Hello, and welcome to the final full week of Horrorfest 2020! It’s insane to me that we are already at the end of the month of October, but all good horror must come to an end. This week, I am focusing on some of the most influential actors and actresses in horror and their terrific performances that have made our favorite scary stories that much scarier. Please enjoy our final full week of Fandom Horrorfest!
Milla Jovovich
Video game adaptations are tough movies to pull off. Either they come off as hollow echoes of the games we love, losing much of the engagement and personality when narrative becomes more observational rather than active; or they are such huge deviations from the source material that the final product doesn’t really feel much at all like the game we fell in love with. Resident Evil is a beloved horror game franchise whose movie adaptations fall much more in the latter category, and they surely would’ve fallen to the wayside long ago if it hadn’t been for one actress’s ability to absolutely carry these films: Milla Jovovich.
It’s still funny for me to think about how for a movie franchise with such a rich wealth of lore to draw from in the source material, the best thing about the Resident Evil movies isn’t even in the games. Jovovich’s character Alice appears nowhere in the video game franchise, but her stardom in the films offers enough action, badassery, and charisma (which is even more impressive considering her character is supposed to be sort of a blank slate) for the franchise to have 6 full-length movies. While I won’t tell you the movies are terrific sci-fi or horror films, they’re an absolute blast the way that modern zombie horror probably should be, and they offer terrific breaks from some of your darker, more emotionally draining Halloween movies. It’s a series that has consistently batted out of its league with repeatedly landing Jovovich for the lead role, and if she had made some different decisions, it would have been interesting to see where the insanely talented actress’s career would have gone and just how quickly the Resident Evil movie franchise would have died off.
As a new Resident Evil reboot–maybe two reboots? I can’t quite keep up–approaches, it looks like 2016’s RE: Final Chapter really will be the last appearance of Jovovich’s character Alice in the RE extended universe. While fans are excited for new and possibly more accurate adaptations of the games, I will miss Jovovich and the quiet charisma that she brought to this mess of movies. I encourage everyone to take a weekend sometime and just binge the RE films. They’re a ton of fun and really lean into the absurdity the further you get.
