Return to Silent Hill (2026)

When it comes to horror video games, I've rarely ever dipped my toes into the dark waters of the Silent Hill franchise. I've honestly only ever played three games in the whole series. (And that's assuming the "P.T." demo from 2014 counts as an actual game.) That said, the extremely basic concept of Silent Hill ― an abandoned town turns someone's inner demons into actual monsters ― is an amazing foundation on which to build frightening psychological stories.

But I've always been more of a movie fan than a gamer. That's one of the big reasons I haven't played the majority of the franchise's games. But judging by the trailers alone, I just had to see the Silent Hill movie adaptations when they were released in 2006 and 2012. Knowing less about the franchise back then than I do now, I enjoyed the first movie while being immensely disappointed with its sequel. But now that I've slowly gotten more familiar with the games, I was genuinely excited when I heard there would be a new movie directly based on Silent Hill 2.

Though I haven't played the original PlayStation 1 version of Silent Hill 2 that was published by Konami in 2001, I adore its 2024 remake and was ready to walk into the new movie and absolutely love it. I'd seen its abysmally low score on Rotten Tomatoes, but I didn't care. I held out hope that the movie, titled Return to Silent Hill, would terrify me just as much as the remake of Silent Hill 2 did.

But as I sat in that theater, I began to realize that what I'd heard was correct. Return to Silent Hill is absolute garbage. There are not enough synonyms for the word "bad" to properly describe it. And the more I think about the movie, the more I go over the notes I scribbled down in the theater's parking lot to prepare for the writing of this review, the more upset I get. As a fan of the horror genre and of movies in general, I'm almost insulted by just how awful Return to Silent Hill is.

The movie follows James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), a struggling artist that was deeply in love with his girlfriend Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson). But the pair separated some time ago, and James has fallen into a spiral of deep depression and alcoholism without her. So when he receives a mysterious note from Mary that beckons him back to her hometown, a small New England town called Silent Hill, James drops everything to rush there.

Nothing about Silent Hill is how he remembers it, however. It is almost completely abandoned, most of the roads are closed off, and the town is blanketed in a thick fog and falling ash. He also encounters a small handful of locals that can't quite grasp why he would ever come back to Silent Hill at all. One of then, Maria (also played by Hannah Emily Anderson), even follows him around and tries talking him into leaving. But James remains adamant that Mary is somewhere to be found, continuing his search even as he discovers that Silent Hill is also now home to ungodly monsters and an alternate version of itself that is roughly equivalent to stepping into Hell.

I don't know if I could've prepared myself for just how bad Return to Silent Hill is. That's an odd statement to make, considering that nine times out of ten, you can already expect a horror movie released in the Hollywood dumping ground that is January isn't going to be very good. But then there's the fact that I've seen practically no advertising for it whatsoever. There was a trailer posted on YouTube a few months ago, an occasional sponsored post on Facebook, some articles on the popular horror news site Bloody Disgusting (which is coincidentally owned by Cineverse, this movie's distributor), and that's been it. A horror movie released in January with minimal advertising, and it's based on a video game too... that's a bunch of red flags. The resounding consensus I saw after that trailer dropped was, "wow, Return to Silent Hill looks like it's gonna suck." The consensus was right, because it absolutely did did suck.

I've seen a lot of bad movies, and a lot of bad video game adaptations, but it is baffling that everyone involved with making Return to Silent Hill decided that this was the best they could do. Were the producers exploiting some kind of tax shelter, like Uwe Boll used to do? Were they in danger of losing the film rights back to Konami if they didn't make something? Did they just not care?

I genuinely enjoyed the first Silent Hill movie twenty years ago. So when I saw its director, Christophe Gans, returning to the franchise twenty years later as this movie's director and co-writer, I wanted to get my hopes up. But as they said in The Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing. Gans brings nothing to Return to Silent Hill. It is a lifeless, utterly miserable watch. There is no tension, any attempts at being scary are weak at best, and there is absolutely no subtlety whatsoever.

Gans also apparently decided that he wanted his storytelling to be as jarring as possible. On more than one occasion, he switches to a first-person perspective with no warning and for seemingly no reason other than it was briefly done in one Silent Hill 2 cutscene. He also haphazardly bounces us back and forth between current day and flashbacks, and between what's happening in Silent Hill and subplot about James's psychiatrist repeatedly trying (and failing) to contact him that becomes utterly inconsequential by the end of the movie.

I'm surprised at just how cheap the movie looked as well. I know the budget was very modest (I've heard somewhere around 23 million dollars), but it looks like they didn't spend a dime of it. The set design is poor, the CGI and green screen effects are really badly done, and the monster makeup effects often made me think Gans and his crew spent a day shopping at Spirit Halloween. I'm not joking about that, either. I've seen cosplayers dressed as Silent Hill's monsters at conventions that look better than what we see here.

There's also a scene where we see James with a beard, and it is insanely obvious that the beard is a wig. There's no hiding it, you can see the seams and everything. It looks so spectacularly fake that I cannot believe someone approved it being in front of the camera. If I had been directing this movie and saw Jeremy Irvine walk onto set wearing that thing, I would have immediately stopped filming so I could spend an hour screaming at the makeup department with all the rage I could muster.

Atmosphere is also one of the most important parts of the franchise as a whole, but Gans seemingly said "not in my movie, it isn't." The overwhelming sense of oppressive dread from the video game version of this story is gone as well. Instead, there's just stuff going on at all times. There is no opportunity for anything that's happened to sink in. Something is always going on, along with a distracting amount of visual noise even when the movie tries to slow down. The feeling of loneliness as James walks around the town is utterly gone, as is the pure nightmare fuel of the town's hellish "Otherworld."

Whenever you see a monster, it isn't a threat, just something that just shows up solely to be there. The popular "bubble head nurses" only appear as a swarm to be charged through at the end of the movie. The "Abstract Daddy," one of the most disgusting monsters from the whole Silent Hill franchise for multiple reasons, shows up for maybe ten seconds before disappearing without a fight. Even "Pyramid Head," the Silent Hill 2 creature who became so iconic that he's practically the franchise's mascot now, is just a distraction and not something to really be feared.

Some of this also comes from the script Gans co-wrote with Sandra Vo-Anh and William Schneider too. I can accept adaptations having to alter or outright remove things from the source material, because sometimes that just happens. Something might not translate well, or the story needs to be condensed to keep the adaptation from being excessively long. But Gans, Vo-Anh, and Schneider completely bungled this. There are changes made to the story that are either wholly unnecessary or painfully frustrating. The recurring character of James's therapist is new to the story and adds absolutely nothing to the movie.

I also found the alterations to what made it over from the game to be confusing. Eddie, an important supporting character from the game, relegated to a single scene that could've easily been cut from the movie with no harm done to its narrative. The changes to key plot points, among them the backstories and motivations of Mary, Laura, and Angela, also actively hurt the story and make the movie less scary. These changes to crucial elements of the original story take away much of the psychological and psychosexual horror that made both versions of Silent Hill 2 so terrifying.

This absolutely guts the original story's entire emotional core. One of the major reasons the Silent Hill franchise has been so popular is because the horror is derived from a myriad of deeply personal, almost taboo topics. Silent Hill 2 specifically shows us a traumatized rape victim blaming themselves for what's happened to them, someone's mental instability leading them to believe that killing others will fix their problems, and the toll a terminal illness takes on both the person diagnosed as well as their loved ones. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. On top of that, almost everything and everyone James encounters in the game's story is some kind of reflection of himself as well. James's mental health has reached a breaking point and his journey throughout the game is one that forces him to reconcile the choices he's made that have brought him to Silent Hill. Something similar has happened to Angela and Eddie, whose situations somewhat mirror his own. Their stories compliment James's in a way that still places him at the center of the overarching plot even beyond his deceptively simple role as the protagonist.

In the movie, Eddie has a small, pointless cameo and Angela has been completely overhauled into a local crazy girl (whose purpose in the story is also completely different now), with everything ultimately being about Mary. Everything is there because of her, everything is her fault when it shouldn't be. Flashbacks show us that Mary was part of a cult, and it led to tension between she and James. The inclusion of this cult as part of the movie does more harm that good. It contributes nothing beyond ruining the utter tragedy that was the story of Mary and James. The video game Mary was a cancer patient instead of a cult member, and the randomness of the disease leading to her ultimate fate was a driving part of James's journey. That's taken away with the introduction of the cult. I understand that a cult is part of some of the Silent Hill games, but it feels so out of place here. It not just affects how we view Mary, but how we view James as well. Video game James is haunted by Mary's death and his role in it, but movie James is just some sad drunk in a spooky town that has to fight his way out, eliminating any emotional impact there could've been.

And when I said earlier that there was no subtlety whatsoever, I meant it. The fact that Maria looks quite a bit like Mary is one thing, something the game itself touches on. But the ultimate revelation as to why Hannah Emily Anderson is playing three characters (with the aforementioned Angela being the third) feels so hackneyed that I wouldn't have believed the movie did it if I hadn't seen it myself. And this lack of subtlety is especially obvious by the bold decision the writers made to turn the subtext into just the text by outright stating what Pyramid Head symbolizes with absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever, to the point that it felt like they were trying to hit the audience over the head with it.

The minuscule cast is also poor, but considering how badly written their characters, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The supporting characters are all forgettable, but then you barely ever see them anyway, so it's not really of any concern whether they were good or bad. Jeremy Irvine and Hannah Emily Anderson are the only actors on screen for the majority of the movie, with Anderson playing three characters as I said earlier, while Irvine is given the task of being the person who the movie is supposed to gravitate around.

Anderson is given practically nothing to do despite having three roles to play, with none of them being particularly deep. There's nothing for her to sink her teeth into with these roles. It's especially bad with Angela, is (as I said earlier) painted as the shallow "crazy local girl" trope for much of the movie despite being such a tragic character in the games.

Irvine, meanwhile, is supposed to be the main character, but he's just so damn boring. There's no gravitas to his performance. Saying that the James Konami gave us in 2001 and 2024 was a guilt-ridden man being eaten alive by heartache and the memories of his wife doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the character. But Irvine's just kinda... there. They tell you he's upset about Mary, but Irvine never tries to make you believe it. His performance feels hollow, almost like he was told to just say his lines, hit his marks, and don't put any thought into what he was doing. It's another in a long line of things that ruins the emotional weight of what could've been something tragic.

We are only three weeks into 2026, and we've already been given a contender for one of the worst movies of the year. You might be thinking to yourself, "If you wanted the game, why not just play the game?" That isn't the point. I'm not saying Return to Silent Hill necessarily needed to be a 1:1 translation of Silent Hill 2. Look at Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, for example. It is widely considered a poor adaptation of Stephen King's novel but is still heralded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. You don't need to do the exact same thing beat for beat, note for note as long as it's still a good movie. But holy shit, Return to Silent Hill is both a terrible adaptation and a terrible movie. It either misunderstood, ignored, or just failed at doing every single thing that made the original Silent Hill 2 such a gripping story.

Even when divorced from the video games and viewed on its own merits, Return to Silent Hill is still abysmal. It's as if everyone involved in the movie, from the top of the credits to the bottom, just shrugged their shoulders and said, "yeah, whatever." The only person involved who seemed to put forth any effort was composer Akira Yamaoka, and all he even did was re-record the beautiful and haunting music he composed for the video games. Return to Silent Hill is the kind of bad movie that comes along just once in a while, the kind that you just can't believe exists and that someone would be okay with releasing to the general public. It feels like an amateur movie that would be made by kids that had neither a budget nor talent.

The saddest part of all this? Evie Templeton ― who provided Laura's voice in the Silent Hill 2 remake ― actually plays the character here too, and they never gave her the chance to say Laura's "see ya, fart face!" line from the game. I might've actually given the movie a good review if they'd done just that. But much like the people that visit the eponymous town, we can't have nice things in Return to Silent Hill.

Final Rating: *

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025)

Just in case you missed my review of it earlier this month, I did not like the first Five Nights at Freddy's movie. It was a dishearteningly dull movie, never using its setting or concept for anything beyond inviting the franchise's diehard fans to join a 109-minute Easter egg hunt. It wasn't scary or really worth watching a second time, and the only parts of it I actually liked were barely in the movie at all. But what do I know? The movie made 297 million dollars at the box office, just a fraction short of fifteen times its production budget, when it was released two years ago. Maybe people saw something I didn't.

I also said in my review that I'd likely give the sequel a shot when it hit streaming, and a little over three weeks later, here we are. Much like the last movie, the sequel is a movie that could've been much better than it actually is. The potential for an amazing horror movie is painfully obvious as you watch it. I desperately wanted to like it, for its makers to say, "If you didn't like the first movie, we're gonna use the sequel to change your mind." But no, they didn't do that. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is just more of the same old bullshit I saw last time.

Beyond a brief prologue, the movie takes place one year after we left Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to put the whole thing behind him, while Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is haunted by nightmares of the animatronics and her murderous father (Matthew Lillard). Young Abby (Piper Rubin), however, is still in mourning. The ghosts inside the animatronics were her friends, even if she knew them only briefly.

She sneaks out one night to see them, hoping that they're still active, but is heartbroken when she discovers that they aren't. Abby does, however, find a "FazTalker" toy (imagine a Freddy Fazbear-branded version of a Speak & Spell) in the remains of the pizzeria's prize booth and takes it home to remember them by.

But there's some rough stuff up ahead. A group of ghost hunters visit the very first Freddy Fazbear's location, which was closed down shortly after a child was killed there in 1982. They end up accidentally awakening "the Marionette," a cruel animatronic powered by the unfettered rage of that murdered child's spirit. The Marionette contacts Abby through the FazTalker and pretends to be the friendly animatronics she knows, manipulating her into helping the original location's animatronics reach the outside world so that the spirit can finally have the revenge it has spent twenty years longing for.

This is not a good movie. It actually doubles down on what I didn't like about the first one, by having more stuff that could've made for an awesome movie front and center but never doing anything worth a damn with it. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has fantastic outfits for the animatronic performers to wear, bigger stakes, and an intriguing villain that could be a million times scarier than what we saw in the first movie if used right. But it's still lousy, and that somehow makes it worse. A movie that obviously has all the cards to be great but still turns out bad is somehow more disappointing than just a movie that's simply bad.

Director Emma Tammi returns to helm the movie, and she does a slightly better job behind the camera this time around, but that isn't saying much. The movie's pacing is horribly inconsistent, never really getting into any kind of groove as it stops and starts trying to balance its different subplots. And then there's the fact that absolutely nothing resembling suspense is on the menu at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. All you're getting are loud noises and shitty jump scares instead of things that are actually frightening. I know the game franchise relies a lot on that kind of thing and doing that makes it accurate to the games, but it gets very tiresome in movie form. It's the equivalent of someone jumping out of nowhere and blowing an air horn in your ears every few minutes. It's one of those cases where I'd actually be okay with an adaptation straying as far as possible from the source material.

I'm also astounded by how tame the movie is. I know aiming for a PG-13 was a necessity because the movie's target audience is so young. But what little violence is in the movie feels so dreadfully limp because of it. Some characters are attacked via jump scare and disappear from the movie. Another is torn to pieces and what we see looks like a production assistant hacked up a mannequin and threw the parts onto the set. Someone else gets his head crushed by "Toy Freddy" and it just looks like he's getting a scalp massage. I'd be foolish to expect a ton of gore, but give us something.

There is, however, one sequence roughly forty minutes into the movie that I really liked, where Vanessa tries confronting the spirit of her father in a dream. The scene is actually very well done, genuinely serving as the scariest part of the movie. The whole movie being more like this would've made for something I'd have enjoyed a lot more (or at least hated less).

Franchise creator Scott Cawthon, meanwhile, has sole writing credit for the sequel, and you can definitely tell he's a game developer and not a screenwriter. The story feels like a bunch of subplots that Cawthon came up with but never bothered developing. For example, Abby is ostracized at school because her classmates all think she's a weirdo, with only one little boy giving her the time of day. Cawthon could've spun that into Abby making a human friend and being at ease without her beloved animatronics, but the little boy only has two or three scenes tops. An epilogue where he invites Abby to hang out with him would've been welcomed, a cute moment to conclude the movie, but he's ultimately not important to anything going on.

And I absolutely cannot forget FazFest. It's established that Mike and Abby's aunt was committed to an asylum after encountering "Golden Freddy" in the first movie, her outrageous story about haunted mascots from the local pizza place sparking an urban legend that becomes the theme of the town festival seen in this movie. However, the festival idea accomplishes nothing outside of "Toy Chica" (who is inexplicably voiced by Megan Fox of Jennifer's Body and Transformers fame) defending an upset Abby from an excessively mean science teacher, as well as a fun moment where "Toy Freddy" is believed to be someone in a costume, but the festival idea doesn't accomplish anything.

The animatronics are out in public at a festival themed around them, why not have them run amuck at the festival itself? Make it like the cornfield rave scene from Freddy vs. Jason. Even if the PG-13 rating would keep it from being a bloodbath, the concept alone could've made for an awesome climax. With the exception of one scene where Vanessa stops "Toy Bonnie" from attacking a family in their house, the last half hour of the movie is at the original pizzeria and the Schmidt house. It leaves the festival as another interesting idea that served no true purpose.

And then there's the cast, who is once again dull as dishwater with the exception of Matthew Lillard. He's genuinely frightening in the one scene he's in. It's the scariest part of the entire movie, and it made me feel like he should be the primary monster instead of the Marionette or the Fazbear gang. But that's the sad part is, like I said, he's in one scene. If any Five Nights at Freddy's fans are reading this, please answer this: does his character get a bigger role in any of the games? I ask because I will absolutely watch as many sequels as it takes for him to be given more to do.

To be fair, I won't completely crap on all the actors in the movie though. Skeet Ulrich isn't bad in his cameo as the father of the spirit haunting the Marionette, and I'd have enjoyed seeing more of Mckenna Grace in her small role as the leader of the ghost hunters. But much like the first movie, Lillard absolutely steals the show here.

One of the ghost hunters asks early in the movie, "What the hell kind of kid would want to come here?" I'm asking myself the same question. It just blows my mind that the Five Nights at Freddy's super-fans would be okay with this. But I guess if they keep making money, why change what works? Five Nights at Freddy's 2 might not be good, but I can't say it wasn't a hit. It'd probably made even more money in theaters if Avatar: Fire and Ash hadn't just come out looking to kill everything else at the December box office. (Maybe that's why its digital release was so soon?) There will surely be a third movie, if the post-credits scenes were any indication. All I can hope is that whenever it comes out, the third time will be the charm and I'll actually like it.

Final Rating: *½

Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)

A new subgenre of horror began to carve out a niche for itself during the second half of the 2010s. It came to be called "mascot horror," due to the villains usually being colorful characters that could easily be mistaken for (or sometimes actually are) the mascots of a beloved children's franchise.

If you're not familiar with it, mascot horror has made its home in the world of independent video games. An absolute ton of them have been released on Steam over the last decade, with notable examples including Poppy Playtime and Bendy and the Ink Machine. But much like how Godzilla is the king of all monster movies, at the top of the entire "mascot horror" subgenre sits Five Nights at Freddy's.

Developed by Scott Cawthon, Five Nights at Freddy's began as a single game published on Steam in the summer of 2014. Indie games arrive and disappear all the time, so despite the good reviews it got, it likely would've just flown under everyone's radars had it not been for YouTube. Videos about the game by a number of super-popular YouTubers got millions of views, shining a spotlight on the game and helping make it a surprise success.

It was so successful, in fact, that Cawthorn created a sequel just three months after the first game's release, and it's snowballed from there. Five Nights at Freddy's has since blossomed into a franchise that's produced twenty official games by my count, as well as novels, tabletop games, Halloween costumes, coloring books, toys, an insane amount of fanmade projects, and an attraction as part of the 2025 edition of "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Studios Hollywood. One of its villains even appears alongside a cornucopia of iconic horror characters as downloadable content for Dead by Daylight.

So of course, Hollywood came calling to make a movie too.

After years of production delays and behind-the-scenes shake-ups during its development, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Studios released a Five Nights at Freddy's film adaptation simultaneously in theaters and on Peacock a few days before Halloween in 2023. And while it was largely panned by critics, it was a box office success and became one of Blumhouse's biggest hits.

Having never played any of the games (and never having had any interest whatsoever in them, if I may be honest), I was in no rush to see the movie. But the sequel comes out today and I could use some content for this blog, so what the heck, I might as well watch it. And truth be told, it's just okay at best. It's a passable movie that could've been worse, but it could have been much better too.

Meet Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a man with low prospects and an unfortunate inability to stay employed. It leaves him unable to pay his bills, and at risk of being both evicted from his home and losing custody of his little sister Abby (Piper Rubio). But an odd opportunity soon presents itself when Mike is offered a job working as an overnight security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. A combination of pizzeria and playground, it was immensely popular back in the '80s, but was shut down at its peak after five children went missing. Now it merely stands as an abandoned, dilapidated shell of its former self.

Mike's first few nights seem relatively unremarkable, mostly just dozing off on the job and dealing with the mess a group of vandals left behind. But when he has to start bringing Abby to work with him following the disappearance of her babysitter, shit really starts to hit the fan. It turns out the pizzeria's four animatronic mascots ― Bonnie, Foxy, Chica, and Freddy Fazbear himself ― can come to life. While Abby believes them to be her friends, Mike discovers that they have more malevolent intentions that put both he and his sister in grave danger.

I will be upfront and say that I am not the target audience for Five Nights at Freddy's. That's why it took me two whole years to bother watching the movie, because I had a feeling that much like the games, the movie just wouldn't be for me. And having actually watched it now, I can say that my suspicions were correct. But that's not to say I hated it either. There's a lot of stuff here that I wanted to like, a lot of elements that would've made for something fantastic had the movie itself just been stronger as a whole. Five Nights at Freddy's is one of those times where I saw there was a chance it could be really good, but it stopped just a few yards short of the goal line.

The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it felt like Emma Tammi's direction and the script written by she, Seth Cuddleback, and Cawthon didn't strike me as being very confident in knowing just what kind of movie was supposed to be made. The first half of the movie gives us a scene where Freddy and the other mascots separate and kill a group of vandals that have broken in, and you begin to think that's where the movie might go. There's lots of jump scares, and a sequence that's actually pretty tense by kid-friendly standards. But then the second half of the movie starts leaning more towards something that tries to be more psychologically thrilling when it really isn't.

The dueling plotlines of a custody battle between Mike and his aunt over Abby, and Mike's recurring and evolving nightmares about the abduction of he and Abby's brother many years earlier, feels like something I would expect from a horror movie that's a bit more mature. Maybe put a full-fledged cult in there, maybe put Ari Aster's name on there as a producer, and it'd be one of the "emotional trauma porn" horror movies that A24 and Neon have released over the last few years.

It doesn't really do the mature stuff well, nor the "killer Chuck E. Cheese animatronics" side either. Neither the director nor the script put the idea of being stuck inside an rundown arcade/pizzeria with a bunch of monsters to any good use. The set design is downright bland, and there's never any energy pulled from it. Outside of one scene near the end where Abby hides in an old ballpit, the setting itself is never really utilized at all. You're in an arcade and singing, dancing creatures that look like they escaped from a demented furry convention are trying to kill you, you can do something to play up the inherent silliness of it. The movie's concept and the outfits Freddy and his friends wear are too good to just half-ass it. I know the franchise's main demographic is kids, but this movie is begging for someone to use it as an excuse to completely rip off Chopping Mall.

And then there's a cast who I think weren't bad, but they deserved more than what they had to work with. Josh Hutcherson's performance feels like he was desperate for better material than what he was given, while I found Piper Rubio was adorable. I did like Elizabeth Lail as well, even though I thought her character (that of a local cop who slowly tells Mike about the pizzaria's dark history) was a little on the bland side.

The best parts of the whole movie, though, came from two people who are barely in the movie at all. One I wanted to highlight is Matthew Lillard. He's barely in the movie at all, showing up at just the beginning and again during the climax. But Lillard milks what time he has for everything it's worth, stealing what scenes he's in by overacting his ass off and being one of the most memorable elements of the movie because of it.

The other actor I wanted to highlight is Mary Stuart Masterson as Mike and Abby's aunt, who is trying to get guardianship of Abby solely so she can get financial assistance from the government. Much like Lillard, Masterson only appears in a few scenes and has roughly six or seven minutes of screen time in total. She makes it every second count, however, by being wonderfully bitchy and making you love to hate her character.

As I said before, Five Nights at Freddy's wasn't made for me. It was made for its fans. And that's perfectly fine! There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm on the outside looking in, watching a celebration of something that I know so precious little about. Speaking as an outsider, Five Nights at Freddy's is almost two hours of mediocrity. I don't want to say it was a victim of the old trope that movie adaptations of video games are bad, because it isn't. But it has so many half-baked ideas and so much unrealized potential that I'm more disappointed with the movie than anything else.

Today sees the theatrical release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, and I'll likely give it a shot when it eventually hits streaming. So here's hoping that the sequel will be more satisfying than the first one.

Final Rating: **

Resident Evil: Damnation (2012)

I've been a fan of Capcom's Resident Evil video games since the franchise began, before I even owned a console on which to play them. I remember many a weekend in 1996 and 1997 where I'd go down the street to hang out with a friend who owned a PlayStation and playing the first game until the wee hours of the morning. The franchise is even one of the big reasons why I bought a Nintendo GameCube. And then Sony Pictures had to go and break my heart by letting Paul W.S. Anderson make his live-action movies inspired by the games.

I've spoken about my disappointment with Anderson's movies numerous times in the past, so I won't go into that again. But I will confess to being excited to see the animated Resident Evil: Degeneration when it was released straight to DVD in 2008. It was flawed, sure, but it was fun and I ultimately walked away moderately pleased. And because of that, when a sequel was similarly released to home video in 2012 (coincidentally between the fifth live-action movie and Capcom's Resident Evil 6 game), I was excited to see it. It might have taken me two years, but I've finally gotten around to seeing the sequel. So let's jump into Resident Evil: Damnation and see how well it turned out.

The movie takes us to the Eastern Slav Republic, one of many countries that came into being after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the country's transition to independence and a surge of unchecked capitalism led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, allowing an oligarchy to gain control of the government. A militia of freedom fighters arose to turn class warfare into actual warfare, sending Eastern Slav into a bitter civil war.

As our story proper begins, we're once again introduced to U.S. federal agent Leon Kennedy (the voice of Matthew Mercer), who has secretly entered Eastern Slav to investigate rumors indicating that the rebels have acquired biological weaponry on the black market in an attempt to turn the war's tide in their favor. But shortly after he arrives, his superiors order him out after a breakdown in peace talks prompt Russia and the United States to get involved. Convinced that something suspicious is going on, Leon defies his orders and begins searching for the source of the rumors.

This might come as a shock, but his fears prove to be well-grounded. Leon discovers that not only do the rebels have some lab-created monsters at their disposal, but are controlling them via the Plaga parasites seen in Resident Evil 4 and 5. However, as is tradition with this franchise, things have gotten out of control. The parasites have also been unleashed upon Eastern Slav's capitol city, its victims becoming violent zombie-like lunatics.

In order to survive, Leon is forced into a shaky camaraderie with Sasha Kozachenko (the voice of Dave Wittenberg), a rebel fighter whose personal stake in the war has pushed him to make some increasingly desperate choices. But things get even more complicated when Leon learns that the Plaga outbreak is part of conspiracy that runs far deeper than a mere civil war, a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of Eastern Slav's political food chain and the country's president, Svetlana Belikova (the voice of Wendee Lee).

I honestly don't know why it's taken me two years to see this movie. I guess I was afraid of having another "it's okay, nothing special" experience like with Degeneration. But now that I've actually seen it, I can't figure out why I waited so long because Damnation is a fun flick. Again, I didn't think it was perfect, but the movie is still an entertaining ride.

One of my big complaints about Degeneration was the animation. It was serviceable enough, but it looked like it belonged in a video game instead of a movie. The CGI here, however, is fantastic. It feels like an actual movie this time around. Thanks to the combination of the gorgeous look of the CGI and the use of motion capture, the animation is a lot more fluid and looks surprisingly realistic in a number of scenes. The fistfight between Svetlana and super-spy Ada Wong particularly stands out in this regard, and serves as one of the movie's highlights due in part to the quality of the animation. I also felt the movie also felt more exciting than its predecessor as well. The movie's fight scenes, action sequences, and especially the protracted climax (one that pits Leon, Sasha, and a number of Lickers against two humongous "Tyrant" monsters) are actually more intense than I originally thought they might be.

The catch, though, is that the movie was obviously supposed to have been in 3D. From the way certain shots are composed to things getting thrown or pointed at the audience, it's obvious that they were aiming for a 3D release for the movie. I've heard it even got one in some Japanese theaters, but here in the United States, we're forced to do without. The added depth would have made the visuals that much cooler to see, so needless to say, I'm disappointed that I've been left out in the cold.

Another problem I had with the movie, one less superficial than the movie being in 2D, is the screenplay (which, much like Degeneration, is written by Shotaro Suga). My beef with it is that the plot feels murky and convoluted. With the games, you're constantly finding clues and other material that fill in the gaps in the story and provide some extra exposition that straightens out any questions one may have and makes the world of the games richer and more rounded. But you can't do something like that here without the movie grinding to a complete halt. Because of that, it makes the story feel weak. Maybe it's me just not noticing every little detail or something going over my head that would have straightened things out for me, but I felt like the movie's government conspiracy storyline was more complicated than it should have been.

To Suga's credit, however, he has improved on some things. One of Degeneration's flaws was that splitting the narrative between the separate paths the two main characters were taking caused it to be less focused. He fixes that with Damnation, spending the bulk of the story following the Leon character. We do cut away to Ada and her sneaky attempts at infiltrating Svetlana's office but for the most part, this is Leon's movie. This singular focus allows the movie room to stretch its legs without getting bogged down by having to bounce back and forth between protagonists.

The movie also benefits from some decent voice acting as well. The cast, comprised of veteran anime voice performers and actors reprising the roles they play in the Resident Evil games, all put forth respectable work. Granted, they're once again stuck with the occasional bit of clunky dialogue, but they're still good. I enjoyed Val Tasso, who plays a goofy rebel that takes a liking to Leon, and especially liked Matthew Mercer and Courtenay Taylor as Leon and Ada, reprising the roles they've played multiple times in the games. The two know exactly what to do and where to go with their characters, making both of them intriguing and likable in their own ways.

Resident Evil: Damnation isn't a perfect movie, and it might not appeal to those who aren't devoted fans of the games. But it's still a very fun, entertaining movie that, as a fan, I thought was a really satisfying effort. If Sony Pictures were to ever get rid of Paul W.S. Anderson and reboot the live-action movies, they'd do well to follow in the footsteps of Capcom's animated movies. It might just be a tie-in created just to promote a video game, but Damnation is totally worth your time if you're even remotely a Resident Evil fan.

Final Rating: ***

Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

It goes without saying that movies based on video games have something of a bad reputation. Even the ones that don't suck will rarely rise any higher than mediocrity. Hollywood must have gotten the hint too, because outside of the Resident Evil movies, most video game adaptations in the last few years have gone direct to video.

But one that stands out is Silent Hill. Released in 2006, I thought the movie was a fantastic attempt at translating the surreal world of the games into live action. But its modest box office performance and lackluster critical reception, combined with the passage of time, have caused the movie to be all but a footnote in the "video game adaptation" genre. That's why it was surprising to see a promotional campaign for Silent Hill: Revelation pop up. After six years in developmental hell, I thought a second Silent Hill movie was never going to happen. I was proven wrong in that regard, but after seeing it, perhaps they should have developed it a little further.

Many years have passed since the end of the first movie. During that time, young Sharon Da Silva (Adelaide Clemens) somehow managed to escape the hellish ghost town of Silent Hill. She has no memory of of the horrors she was a part of, having only the vaguest of recollections of the town itself. But the evil cult within Silent Hill never forgot, continuing their hunt for the innocent Sharon. Her father (Sean Bean) knows just what they'd have in store for her, and has kept himself and his daughter on the road ever since. Changing their locations and identities whenever necessary, the Da Silvas seemingly never have a moment's peace.

We pick up on the eve of Sharon's eighteenth birthday. It unfortunately won't be a happy one for her, as she's plagued by violent nightmares in which she's stalked and killed by otherworldly monsters. Her nightmares are so vivid that they soon start bleeding over into the real world and lead to the murder of a private investigator hired by the cult to find her. And this private investigator didn't help matters much anyway, as he led the cult right to the Da Silvas. They kidnap Sharon's father, leaving the message "COME TO SILENT HILL" painted in blood on their living room wall. Faced with no other recourse, Sharon must return to the town of her nightmares and face unspeakable evils if she wants to save her father.

I really enjoyed the first Silent Hill movie, so much so that I was still highly anticipating the sequel despite the rather negative reviews it's been getting. But I unfortunately walked out of that theater not excited because I'd just seen an awesome follow-up to a movie I really like, but instead a movie that felt like kind of a letdown. There are so many elements of Silent Hill: Revelation that I really dug, that really made the movie work. But then there's some things that just plain hold it back from realizing its full potential. It's not a bad movie per se, but it could have been so much better.

The movie was written and directed by Michael J. Bassett, a British filmmaker whom I'd never actually heard of previously. But I was still curious to see how he would approach a Silent Hill sequel, as I really liked the surreal, almost dreamlike world that Christophe Gans crafted in the first movie. And while he doesn't bring Gans's truly artistic flair to the movie, Bassett still does an amazing job in building the world of Silent Hill. I'll admit that he struggles somewhat, mainly because the movie's budget was less than half of its predecessor's, but it's apparent that Bassett wanted to put as much effort as possible into making Silent Hill look and sound as if it had come to life.

The special effects are amazing, with each of the various monsters, beasts, and creatures looking like they'd stepped right out of the games. Some of the CGI is a little iffy at times, though it's never enough to take you out of the movie. Bassett also puts the 3D effects to good use too. He goes for the standard "things pop out of the screen at the audience" gimmick, but he also uses it for atmospheric effect at the same time. The world feels deeper and more encompassing, almost as if it would suck you in if you sat close enough to the screen.

And while it's obvious that Bassett loves the Silent Hill games, there's one thing he forgot to add: the overall sense of soul-crushing dread that permeates both the games and the first movie. My experience with the franchise is admittedly limited, but I've seen and played enough to know that Silent Hill is home to Hell's nightmares. But it's not just all the different monsters and creatures occupying the town that make things so terrifying. A vast majority of the Silent Hill titles I've encountered have all felt like there was something dark, something sinister lying just beneath the surface. Even when some monster with no face and a bunch of claws is trying to rip your heart out, you can never escape the notion that a far more horrifying beast is in the darkness ahead of you.

And this is probably my own opinion, but Silent Hill: Revelation was lacking in that department. It had its fair share of weird, bizarre, surreal moments, but it was missing that feeling that the movie itself was going to come to life and kill you. I could blame it on Bassett's direction or the smaller budget or any number of things, but I thought it really hurt the movie's effectiveness. It had some good scares, but it would have been a lot scarier if it had that same atmosphere.

I will say, though, that Bassett's direction is better than his script. This movie's script is all kinds of awful. There's the banal dialogue, plot threads that go nowhere and are never resolved, and lousy characters that make it hard to care about them. Things will come to an absolute dead stop on more than one occasion so a character can deliver lengthy expository monologues that do nothing but kill the story's momentum. That sort of thing might work for video games, but the lack of interactivity in movies means that it just throws off the pacing more than anything else.

Another thing that bugged me was that Bassett began setting up what could have been an intriguing subplot (in which Heather was wanted by the police for questioning regarding a murder), only to drop it altogether without so much as a further mention after the first act. Did I miss the resolution? Did Bassett cut out most of the subplot and accidentally leave the first act stuff in the movie? I want to know what happened to the cops! There could be a whole alternate movie here, where the police end up in Silent Hill fighting their own batch of creatures. A resolution could make for a neat bonus feature on the DVD and Blu-ray release in a few months, but the fact that Bassett seemingly started something he never finished just makes the final product look rough.

But I will applaud him for going above and beyond the call of duty when it came to staying close to the source material. He actually took the story for the third Silent Hill game and tried spinning it as a continuation of the first movie. The only problem is that the whole thing got a little muddled along the way. The fact that he's trying to appease both fans of the first movie by introducing the plot from the Silent Hill 3 game while still trying to continue the original movie's story (right down to explaining that Sharon Da Silva has changed her name to Heather Mason, for example) is too much. It sets up plot holes and inconsistencies, and it's so poorly handled that it feels like he's simultaneously doing too much and not enough. It's a bloated mess, yet nothing seems to really matter at all in the long run. I appreciate Bassett's efforts, but I just wish he could have had a co-writer to help him streamline some things.

And this brings us to the cast, a group of actors who are give or take. Sean Bean is great yet sadly underused (much like in the first movie), Kit Harington is okay (but not fantastic) in his role as Sharon's love interest, and Carrie-Anne Moss is sadly just kinda there as the leader of Silent Hill's cult. She spends the whole movie on autopilot, like she showed up on set one day and decided to mosey in front of the camera to kill a little time until another movie came along for her.

There are some standout performances, though. For starters, Malcolm McDowell is an insane amount of fun in his unfortunately brief appearance in the movie. He's obviously doing everything he can to avoid taking the movie seriously, choosing instead to be as hammy as possible. McDowell can overact with the best of them, and he's one of the most entertaining parts of the whole movie. On the other hand, Adelaide Clemens actually is taking the movie seriously, and her performance is very strong because of it. The character suffers from the weak writing, but Clemens still makes every effort to rise above it. She's strong, brave, smart, and very likable, and I don't know if they could have gotten a better actress for the part. 

Silent Hill: Revelation is a movie that I desperately wanted to love. I wanted to rub Paul W.S. Anderson's nose in it and tell him that this is how you turn a "survival horror" game into a movie, instead of that Resident Evil crap he's been putting out for the last decade. Alas, I had my heart broken instead. There was much I did like that I did enjoy, but there was just as much that I thought the movie could have improved upon. Maybe my opinion will change in a few months if I give it a second chance on DVD, but right now... meh. I do want to see another Silent Hill movie, though, but considering the overwhelming number of negative reviews and the lousy box office numbers, I'm pretty sure that this one will be the last one. And honestly, that's even more disappointing than the movie itself. 

Final Rating: **

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

I've had kind of a love/hate relationship with the Resident Evil franchise over the years. While I've loved nearly all of the video games that have carried that name since the first game was released on the original PlayStation in 1996, the cinematic adaptations have left me sadly disappointed. Each of the movies have had elements that I liked, I can admit that. But the fact that the rich mythology of the games I cherish so much was either altered or flat-out discarded in favor of mediocre fan fiction makes the movies more frustrating than anything else.

But every time a new Resident Evil movie is released, I still have to go see it. I don't know what it is, but I'm drawn to every single one of these movies. And thus I was sucked into the newest chapter, Resident Evil: Retribution. And once again, it's a sadly average entry into a franchise that's never really seemed able to rise above its own faults.

The movie picks up not long after the end of the previous one, as the squad of Umbrella soldiers have laid waste to the survivors and captured Alice (Milla Jovovich). Alice is imprisoned and subjected to brutal interrogation tactics, but a freak power outage allows her to escape from her cell and make a break for freedom.

Alice is quickly intercepted by Ada Wong (Li Bingbing), an associate of the perpetually evil Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts). It turns out that Wesker triggered the power outage and sent Ada to retrieve Alice, whose altered DNA is the key to saving the human race from extinction.

But escaping to the outside world will be no easy feat. It turns out that Alice had been imprisoned deep beneath the ice of the Arctic Circle, in a combat research facility populated with Umbrella's homegrown creatures, monsters, and beasts. And while Wesker has his own team of commandos to extract Alice and Ada from the facility, the supercomputer that runs the place has sent a team of its own soldiers ― led by the brainwashed Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) ― after them as well.

Once again a Resident Evil movie sees a theatrical release, and once again I leave the theater feeling disappointed. Is it too much to ask for one of these movies to be better than the crap that this franchise has been giving us for the past decade? It's like everyone involved in the cast and crew can't be bothered to care because they know they'll still make a ton of money from people like me, people who are too dumb to know any better. And I really should know better, because I know exactly what I'm getting into when I walk up to the box office and buy a ticket to see a Resident Evil movie. But I keep doing it anyway, because I'm an idiot.

Returning to both write and direct the latest entry into the saga is Paul W.S. Anderson, a filmmaker who as far as I can tell is like a low-rent version of Michael Bay. He's all sizzle and no steak, putting as much emphasis as possible on style without even remotely considering substance. That isn't always a bad thing, but with this movie, Anderson doesn't make so much as the slightest attempt to use that style to overcome or distract from the movie's flaws. It's like he just can't be bothered to care as long as Sony Pictures is still willing to hand him a big stack of cash to keep making the Resident Evil movies.

But practically all of the movie's flaws lie are with Anderson's screenplay. The script for this movie is just more proof that he simply does not care and would rather cobble together a bunch of garbage that shares a couple of names with the video games that Anderson is supposed to be adapting. And as bad as the writing for the other four Resident Evil movies might be, Anderson flushes the whole thing down the crapper with this one.

I do applaud his efforts to connect the disjointed continuity of all the movies together with a monologue at the beginning of the movie, but beyond that, Anderson steers things into a nosedive. It begins with his introduction of a bunch of new characters and the reintroduction of characters that died earlier in the series (having been brought back via cloning courtesy of Umbrella), while some from Afterlife disappear without as much as a mention. What happened to Chris and Claire Redfield? What happened to that "K-Mart" girl? They just up and vanish, no excuse given. Was this a situation where the actors didn't want to come back and Anderson couldn't recast them? I'll admit that I enjoyed seeing Ada Wong, Leon Kennedy, and Barry Burton up on the big screen, but did we absolutely need them when there's perfectly good characters already there?

What bugged me more than that is the absolute lack of anything resembling a plot. There is no story here. None. We're given the "Alice has to escape from Umbrella's facility" setup nearly twenty minutes into the movie, and that's it. The whole movie is just one big flimsy excuse for a batch of loosely connected action scenes. With no plot and no reason to give a damn about anything that happens, the movie just becomes a cacophonous mess. It's like Anderson is letting Uwe Boll write these movies, because he obviously has no desire to make anything that resembles the games anymore.

At least Anderson's direction is pretty good. Since he can't give us any substance, he makes up for it with a lot of style. Not only are the movie's 3D effects absolutely amazing, but the action scenes are very well done. While Anderson runs out of steam by the time the movie ends, he still manages to craft an action movie that's a real feast for the eyes. My favorite part, though, as near the beginning, when we see a huge mob of zombies running amok through a test simulation in a fake suburban town within Umbrella's facility. It actually takes the movie towards the horror contained within the early chapters of the video game franchise, and I thought it was really effective. I actually got invested in it (before Anderson shot himself in the foot with the rest of the movie, that is). The scene is really good, and it makes me wish Anderson had just done that for the whole series.

And then there's the acting, which is a mixed bag. Nobody is actively bad or anything, it's just that a lot of the cast feels like they're on autopilot. Take Milla Jovovich, for instance. For the majority of the movie, she's her usual self. No heavy lifting is required for her role, she just needs to talk in an unaffected monotone voice and beat up some monsters. It's all the more jarring when you see Jovovich playing a clone of Alice programmed to be a devoted wife and mother in that suburbia simulation I mentioned. Jovovich is great in that sequence, but once she has to jump into "Ass-Kickin' Alice" mode, that all goes away and she gives us the same old performance from the first four movies. Maybe I'm projecting my own utter contempt for the Alice character onto Jovovich's performance, but she struck me as just being here for the paycheck.

I was also on the fence about Li Bingbing as Ada Wong. She looks the part and actually comes very close to nailing it. But I didn't feel like she had the same sly, mysterious nature of her video game counterpart. And maybe it's just me, but Li's dialogue sounded like it was dubbed. I'm aware that English is not her first language and perhaps she memorized her lines phonetically, but something about it just sounds... off, I guess.

But I did, however, like Sienna Guillory, who plays the brainwashed Jill Valentine as the most unapologetic, cold-hearted bitch imaginable. She really makes it work, and I'm glad Guillory's returned to the franchise. But without a doubt, my favorite bit of acting comes from Aryana Engineer. She plays an artificially-created little girl built to be Alice's clone's daughter in that suburban weapons test, but finds herself taken in by Alice after her "mother" gets chomped on by a zombie. Engineer plays the role extremely well, and I thought she was really cute and likable. The relationship between her character and Alice is obviously supposed to be somewhat evocative of Ripley and Newt in Aliens, but I won't hold that lack of originality against Engineer, who I felt did a fantastic job.

Unfortunately, the movie as a whole is nowhere near as good as Engineer's performance. It actually makes me outright resent the Resident Evil name altogether. I probably wouldn't be so frustrated with it or the movies as a whole if I weren't already a fan of the games, but even that doesn't change the fact that Resident Evil: Retribution is an unmitigated disappointment. They'll probably end up making a sixth one of these godforsaken movies, especially considering how Retribution ended, and despite all my better judgment telling me to do the opposite, I'll probably see it anyway, There's no way it could be as bad as this one… could it?

Final Rating: *½

DOA: Dead or Alive (2006)

Although it was not the first fighting game, Capcom's Street Fighter II revolutionized and redefined the entire genre when it arrived in arcades in 1991. Fighting games were big business for game developers in the years that followed, with imitators and wannabes all gunning for a share of the pie. While the most famous of these is the Mortal Kombat franchise, other games made name for themselves as well. Virtua Fighter and Tekken gained prominence through their then-groundbreaking use of 3D polygonal graphics, while the Dead or Alive franchise gained fans for... well, other reasons.

Since the franchise's debut in 1996, Tecmo's Dead or Alive games have become notable primarily for its extensive use of what's been dubbed "jiggle physics." That is, how much the bosoms of the female characters bounce during gameplay. Yeah. The jiggle physics became so prevalent that Tecmo even created a series of spinoffs titled Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball. This focus on sex appeal would even transition into the eventual live-action film adaptation of the franchise. Yeah, you may not know it if you're an American, but they actually made a Dead or Alive movie. It was only released to 505 theaters here, a full year after it was released in the rest of the world. It had pretty much no promotion, and it didn't even make back half of its budget. And yeah, it totally sucks. It really, really, really sucks.

A group of top fighters from around the world have been assembled at a private island for the prestigious "Dead or Alive" tournament. Among these fighters are skilled assassin and thief Christie Allen (Holly Valance), pro wrestler Tina Armstrong (Jamie Pressly), and ninja princess Kasumi (Devon Aoki). Overseen by the tournament's unscrupulous organizer, Victor Donovan (Eric Roberts), the three women start clawing their way up the tournament's rankings to accomplish their own personal goals. But it soon comes to light that Donovan has concocted a plan to harness the fighting prowess of each contestant for his own nefarious purposes. The fighters will have to unite and stop Donovan from fully orchestrating his evil scheme.

This is the part where I have to confess that I've never once played any of the Dead or Alive video games. I barely even knew they existed; I'd only vaguely heard of the Xtreme Beach Volleyball spinoffs prior to seeing the movie and doing my research for this review. So I can't judge how close the movie sticks to the game. But what I can tell you is that the Dead or Alive movie is one gigantic steaming turd. It's the kind of video game movie that's so bad that I could have sworn Uwe Boll had something to do with it. (So you can imagine my shock when not once did I see his name listed in the credits.) I just... wow.

DOA was directed by acclaimed fight choreographer Corey Yuen. Although he's directed tons of movies over the last three decades, the way he directs DOA makes it look like he was fresh out of film school. Yuen's direction is uninspiring, sub-generic, and just plain boring. There's a lot of stuff going on at all times, but none of it feels like it matters. It fails to capture one's attention to the point that I just couldn't be bothered to care. The fight scenes aren't all that exciting either; they're nothing that hasn't been seen in a hundred other karate movies. The CGI is ugly and unconvincing too, to the point that it looks like the effects had absolutely no budget at all.

However, I should give Yuen credit for trying to keep the movie close to its gaming rules. Disembodied voices boldly announce when knockouts occur, and surveillance footage of the fights feature life bars at the top of the screen. It's silly, goofy, and undeniably corny, but it's still a funny little element that does liven up the movie a little bit. But it still cannot save Yuen's work from being less than adequate.

And then there's the terrible script, credited to J.F. Lawton, Adam Gross, and Seth Gross. Seriously, this screenplay is really, really bad. I'm aware that most '90s fighting games had practically no plot at all beyond "pick a character and kick some ass," but the DOA movie's plot is friggin' preposterous. "The tournament being a cover for a mad scientist who wants to harvest fighting styles in order to create technology that would make its user the greatest fighter alive" is a phrase I never thought I'd ever have to write, ever. And I never would have, had it not been for this movie.

The real problem with the script, though, is that I just plain didn't give a crap about a single one of the characters. They're written so blandly, so one-dimensionally that I can't begin to even pretend I'm interested in anything they do. Maybe one could argue that Lawton and the Grosses were staying close to the source material, since in addition to not much plot, '90s fighting games had characters whose whole character could be summed up in one sentence (if that). It allowed the games to focus on what brought people to the party, specifically the fighting. I've seen and enjoyed some movies that were nothing but action set pieces, but the DOA movie simply doesn't pull it off.

Last but probably least is the cast, who simply aren't all that great. Jamie Pressly is okay and amusing in spots but still kinda bland, while I thought Devon Aoki's acting was a lot better in Sin City. And considering all that was required of her in Sin City was to stand around and look cute, that's saying something. Holly Valance's performance is stiff, while I didn't think Eric Roberts was even bothering to try. I'm convinced that Roberts just took the job because he needed a quick paycheck, but I can't prove that. The only performance in the entire movie that I liked at all was Kevin Nash, who has a small part as Jamie Pressly's character's father. His part isn't much, but he's funny, entertaining, and enjoyable. I wish I could say that about the rest of the cast, but everyone else is just kinda lame.

Upon reflection, I don't think the creative forces behind DOA: Dead or Alive were striving to make a good movie. I think they just wanted to make a movie that would appeal to 13-year-old boys. All there is to the whole thing is scantily-clad women and fight scenes. And there's even a scene where, while one of the male characters fights off a group of mooks, the female characters drop everything to play a round of beach volleyball. It's not only a cute little shoutout to the Xtreme Beach Volleyball games, but it pretty much sums up the entire movie: people fighting, babes in little clothing, and not much else. And really, the movie might have at least been entertaining had it not been so unbearably boring. But for all the fight scenes and for all the pretty ladies in bikinis, I could barely make it through. Thanks for helping propagate the stereotype that video game movies suck, DOA! That was mighty nice of you!

Final Rating: *½

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

I've been a fan of Capcom's Resident Evil games for a long time, since even before I owned a console on which I could play them. Their combination of zombies, monsters, and the "oh crap, something's gonna get me!" vibe made me fall in love with them as far back as the PS1 days in the middle of the '90s. So when I heard that there was going to be a Resident Evil movie, I got super-excited.

And then I actually saw it. I remember the date: March 16, 2002. I sat in that darkened theater watching something so unlike the games that I was dumbstruck. The Umbrella Corporation was there, the T-virus was there, the zombies were there, but it was far from the Resident Evil I knew and loved. It was, plain and simple, 101 minutes of stupidity.

But then came the sequels. Resident Evil: Apocalypse got a teensy bit closer to the games and was better for it, while Extinction said "screw it" and took the movie franchise as far away from the games as possible. All three were utterly mediocre movies that show what happens when a filmmaker wants to piss in the faces of a franchise's built-in audience by turning his significant other into an unstoppable superhero at the expense of everything that made the source material cool.

That leads us to Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in the saga and the first to be made in 3D. Having given up all hope of seeing a live-action Resident Evil movie that's truly faithful to the source material, I went into Afterlife at least hoping that maybe it wouldn't be as silly as the first three movies or as goofy as its trailers and commercials made it look. Turns out all my hopes were in vain, as the movie is just more of the same.

The movie begins where Extinction left off, with Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her army of clones pursuing her vendetta against the Umbrella Corporation. The team of Alices storm Umbrella's underground bunker in Tokyo, a mission that ends with the clone army wiped out, Umbrella chairman Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) seemingly dead, and Alice stripped of her superpowers.

With her enemies defeated, Alice ventures off to find Arcadia, a rumored safe haven for survivors located in the Alaskan wilderness. She arrives to find nothing but a field of abandoned planes and helicopters. The only other person to be found is Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who has been stricken with amnesia and has no memory of where her convoy could have gone.

While flying down the western seaboard in search of other survivors, they discover a small group living in a maximum security prison in the ruins of Los Angeles. Among them are former pro basketball star Luther West (Boris Kodjoe) and Claire's brother, Chris (Wentworth Miller). When Alice and Claire mention Arcadia, the survivors reveal that it is not a town, but a cargo ship traveling along the coast. They've heard no radio broadcasts from Arcadia for several days, and it seems as if the zombies and monsters outside the prison will get to them before any help does. Left with little other recourse, this small band of survivors must find a way through the legion of undead that surrounds them and get to the safety they believe Arcadia has for them.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is a weird movie on multiple levels. It tries to do its own thing, yet it also tries shoehorning in elements from Resident Evil 5 without making them feel natural. And despite its 100-minute running time, it feels like only half a movie. There's really only enough plot to sustain it for somewhere around 30 to 45 minutes. The movie is just a compilation of action sequences that are barely connected to one another. It's a lazy movie that, for some strange reason, still manages to be somewhat watchable and even a little fun on occasion.

Paul W.S. Anderson returns to the franchise's director's chair after simply writing the other sequels, and he once again proves that he's more style than substance. The movie looks gorgeous, with some excellent cinematography and impressive special effects. And although there was no discernible need for the movie to be 3D, it still provides for a few very cool moments. (The scene where Alice and Claire fight that giant executioner guy from Resident Evil 5 in the prison shower is awesome, by the way.) Unfortunately, there's nothing much to it at all. Anderson's overuse of slow-motion and "bullet time" gets annoying after a while, too. There's so much slow-motion in the movie that I started to think that Anderson was just padding out the runtime.

It doesn't help anything that Anderson isn't a very good writer. There's no two ways about it. It's especially obvious with this particular script, which is so utterly bad that I'm surprised a movie studio signed off on it. There's practically no plot at all, and what little there is goes absolutely nowhere. Nothing is accomplished, nothing is gained or lost. It contributes nearly nothing to the Resident Evil movie franchise at all. And that pretty much sums up the entirety of Afterlife; it's a great big mountain of nothing. The characters are useless, the story is nonexistent, and the dialogue is banal. The movie is just plain there, with no point and no reason to exist. And that's terrible.

If I may single out some more specific complaints, one of the things that bugged me the most about the script was how quickly Anderson dumped the idea of an army of Alice clones. Yes, I've complained about how Alice had completely overwhelmed everything else in the movies, but a movie where dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Alices go to war with Umbrella was something I could have gotten behind. That could have been a cool movie. But what happens? Anderson gives us a couple of clones and kills them all off in the first ten minutes of the movie. Couldn't we have gotten at least half an hour before they get eliminated? You never cease to disappoint me, Paul W.S. Anderson.

At least Anderson manages to get a cool musical score out of his composers, Thomas Hajdu and Andy Milburn. Collectively known as "tomandandy," Hajdu and Milburn provide a bass-heavy techno score that is far better than what the movie actually deserves. If there's one good thing about Resident Evil: Afterlife, it's tomandandy's music.

Rounding us out is the cast, who aren't great, but don't totally suck either. Milla Jovovich once again returns as Alice, a role that doesn't require Jovovich to do much acting. I mean, all she has to do is look like a sexy badass and hope that the stunts don't go awry. I'm still convinced that Anderson continues to give Jovovich such a huge part in the Resident Evil movies so she'll have steady work, but maybe she should try talking him into letting the role have a few more moments where she can actually do some acting, or just stopping the movies altogether so she can do some other movies for a change.

Moving on, I thought Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller were quite good as Claire and Chris Redfield, the sibling duo whose exploits have been such an important part of the games. Both Larter and Miller play their roles with a quiet, focused intensity that I thought made them that much cooler when they got to kick some ass. I still wish, though, that the movie franchise had focused more on the game characters than Alice. Maybe then Larter and Miller would have had more time to shine.

Among the others in the cast, I have to confess that I thought Boris Kodjoe did a fine job in his role. It's a thankless character that isn't written all that well, but Kodjoe did the best he could. The same can be said for Kim Coates, who plays one of the most entertainingly irritating horror movie characters I've seen in a while. Coates purposely plays the character in such a way that you'll hate his guts the second you see him and will be happy to see him get his comeuppance. He hits every note exactly right, and though he doesn't have a whole lot of screen time, Coates's portrayal of the clichéd prick of the group was aces.

Last but most certainly not least is Shawn Roberts as Albert Wesker. Wesker has been one of the most important elements of the Resident Evil franchise, serving as its "Big Bad" in one form or another since the very beginning. He's probably my favorite video game character of all time, and I thought Roberts did a fantastic job in the role. Roberts absolutely nails it, playing the character exactly how I'd always wanted to see a live-action version of Wesker done. Honestly, if the entire franchise had followed the leads of Roberts and Sienna Guillory's take on Jill Valentine from Apocalypse, the Resident Evil movies would have turned out a lot better.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the movie. Maybe when it hits DVD in a few months, I'll watch it again and have a different opinion of it. It happens. But as of this present moment in time, Resident Evil: Afterlife is disappointing. I knew exactly what to expect when I bought my ticket and put on those 3D glasses, but I still hoped for the best. And I'll continue to hope that someone will finally make a live-action Resident Evil movie that's actually good. I know it's possible. I'm sure of it. I'll be patient and bide my time, and I'll watch every movie bearing that name anticipating something great but knowing that I probably won't get it. At least the games haven't let me down yet. I still have them to remind me that the Resident Evil name can be attached to something awesome. Maybe one day, Hollywood will get it right.

Final Rating: **

Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008)

Three times now, I've spoken at length about the movie adaptations of Capcom's Resident Evil series of video games. And I stand by my belief that at this point, they've become vehicles that Paul W.S. Anderson uses to make Milla Jovovich look like the biggest badass possible. They're unbelievably mediocre attempts at this, but they're attempts nonetheless. And that's a real shame, too, because the movies are an incredible disservice to the games themselves. Outside of a tiny handful of characters and a few small elements, Anderson's movies have practically nothing whatsoever to do with the games.

But believe it or not, there actually is a Resident Evil movie that remains faithful to the source material. Commissioned by Capcom and released by Sony Home Entertainment, Resident Evil: Degeneration was a CG-animated flick intended to serve as something of an bridge between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 that could easily be fitted into the continuity of the games themselves. And even though it could have been better, it'll surely please most fans of the game franchise.

In 1998, the town of Raccoon City was decimated by a biological weapon known as the T-Virus. The effects of the T-Virus were devastating, turning those it infected into flesh-hungry zombies. To stop the outbreak and prevent its outward spread, the government was forced to launch a missile at Raccoon City and effectively wipe the town off the map. Only a handful of people were able to make it out alive, among them Claire Redfield (Alyson Court) and Leon Kennedy (Paul Mercier).

Seven years have passed since the Raccoon City disaster. In that time, Claire has joined TerraSave, a group that handles search and rescue operations following attacks using biological and chemical weapons. She arrives at an airport to meet a friend, but soon finds herself in the middle of a T-Virus outbreak.

The airport is quickly quarantined, leaving Claire trapped inside with a small group of survivors. As part of the lockdown, the military sends in Leon — now a government agent — and Special Response Team members Greg Glenn (Steven Blum) and Angela Miller (Laura Bailey). The three-person team enters the airport and fights their way through an army of zombies and monsters to locate the survivors, eventually escaping with them in tow.

At a debriefing, Leon discovers that a terrorist group is responsible for the outbreak at the airport, having obtained the T-Virus on the black market. This group's goal is to force the American government to admit their rumored connections to the T-Virus's development. As the movie progresses, dark secrets are brought to light as the source of the terrorist group is revealed, and the threat of a greater viral outbreak looms on the horizon.

In watching Resident Evil: Degeneration, I had something of a realization. People are always criticizing video game movies for straying too far from their source material. I've done my fair share of it in the past. But I realized that staying too close to those roots can be hazardous as well.

That's my biggest complaint about the movie. It's a direct translation of the game's world. The animation makes it look like a 96-minute cutscene from the games, some of the franchise's voice actors reprise their roles in the movie, and it's even introduces certain elements that would be referenced in Resident Evil 5. But while those are positives in a sense, they're also negatives. Because of how close the movie is to the games, it risks alienating potential viewers who are not avid followers of the Resident Evil saga. They won't know the characters or the backstory, and if they have to do homework in order to understand the movie, they probably won't watch it at all.

One of my other gripes is the quality of the animation. I'd be a fool to expect Pixar-quality CGI, but am I wrong for wanting more from the movie? Yeah, it's good, but it doesn't feel like it belongs in a movie. It looks like it belongs in a game, so much so that I was hoping that I could actually just start controlling the characters in the movie instead of just watching them.

The animation looks enough like the games that I felt like I was just watching someone play a Resident Evil game instead of playing it myself. It actually put me in the mood to turn the movie off and go play one of the games instead. It's just sad, really.

There's also the screenplay, credited to Shotaro Suga. Once again showing how close the movie is to the games, the screenplay is full of corny dialogue, precious little character development, and a convoluted plot that isn't really all that necessary. You tend to ignore flaws like that when you're playing the games, but the lack of interactivity makes them more evident and annoying.

Last on my list is the voice acting, which is okay, I guess. It's not great, but it's acceptable. (It doesn't help them that the dialogue is so clunky, though.) The voice actors get a bit hammy at times, almost to the point of being laughable, but as a fan of the game series, I can't say I didn't see that coming.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on the movie. It isn't really as bad as I may have made it out to be. In fact, it's a lot of fun. But you come away from it with a feeling of mediocrity. However, I would still recommend it to anyone who calls themselves a fan of the Resident Evil saga. Unfortunately, I don't think I can justify giving Resident Evil: Degeneration anything more than two and a half stars. And at least the movie didn't feature any of those frustratingly complex puzzles from the games. That would have been too much.

Final Rating: **½