel room and she says, "We have to have a big talk, or I am gonna be on a flight home tomorrow morning. I will drop this movie." So they sit down for three or four hours. They go through the script page by page, and every time that she came across something that had been changed from Alice to Rain, she'd say, "Okay, why is this changed? Can it go back?" Now, I do think it still tipped toward Rain-

• 1:12:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Big time.

• 1:12:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Probably, ultimately, but it sounds like it was even more extreme than it had been before.

• 1:12:29Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so crazy also, because Mila Jovovich was definitely the bigger star at this time.

• 1:12:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is what Jovovich had to say. Not exactly. Rodriguez had more heat.

• 1:12:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Jovovich was probably more known, but because she had had the flop of Joan of Arc in 1999, and, you know, probably a public divorce-

• 1:12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it. She was slowing down.

• 1:12:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Whereas Girlfight had just blown up at Cannes, and the hype is Rodriguez is in the studio movie, The Fast and the Furious, she's gonna be great in that. So Jovovich says basically, like, "I was the hot new thing four years earlier, and Rodriguez is all of a sudden usurping me as the hot new thing."

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• 1:14:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, a couple of things on pre-production. Richard Urisic, who'd done Event Horizon, also Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Mission: Impossible 2, he comes in as VFX supervisor. They scout all over the world, but they get sold on Reichstag Station in Berlin. That's the staircase that they go down. And they shoot in a bunch of the Yubon stations down there. Basically, like, the Yubon system was divided during the Cold War. They separated the east and west portions of them.

• 1:15:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:15:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they were connecting them after the Cold War. So a lot of areas were actually still shut down and hadn't been reopened yet. And so Anderson said they could just kind of shoot wherever they wanted, and they got all this production value for it.

• 1:15:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:19Chris Winterbauer?

  The team also did a lot of their own stunts in this movie. They did three weeks of training under former Navy SEAL James Butler. He'd also worked on Boys in the Hood. And they had a release date, October 26th, 2001, and they had a title, Resident Evil: Ground Zero.

• 1:15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:15:33Chris Winterbauer?

  That title will not stand.

• 1:15:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Chris Winterbauer?

  But that is the title they had. They kick off production in the winter, early winter of 2001.

• 1:15:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I know why that title won't stand. Oh, no!

• 1:15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Hold it. Okay, on the positive side.

• 1:15:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oopsies.

• 1:15:47Chris Winterbauer?

  They're shooting in an abandoned Yubon system. They can shoot without having to shut down traffic. On the negative side, Jovovich is in a tiny red dress underground at the end of winter.

• 1:15:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, in Germany. It's cold.

• 1:15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  She said she's literally freezing. She was wearing this little red dress. She was soaking wet. You look at the camera crew, and everyone's wearing massive jackets, fur, hand warmers, and gloves. Jovovich later said that the big joke on set was that at first, the makeup team was painting the bruises, but after a while, they were covering the real ones up. Because of her dress, she couldn't wear pads on her elbows or her knees.

• 1:16:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Anderson said that she worked six-day weeks, trained on the seventh day, and during the one weekend she had off, she went to shoot a L'Oréal commercial in Paris.

• 1:16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:16:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And she later said, "When I do L'Oréal, it's like, 'Miss Jovovich, is everything okay? Are you feeling all right?'" And then the next day, I'm back in the flooded lab, freezing in my miniskirt. For the zombie makeup, Anderson enlisted special effects makeup company Animated Extras International Limited, led by Pauline Fowler. She'd actually done Event Horizon with Anderson. They did the Kilrathie in Wing Commander, if you guys are interested in watching it. For the undead movement, he hired movement coach Warner Van Eden, who had played a bandleader in Swing Kids, Lizzie's secret favorite movie.

• 1:16:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:57Chris Winterbauer?

  No, Newsies is your secret favorite movie.

• 1:16:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:16:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, and James Purefoy said that the zombies were actually legitimately terrifying. They brought in trained dancers to play many of the undead, which again reminds me of Danny Boyle bringing in athletes in 28 Days Later.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the movements too. There was a lot watching this. They're not as fast as 28 Days Later, but they got some speed on them.

• 1:17:18Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, they're still slow zombies.

• 1:17:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah, they're like medium-slow zombies, and there is a-

• 1:17:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they're twitchier than the Romero ones.

• 1:17:24Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a quality to the movement that I think does kind of get us the next step of the way to Alex Garland's.

• 1:17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Animated Extras also did the dog makeup. These are real Dobermans, for the most part, wearing suits of netted fabric-

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Covered in prosthetics. The dog Alice kicks, to be clear, is a full-size dummy. She does not kick a real dog.

• 1:17:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Can't imagine she would.

• 1:17:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, they apparently couldn't put makeup around their mouths, because the Dobermans would just go pffft and lick all the makeup off their mouths.

• 1:17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Speaking of licking, Fowler's team did the practical versions of the liquor. So the liquor is often CGI and that's the big creature. But the practical versions look great and they're huge. They did a three quarter scale model for the closeups of its face and jaws.

• 1:18:04Lizzie Bassett?

  You can really tell, though.

• 1:18:06Chris Winterbauer?

  You see the difference. I agree.

• 1:18:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Unfortunately, that's one of the things where it doesn't, it just doesn't look good. Like the CGI just was not.

• 1:18:14Chris Winterbauer?

  The CGI is in transition here. Yeah, I agree. It's not quite up to snuff.

• 1:18:18Lizzie Bassett?

  When it is the model, which you can tell, it does look totally great. When you can see its brain, when all that stuff like, that's awesome. But yeah, as soon as it, you know, you get the white of it crawling, you're like, oh, well.

• 1:18:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So in June of that year, either at the tail end of production, roughly, Lara Croft's Tomb Raider hits theaters. Critics were not as high on the Angelina Jolie vehicle as Lizzie Bassett was.

• 1:18:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's not good.

• 1:18:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Merciless. Yeah. This is one of the worst reviewed video game adaptations, along with something like Super Mario Brothers.

• 1:18:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, have you seen it recently?

• 1:18:54Chris Winterbauer?

  No, not recently. I saw it in theaters when it came out. I enjoyed it.

• 1:18:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not good. Her accent, not good.

• 1:19:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It's crazy.

• 1:19:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's crazy. And you know what? I don't care. I don't care at all. I liked it. I liked her flipping around in her giant mansion and, you know, with her pole vaulting. I don't care. I don't care. She looks great.

• 1:19:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, fans were very mixed, but the movie actually did pretty well.

• 1:19:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it did well enough to spawn sequels. Yeah.

• 1:19:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, one sequel and then reboot. But yes, it brought in nearly $275 million against its $115 million budget. But according to some people involved in this production, they said that kind of like the talk around the town is that it was being painted as another example of a female-led action movie flopping.

• 1:19:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So like La Femme Nikita, Cutthroat Island, which we talked about, Tank Girl.

• 1:19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Aeon Flux.

• 1:19:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Aeon Flux would be later. Yeah. The Long Kiss Goodnight. Now zombies also hadn't been popular in over a decade. Part of me wonders if the original McElroy script, moving it to psychopathic cannibals, had been an attempt to distance itself somewhat from the zombie genre, which again, had not quite been rebirthed.

• 1:19:54Lizzie Bassett?

  That would make sense.

• 1:19:55Chris Winterbauer?

  The sort of fantastical creatures that are popular right now are wizards with the upcoming Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.

• 1:20:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Also wizards.

• 1:20:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Wizards and hobbits and goblins and more.

• 1:20:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Less wizards, more lizards. That's what they said for Resident Evil.

• 1:20:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So with two days of shooting left in Toronto, and I believe these were either pickups or reshoots, based on the schedule that we were able to find, Anderson boarded a plane in New York to head to the production. That plane, according to Anderson, was one of the last to leave American airspace before it was shut down completely following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

• 1:20:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So that shoot got delayed for roughly a month. This is, I believe, Alice walking out into Raccoon City at the end of the film.

• 1:20:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Was actually a very impressive pullout shot to show all the destruction on the street.

• 1:20:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So the release date gets pushed, obviously. You're not going to release this October 26th now. And they can't call it Resident Evil Ground Zero.

• 1:20:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Chris Winterbauer?

  The interim name I read was Resident Evil Genesis, which I'm guessing they probably changed because of the Sega Genesis, but I'm not sure. And around this time, Paul Anderson lost his name, Lizzie. So Paul Thomas Anderson had registered as Paul Anderson with the WGA. Paul WS Anderson had Paul Anderson locked up with the DGA. And so now that's why we have Paul Thomas Anderson, PTA, and Paul WS Anderson, because each of them had one guild locked up for their names. So they both had to ditch the Paul Anderson name.

• 1:21:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 1:21:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So Anderson claims that they had an NC-17 cut of the film, but he toned down the gore to secure an R rating. Whatever, Constantine never would have released an NC-17 version of the movie. In January, they hold a test screening. It's attended by Ain't It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. And his criticism, I actually think, is a pretty good indication of what ends up happening with this movie. He says, quote, "It's rare to find a scene that wasn't inspired by another movie. We're talking outright theft." He called it a hybrid ripoff of Romero's Dead trilogy and Aliens. He makes some pretty lewd comments about Jovovich and Rodriguez that I don't need to repeat here. But he also wrote, quote, "Despite being incredibly derivative, it works. As a fast-paced, action-packed zombie movie, it gets the job done," end quote.

• 1:21:59Chris Winterbauer?

  So the question is, is Resident Evil going to be the final nail in Paul WS Anderson's career? Or is it going to open up some new doors? So it premieres in Los Angeles on March 12th, 2002, releases wide on the 15th, and the reviews are bad. We went with some local reviews instead of national ones this time, just to mix it up. The Cincinnati Enquirer said, "You'll be rooting for the flesh-eating zombies."

• 1:22:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's true.

• 1:22:21Chris Winterbauer?

  "This movie is so bad, it can't even steal effectively from other horror films. Nothing genuinely frightening or even surprising happens." The folks at the Kansas City Star were a bit kinder. They gave it two stars. "From Super Mario's to Lara Croft Tomb Raider, bad video game adaptations have been stinking up multiplexes for too long. Resident Evil almost escapes this curse and has George Romero to thank for it." The Austin American Statesman wasn't high on it, but did write that Jovovich has a decent action hero presence. And as a brooding commando, Michelle Rodriguez is the only other remotely interesting cast member. The New York Times called it "Microsoft meets The Night of the Living Dead." And Roger Ebert seemed dead-set on burying it. He gave the movie one star. He wondered why Umbrella couldn't make a door that doesn't make a slamming noise when it closes,

• 1:23:06Chris Winterbauer?

  and he put it on his worst films of the year list at the end of the year. Fans weren't high on this movie either, Lizzie. I think there was a general sense of being bummed by the lack of adherence to the games, focusing on a new character created whole cloth, on action over, you know, horror, on style over substance. But something weird happened. Resident Evil opened number two on its opening weekend behind Ice Age. It didn't make Tomb Raider money. It didn't even make Mortal Kombat money. But it did make Street Fighter money. And relative to Tomb Raider, Resident Evil was cheap to make.

• 1:23:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:23:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It had a roughly $30 million budget.

• 1:23:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And how much did it make?

• 1:23:43Chris Winterbauer?

  $100 million.

• 1:23:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay. So yeah, it's not a slam dunk, but it's profitable.

• 1:23:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It turned a profit. So even if you were to assume a $15 million advertising budget, which would be half the production budget, that'd be $45 million. You'd need 90 to break even. It does 100, so it's profitable at the box office. And then you have to think DVD, home video, tie-ins to the video game.

• 1:24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:24:07Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, I think that they just released, or they're about to release, Resident Evil 3. They released the remaster of Resident Evil 1. This movie did pretty well. It found an audience.

• 1:24:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and this is going to sound dumb, but I think one thing this movie does very, very well is the styling of Mila Jovovich. And that is super important. And obviously that's different from the game. But the outfit that they give her is so iconic and something they did that's very smart, which I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it's very repeatable for Halloween costumes. This is not a difficult or complicated costume to recreate. And I, I mean, it is a common costume I've seen over and over again. Lara Croft Tomb Raider is as well, but of course, that's based on the game. But I do think that the way that they styled her was very smart. It's visually immediately recognizable as this movie. I hadn't even seen this movie and I knew exactly what she was wearing in it.

• 1:25:01Lizzie Bassett?

  So I do think that like, that does something, that contributes to this.

• 1:25:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And I think there are a few fun set pieces that are decently memorable. The laser hallway, for example.

• 1:25:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, when the guy gets cubed. Loved it. Favorite part of the movie.

• 1:25:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is also like, it's such a ripoff of something like Cube, for example, but it's fun. Her doing the trinity kick on the Doberman is also fun.

• 1:25:23Lizzie Bassett?

  The dogs are great.

• 1:25:24Chris Winterbauer?

  The dogs are great. It has its fun moments and its guilty pleasures. And it just kind of, you know, found its lane, weirdly enough. Despite poor critical response, despite not really resonating with the fans too much, and not all the fans disliked it, but again, it did not adhere to the games. And all of a sudden, this formula is born. So a sequel was discussed publicly as early as February of 2002, which is before the movie was released. And Sony officially greenlit it in mid 2002. Again, I'm guessing, seeing how successful 28 Days Later was as well, which was made even more cheaply, although it didn't make quite as much money at the box office. Anderson says, "I'm not going to do a Mortal Kombat 2. I'm going to continue to be involved in these movies." He can't direct the second one. He's committed to Alien versus Predator,

• 1:26:09Chris Winterbauer?

  but he's going to write it. So he stays on as a writer. And all of a sudden, Mila Jovovich has found her career. So Resident Evil Apocalypse is released in 2004. It gets terrible reviews. It made $130 million against a $45 million budget. Resident Evil Extinction follows in 2007. $150 million against a $45 million budget. These movies, this is unheard of.

• 1:26:36Lizzie Bassett?

  They're going up.

• 1:26:36Chris Winterbauer?

  They are going up. Paul WS Anderson returns for Resident Evil Afterlife. By the way, he's all star Jovovich.

• 1:26:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 1:26:44Chris Winterbauer?

  In 2010. Resident Evil Afterlife makes $300 million against its $60 million budget. Anderson runs it back. Resident Evil Retribution, 2012. $240 million against its $65 million budget. He brings it home. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, 2016. $312 million against a $40 million budget.

• 1:27:09Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:27:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Jovovich stars in every goddamn one of these. They bring in Ally Larter. Michelle Rodriguez returns for Retribution. She plays clones of her original character. These movies get panned. Headshot, headshot. They will not die. They keep coming back. There's only one other franchise I could think of that's quite like it, and that's Underworld, starring Kate Beckinsale. Those movies all do terribly. I liked the first one quite a bit.

• 1:27:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I like Underworld.

• 1:27:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too.

• 1:27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Underworld is better than this. I'm sorry.

• 1:27:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, the first Underworld is.

• 1:27:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Pretty great.

• 1:27:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Five stars. Five stars, no notes.

• 1:27:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:27:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy.

• 1:27:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Chris Winterbauer?

  No complaints.

• 1:27:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Kate Beckinsale, absolutely.

• 1:27:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Give me all of them. Ugh, that is such a Matrix ripoff with the way they dress her. It is amazing.

• 1:27:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't care. Love it. We'll cover it at some point because I do love Underworld.

• 1:27:55Chris Winterbauer?

  But here's the thing, those films, there are five Underworld films, I believe, only made $539 million against a $207 million budget. Even after an attempted 2021 reboot called Welcome to Raccoon City, which I'm not sure if you saw, but I actually thought was fine. That reboot flopped. Resident Evil as a franchise has still made $1.28 billion against a cumulative budget of $313 million.

• 1:28:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Holy shit.

• 1:28:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Why?

• 1:28:24Chris Winterbauer?

  People love these weird, not really adaptations of Resident Evil.

• 1:28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 1:28:31Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so interesting. It's the most successful B-movie franchise, C-movie franchise I can think of. You know, Jason Statham is kind of in this realm with his sort of annual, you know, late August or January releases. Mutiny, you know, for example, just came out.

• 1:28:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna punch some people. Yeah.

• 1:28:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's gotta be Mila Jovovich, right? Like-

• 1:28:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know.

• 1:28:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I just don't totally get it. I like her a lot. I find her very, very watchable.

• 1:28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think she's great. She's very funny in Zoolander.

• 1:28:58Lizzie Bassett?

  She's very funny as Inka. What is it?

• 1:29:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Inka Dunga Dunga.

• 1:29:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Katinka Inka Gabovaganana.

• 1:29:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, something like that, yeah.

• 1:29:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's amazing. She's very funny. I think she is a really good actor. And she and Michelle Rodriguez do make this first movie watchable.

• 1:29:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  That's so crazy. That's crazy. I can't believe this has made that much money.

• 1:29:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, after kind of an on-again, off-again engagement period, Paul W. S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich did get married, and they've continued to make a ton of movies together beyond Resident Evil. And honestly, God bless.

• 1:29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Chris Winterbauer?

  If I could just go make movies that starred my pot spouse, I would totally do that. It's a lot of fun. I'm happy for both of them that they had this career turn. And there was one other unexpected silver lining to this movie. So because of the success of Resident Evil, and then obviously 28 Days Later, and then Shaun of the Dead, Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, the development of The Walking Dead for AMC, zombies were revived once again. And because zombies were hot, George Romero suddenly had an opportunity, and he didn't miss it. He landed a deal with Universal Pictures to make the fourth film in his Dead series, Land of the Dead, and was given a $15 to $20 million budget, which is far more money than he'd ever had before, more in line with what he'd wanted to be able to do on Day of the Dead.

• 1:30:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And in fact, he was even able to do certain scenes and sequences that he had been forced to omit from Day of the Dead in Land of the Dead. And released in 2005, it actually received generally positive reviews, and despite its gore, grossed nearly $50 million at the box office and was profitable. And I, for one, saw it in theaters. And of course, this weekend, we look forward to the next reboot of Resident Evil.

• 1:30:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I actually am very excited.

• 1:30:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I am very excited. Written by Zach Krager and Shay Hatton, directed by Zach Krager, starring Austin Abrams. It is rumored, or Krager has posited, that this is the closest adaptation to the vibe of the original game, of being low on ammo and forced into corners.

• 1:30:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:30:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And not an action movie, but truly a horror movie. Only time will tell, but I'm very excited to see if after this many years and this much money-

• 1:31:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  -we get closer to the material that inspired these movies to begin with.

• 1:31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Just based on the trailer, it looks a lot more like what you're describing in terms of the location, the way that he's moving, the way that the creatures themselves seem to be moving. I am very excited. I read one thing where he said, you know, "I just wanted to see what would happen if I put my foot on the gas at the beginning of the movie and don't let off until the end." And he at least seems to think that that was successful, so let's see how it goes.

• 1:31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of your favorite film of all time, Resident Evil.

• 1:31:34Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not my least favorite film.

• 1:31:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. And I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:31:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I think what went right here is Mila Jovovich. She doesn't get to do a ton in this, but I'm so glad that this became the lifeline for her that she needed at the time. It's obviously something that she has really enjoyed and thrown herself into. Like I said, I think she's a great actor. She has such screen presence, and it's nice to see her play a role here that is in many ways so different from the one that she was playing in The Fifth Element, where she feels very much like an object in that. And in this, even if she is not as active in this one as she becomes in later ones, it's so fun to see her, you know, when she does start to get some action sequences, it's very clear that she's very good at it. And so, yeah, I'll give it to her. I just think she looks incredible.

• 1:32:24Lizzie Bassett?

  She's fun to watch. I love the way she moves. And I love Mila. More Mila.

• 1:32:29Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what? I'm just gonna give mine to Michelle Rodriguez then, because-

• 1:32:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's so good.

• 1:32:33Chris Winterbauer?

  The two of them are the reason to watch these movies.

• 1:32:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:32:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Or this one. It's weird that these movies are kind of the one... I mean, I'm just trying to think of any other female action franchise, you know, that we kind of had for that 20-year span from about 2000 to 2020.

• 1:32:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It really is this.

• 1:32:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really just these.

• 1:32:51Lizzie Bassett?

  And you know what's interesting, too, is that, and I appreciate this very much. You know, I talked quite a bit about her costume in this movie, but she's not overly sexualized, I don't think.

• 1:33:01Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that's the thing. It's just the costume. It's not the camera.

• 1:33:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and even the costume itself is not like, she's pretty well-covered. I know I gave the asymmetrical dress some shit for like, you know, "Why would you be wearing that in the zombie apocalypse?" But-

• 1:33:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it was on the bed for you.

• 1:33:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It was on the bed for you, but also, it's not the most impractical thing you could be wearing. It actually does allow a decent-

• 1:33:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Not if you have to kick a dobermann.

• 1:33:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you can kick them. There's a good range of motion. That's why it's got an asymmetrical hem. But I appreciate the way that they dress them. I appreciate the way that they continue to dress her over the rest of the franchise.

• 1:33:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Exception the weird hospital gown she's wearing at the end.

• 1:33:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I mean, you do see basically her entire body in that. And yet, is it better than The Fifth Element? Yes. Yes.

• 1:33:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't think there is a leering quality to the way that Anderson shoots these scenes. He seems a little disinterested.

• 1:33:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Which is so funny. He wound up marrying her, yes.

• 1:33:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is very funny.

• 1:33:57Lizzie Bassett?

  He's like, "Yep, she's a supermodel. There's her boob and her entire body."

• 1:34:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, "But also, let's go shoot some zombies. What are we doing, guys? Come on." All right, great. Well, we hope you guys enjoyed that deep dive into Resident Evil and the game and the whole history before you go watch the new version this weekend. Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, can you let them know how they can support it?

• 1:34:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course. You can leave us a rating or a review on whatever pod catcher you are listening to this on. You can tell a friend or family member, "Hey, what went wrong? They just covered Resident Evil. It's pretty good. It was a pretty good episode." And then if you're like, "You know what? I also want to go see the new Resident Evil, and I want to hear them talk about that," you can do that. You just gotta pay for it. Not that much, though. Less than a movie ticket for $5 a month. You can now subscribe on Apple or Spotify or Patreon, and you get bonus episodes. We are doing at least two of these every month. Obviously, we are covering Resident Evil. This month, we also covered Practical Magic 2, which that was something. Uh, so, you know, make sure that you subscribe so you can go back and listen to that.

• 1:34:58Lizzie Bassett?

  And next month, it is October, which means we are launching our first ever box office book club where we are doing not one, not two, not three, but four bonus episodes for book screen adaptations. We're kicking it off with the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's Verity, which is just absolutely batshit. Honestly, you know, it's got a dash of Resident Evil to it. A little bit of zombies around the house. Then we will be taking it to Incidents Around the House, which is, of course, the book that Other Mommy is based on, followed by Sense and Sensibility, and finally, Wild Woods. So please subscribe so you can join us for Box Office Book Club. Read the books, watch the movies, come and chat with us about all of it.

• 1:35:40Lizzie Bassett?

  And again, that is on Patreon if you would like to actually join us for the chats. And if you would like to listen to the episodes, those will be available on Patreon, Spotify, and Apple. And if you want to take it up one more zombie notch, for $50 a month, you can get a special shout-out just like one of these.

• 1:36:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you so much to Mike and Clemmie Burbidge, Anthony Thomas, Mandy Raharlinson, Pete Reed Peterson, Team Lizzie, Always Primer, Never Primer, John D. Wiltshire, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, Mark Bertha, Alex Barrett, Frankenstein, Angeline Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Amy Olgeschlager McCoy, Johan George Gunnarsson, Jory Hill Piper, Felicia G., Datem3, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, the Provost Family, where the Os sound like Os, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, David Friskalanti, Film It Yourself, Kate Ellington, M. Zodiac, C. Grace B., Blaze Ambrose,

• 1:37:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Rural Juror, Nate the Knife, Lena LJ, Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson, JJ Rapido, Lousy Susan, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Penn, Korea, Chris Liel, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Rosemary Southward, Jason Frankel, Somon Chinani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes.

• 1:38:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you so much, guys, for sticking with us. You now all have the T-virus. We are coming back next week with a movie that says "The scariest things in this world are high school girls." Lizzie, what do you have planned for us?

• 1:38:35Lizzie Bassett?

  I would argue the scariest things in this world are your mommies.

• 1:38:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, there it is. Yeah.

• 1:38:40Lizzie Bassett?

  We have Carrie. I'm so excited to talk about this movie, and of course-

• 1:38:44Chris Winterbauer?

  We're on a scary mommy stretch.

• 1:38:46Lizzie Bassett?

  We are on a scary mommy stretch.

• 1:38:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Carrie, we're gonna do Other Mommy.

• 1:38:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Verity, yeah, definitely.

• 1:38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Right?

• 1:38:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Keep an eye on your mommy. That's right. Come back next week for Carrie. I can't wait.

• 1:38:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:39:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.