Resident Evil: Afterlife (3D)

Rated R for sequences of strong violence and language.

I am unsure which is worse: watching a clown juggle for 97 minutes or endure “Resident Evil: Afterlife” (3D). Fortunately, I have not had to watch a clown do anything for 97 minutes, much less juggle. Unfortunately, I saw “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” in 3D no less.

The “Resident Evil” films are based on a video game. This is the fourth movie based on the game. All the movies starred Milla Jovovich. Usually she appears half naked. Sadly, her talents remain hidden in “Resident Evil: Afterlife.”

The “Resident Evil” films feature zombies. Usually I enjoy zombie films. How can one not enjoy watching people blow the brains out of a tottering zombie? Well, this film proves that even that bit of joy can be denied to us, the living.

You know the phrase “left on the cutting room floor?” Well, imagine if snippets of 100 sci-fi/zombie/apocalyptic films are gathered up and stitched together like some cinematic, slapdash Frankenstein. There’s your “Resident Evil: Afterlife.”

“Alice” is the super heroine of the “Resident Evil” films. She is indestructible thanks to some magic serum from the Umbrella Corporation. Of course the corporation is evil. The Chairman is really, really evil. We know this because he wears sunglasses while indoors and has a kooky English accent that fades in and out…delivered with a sneer.

It starts out in an underground bunker in Tokyo…then we go to Alaska…then to a decimated Los Angeles, specifically in a deserted prison perhaps in Huntington Beach based on the geography.

Eventually our Alice discovers this prison with a mere handful of folks yet-living. This occurs after she finds another survivor in the Alaskan wilderness. Amazingly, this one looks like a model who just took a break from a shoot to hydrate and get “Make-Up” to apply another layer of lip gloss. No matter, we must “movie on.”

In that prison there is an appropriate mix of ethnics, all in sharp form and age. Well, maybe there is one exception: the hunky younger brother from the now defunct TV series, “Prison Break” (Wentworth Miller), plays a guy (for unclear reasons) who is trapped in a glass cell in the now closed prison. He is kept there by the folks who sought refuge there. All of the “whys” go unexplained, but slap-a-zombie-with-a-mackerel, one of the six or eight refugees just happens to be his sister! Yeah! But, no worries, she has amnesia.

Let’s review: hot chick with guns and knives. Hot chick 2 with amnesia. Studly dudes in a California prison, surrounded by starving zombies. Hot chick 2 with amnesia discovers her long lost brother in a Plexiglas cell built in a prison. What a coincidence! Who would have thought they would mix that all up in one plot…and make it 3D to boot?

Informational Update: now, Mr. Miller was one good looking actor, slim and athletic. After the show (Prison Break) ended, he apparently spent a lot of time eating pasta. His ubiquitous tight shirts with short sleeves are gone and, in this film, he is covered up in bulky coveralls. So, Alice isn’t naked and Beefcake Miller looks like the guy who sprays insecticide under my house. We have been robbed.

I can’t blame Mr. Miller. While being tortured by this horrid form of “Evil,” I kept thinking about communing with pasta, too. I needed comfort food to assuage my misery brought on by severe and unremitting mediocrity.  

Even more of this mess annoyed me. Apparently, there are pieces of this film missing. I’m as serious as a charred out Beverly Hills! One minute the “good guys” were trapped in a landlocked prison, surrounded by hungry zombies, and the next minute they were on a boat headed for a mystery ship off the California coast. I was stunned. How did they get past all those zombies? Frankly, I felt cheated; I was rooting for the zombies. Poor guys, there will be no pasta for them.

I should tell you that the monster zombies aren’t just regular zombies. These guys open their mouths and a Venus-flytrap-octopus thingie comes out like congealed vomit to suck the life out of a living human. This is sort of a new and improved zombie. Not your regular groaning and tottering zombie, but a wiggling, tunneling, swimming, Neo-Zombie: “an undead, proud and loud zombie.”

I think it is a metaphor for this movie. I certainly felt like I got my life sucked out of me by something undead.

“Resident Evil: Afterlife” (3D) deserves nary a single bow tie!