By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
RES. EVIL Anderson To Drive DEATH RACE 3000
Dread Central reports that RESIDENT EVIL Paul W.S. Anderson’s next gig will be not CASTLEVANIA but DEATH RACE 3000 — the remake of the 1976 action comedy about a no-holds-barred race through the desert — and over pedestrians who get in the way. There is a videogame version, too: As in the Paul Bartel-directed movie, you rack up points by running down hapless old people, kids and wrecked cars with rival drivers inside: kaboom, splat, etc. (For some reason, the original DEATH RACE 2000 is mixed up in my mind with the cartoon show THE WACKY RACES (featuring Snidely Whiplash and his laughing dog Mutley)
Props to reporter Johnny Butane being for the exclusive ) and but boo, dude, for even quicker with a reflexive slam on Anderson’s “entire career” (Douse the lighter, Butane and put away your little internet-sized pitchfork. Who died and made you the arbiter of “potentially cool movies”?
I’ve never quite understood why the fanboys recoil from Anderson — when pressed, they’ll acknowledge that EVENT HORIZON did scare the hell out of them, RESIDENT EVIL — while it did not follow the strictures
of the games — was an unusually stylish action movie, and MORTAL KOMBAT, Anderson’s first (indeed, one of the first) successful video game to film adaptations, thoroughly entertained them. One common thread I found: male fans were unsettled Anderson’s focus on female heroes (“his obsession with Final Girls”) in ALIEN VS. PREDATOR and RESIDENT EVIL) one youngish man wrote on a long discussion of IMDB. (The Final Girls being the pursued but not at all helpless female character in horror and sci movies — the chick who may at first seem unimportant/unpretty/unsexy — but who turns out, in the end, to be triumphantly Ripleyesque, taking a Final Stand against the serial killer, monster, creature, or whatever It is that’s been messing with her world.
Final Girls and final girliness and the feminine have been the essence to the horror/sci fi/videogame genre, so protesting their presence suggests to me that some guys out there have issues that go beyond Anderson: they are not comfortable identifying with female heroes. Or aren’t comfortable saying so. Yet.
