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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 10th

"RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE" released in 2004

Immediately following the events of the last film, heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich), who has escaped the underground Umbrella facility, must band with other survivors, including Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), to escape Raccoon City alive. Although aided from the outside by a former Umbrella scientist with his own agenda, Dr. Charles Ashford (Jared Harris), Alice is hunted by an even greater threat then the zombie apocalypse - the Nemesis (Matthew G. Taylor), in the second installment of the Resident Evil series, Resident Evil: Apocalypse!

Watch the Resident Evil: Apocalypse trailer below!

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A month after the contamination of The Hive seen in Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation unwisely sends in a research team to reopen the complex and investigate the incident, since no one survived except Alice (Jovovich) and Matt Addison (Eric Mabius), and as Alice was experimented on (giving her superhuman agility and strength), Matt was put into the mysterious "Nemesis Program". When the team reprograms and opens the sealed blast doors, they are slaughtered by the massive crowd of infected and the zombies reach Raccoon City, spreading the infection among the general populace. Worried about possible worldwide contamination, Umbrella quarantines Raccoon City and establishes a security perimeter around it while evacuating all important Umbrella personnel out of the city. However the car transporting a young girl Angela Ashford (Sophie Vavasseur), daughter of the T-virus creator, Dr. Charles Ashford (Harris), gets into an accident and is stranded alone in the overrun city. It is as this time that Alice awakens in the underground hospital and, upon reaching the surface, arms herself with a shotgun from a police car and wanders around the city to look for supplies. Meanwhile, refusing extraction because his daughter is still missing, Ashford hacks into the city's CCTV system, and uses it to contact Alice, and some other survivors that have joined her - a disgraced police officer Jill Valentine (Guillory), Valentine's partner Sargeant Payton Wells (Razaaq Adoti), and a news reporter Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt) -  and offers to arrange their evacuation in exchange for their rescuing Angela. Alice, seeing no other escape, accepts the offer. Reaching the school, they find Umbrella Special Operatives Carlos Olivera (Fehr) and Nicholai (Zack Ward) acting on the same offer from Ashford, and the survivors band together to save Angela. Unfortunately at this time, the unscrupulous head of Umbrella's contamination operation Major Timothy Cain (Thomas Kretschmann), decides to use the state of emergency to "test" Umbrella's dreaded Nemesis Program; who is really Matt Addison who survived The Hive with Alice, but has mutated into the Nemesis (Taylor) when he was infected by a Licker! With the Nemesis hunting them down, Alice races against time to get Angela to the extraction (upon discovering her blood carries the cure to the virus) before Umbrella puts into effect their ultimate containment plan - to drop a nuclear weapon on Raccoon City!

[first lines]
Alice: My name is Alice. I worked for the Umbrella Corporation, the largest and most powerful commercial entity in the world. I was head of security at a secret high-tech facility, The Hive, a giant underground laboratory developing experimental viral weaponry. But there was an incident. The virus escaped and everybody died. Trouble was... they didn't stay dead.

Top:   Alice (Milla Jovovich) reveals her enhanced speed and strength when she destroys two Lickers;

Above:   Former police officer Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) joins Alice in her quest to save Raccoon City.

The first Resident Evil writer/director, Paul W.S. Anderson, first started writing the screenplay for the sequel almost immediately after completing the first film. Using elements from the video games Resident Evil 2, 3: Nemesis, and Code: Veronica, Anderson's original treatment had Jill Valentine to meet up with Alice much earlier in the script, but the idea was scrapped as Anderson wanted to have the two separate stories occurring at the same time. Although never addressed specifically, the infection had already started since the events of the first film - as the Red Queen had stated, the virus can change form, and during the time span between the two films, the virus has spread from the Hive to the subterranean area of Raccoon City, apparently via the ventilation system, explaining how the undead rose from the cemetery. Anderson ultimately bowed out of directing the sequel as he was prepping another film at the time, AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), and Alexander Witt, making his feature directorial debut, was chosen to replace him.

Aside from archive footage from the first film featuring shots of Eric Mabius, the only person to return after the previous film is Milla Jovovich. Jovovich trained for 3 months to get in shape for the film, and it was her idea to have the film set during a heat wave in Raccoon City as the reason why her character and Jill Valentine are wearing very few clothes (unfortunately, the shoot was in November in Toronto!). Two popular characters from the video game series made their debut with Apocalypse, Jill Valentine and Carlos Olivera - played by Sienna Guillory and Oded Fehr respectively. Another character, Claire Redfield played by Gina Philips, was also set to appear before the character was dropped from the script (Claire however would finally appear in Resident Evil: Extinction, this time portrayed by Ali Larter). Guillory, who had been cast on the strength of her performance in the TV movie Helen of Troy (2003), based her movements of Jill by watching the way Jill moved in the game Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Fehr, on the other hand, had little difficulty in playing a character so familiar with handling guns, having served in the Israeli Navy in his youth, as well as appearing in the earlier films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.

[realizing they've been left behind]
Carlos Olivera: We're assets, Nicholai. Expendable assets... and we've just been expended.

Top:   Umbrella Corp. mercenary Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) also looks for a way out the city;

Above:   Umbrella unleashes it's latest weapon, the bio-engineered Nemesis (Matthew G. Taylor)!

Eric Mabius was due to reprise his role from the first film, with his character evolving into Nemesis. However, Mabius pulled out of the film shortly before production began and was replaced by stuntman Matthew G. Taylor. The suit for Nemesis, which weighed in excess of 60 pounds, meant Taylor could only stay in it for periods of up to 15 minutes before it got too hot. On top of that, his machine gun, which he had to hold with one hand, added about another 65 pounds to Taylor's costume! As one of Nemesis' signature weapons, the General Electric M134 mini gun was modified by armorer, Charles Taylor, who deconstructed, shortened the barrels to 14" and added muzzle brakes which divert the burning gunpowder to create a unique plasma effect when firing. As in the first film,  the actors playing the zombies were mainly all professional dancers trained at a zombie "boot camp" where they were coached to act as "zen" zombies and "liquid" zombies. Anderson and other crew members intended to make the zombies move faster but decided that it would be breaking a fundamental element of the games.

Principal photography was slated to originally begin in July 2003, before being bumped up to August 6, with Toronto and its surrounding suburbs being a stand-in for Raccoon City. Utilizing 47 different filming locations, exterior shot of Umbrella's headquarters as seen at the end of the movie is actually Toronto's Exhibition Place. For the climactic scene where Alice forward abseils down the face of high rise building was first performed by Jovovich's stunt double, who did the first part at about 200 feet above ground, before Jovovich did the last part of the run down Toronto's City Hall. During filming, there was the ever present threat of being shut down by the Canadian authorities due to the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto, but it ultimately didn't affect the production, with filming concluding in October 2003.

Check out blog on Resident Evil: Afterlife also released today on September 10th!

Top:   Director Alexander Witt with writer/producer Paul W.S. Anderson;

Above:   Witt on set

In late 2003, a teaser trailer directed by Marcus Nispel was released, titled Regenerate, and the theatrical trailer being released on Yahoo! Movies on July 7, 2004. These trailers for Apocalypse became one of the most watched on the Internet, with 8.5 million downloads from November 2003 to May 2004! On it's release, Apocalypse grossed $51 million domestically and $129 million worldwide, surpassing the box office gross of the previous installment, but received mostly negative reviews. Leonard Maltin rated the film a "BOMB" in his book Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, and called it a "Tiresome follow-up to Resident Evil that plays more like a remake." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a score of half a star out of four, saying: "The movie is an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it, except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects. [...] Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children." Gregory Kirschling of Entertainment Weekly praised Jovovich but felt that "the rest of the cast is strictly straight-to-DVD." Dave Kehr of The New York Times gave the film a positive review however, saying, "Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact."

The next installment in the Resident Evil series came in 2007 with the release of Resident Evil: Extinction, before original writer director Paul W.S. Anderson returned to the series to helm the follow ups, Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), the former being the first Resident Evil film (as well as being the first video game adaptation) to be produced in 3D. Anderson will also write, produce and direct the next (and possibly final) installment, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, with  Milla Jovovich and Li Bingbing reprising their roles as Alice and Ada Wong.  Anderson expressed his desire for the final film to "come full circle", bringing back characters, themes and the environment of the Hive from the first movie. As usual, the plot picks up immediately after the end of the previous movie (Retribution) and will see Alice returning to Raccoon City where the Umbrella Corporation is gathering its forces. With filming beginning in August, 2016, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is expected to be released on 27 January, 2017.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:    21%

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