Tag: zbs

Netflix’s Resident Evil was terrible and I don’t know why I watched all of it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

  1. Something that was surprisingly difficult to do for this post was finding a good image to use with it. Despite the fact that the show is about how the world is mostly overrun by zombies, they sure didn’t show a whole lot of zombies, and they ones that they did show really weren’t particularly impressive and for a Netflix production they sure weren’t much better than a low-budget HK zombie film.  The main cast were so often away from zombies or any of the traditional Resident Evil baddies, that a single solitary Cerberus dog image, wins by default.
  2. A long time ago, when I was in Las Vegas in my brother, we for some reason went to the ESPN Zone in New York, New York for dinner, instead of the numerous alternate places to go eat, like Ellis Island. I think there was a WWE pay-per-view on that night, and we thought that they would be showing it, which is what caused us to go in the first place.  There was no PPV and worse off we phoned it in and stayed for dinner, and it was so mediocrely unimpressive, it’s basically become a go-to analogy for us to describe anything at all that is as unimpressive, even to this day.

Speaking of my brother, it was while I was down in Texas visiting him, that we watched the first episode of Netflix’s Resident Evil rendition.  I remember when it was first announced, there was a lot of hullaballoo about how the show had the audacity to cast a black guy as Albert Wesker, and I theorized on whether who cared more about it between black people and white guilters.

But in spite of the general clunkers the Resident Evil franchise has had as far as live-action adaptations, Netflix still has a good track record of putting out hits, and I tend to favor television format over film, so that stories can breathe and have better pace, so I was optimistic that RE:Netflix couldn’t really be that bad.

Welp, I was fucking wrong.  I will admit that freely.  It was without question one of the worst things I’ve watched in recent memory, and I have nothing but regret in how much time I sunk into watching it, when I could’ve watched absolutely anything else in the seemingly endless queue of shit that I want to watch.  Mythical wife and my au pair, as well as everyone else I’ve ever brought up the series with all asked why the fuck I was continuing to watch it despite my complaining of how bad it was, and it really boils down to the fact that I’m a fan of the franchise and I was always holding on to hope that things would get better as the season progressed.

But it just didn’t.  It never even got any better as it went on.  It wasn’t like The Witcher S1, which started off slow as fuck but then started getting really interesting up until the end of the season.  It wasn’t like Moon Knight, which I thought also sucked, but did have a few moments here and there where I realized that I sort of cared of what was going on.  It just fucking sucked from start to finish.

None of the characters are really likeable.  Kid Jade and Billie are naïve obnoxious teens versus the world, and their adult counterparts aren’t much better.  As much as I was willing to give black Wesker a chance, since I didn’t think Lance Reddick was a bad actor, he clearly played down to his competition, and up until one of the plot twists, he was rigid, robotic and as putrid as the rest of the show.

Jade Wesker is about the stupidest character in television since like, Andrea from The Walking Dead in the sense that she just can’t stop fucking shit up, no matter how good intentioned she might be, there’s always some very critical and tragic collateral damage in the process.  There’s literally an episode where I’m resorting to yelling at the television to get the fuck out of here with this bullshit, because she’s written so recklessly stupid, that it’s just my natural instinct as a viewer with a brain to be that flabbergasted that someone be portrayed to being that goddamn stupid.

Aside from being about Albert Wesker and his kids, the show makes a few other references to core Resident Evil IP by having lickers, showed a Tyrant, a character named Barry, mentions of the Arklay mountains, and name dropping an actual RE character late in the season, but none of it really helps, nor does it really make you feel like you’re in the world of Resident Evil.  In fact, Netflix could really do Capcom a huge favor replace the names Wesker and Umbrella which are the two main things that anchor it to the RE franchise, and just call this show by a new name and chalk it up as a clunker, because the franchise already has a bad enough history of nobody seemingly being capable of turning such a successful video game franchise into a palatable live action series.

The funniest part of this series is that they clearly were banking on there being a second season, based on all the loose ends, unanswered questions, and plot ropes they set up at the end of the season.  They didn’t even really answer the question of how the world got to where it was in the present, although it doesn’t take a genius to make an easy assumption.  And the news of the show’s cancellation was something that I already knew going into it, which added to the amusement of how the show presented itself as something that was assuming was going to go beyond a first season.

All the same though, Netflix’s Resident Evil was basically like the ESPN Zone of television watching for me.  Completely mediocre and regrettable to have invested my precious time into, and I wish I had spent that time on so many other possible options instead.  It makes me sad that one of my favorite video game franchises just can’t ever get it right with a live-action adaptation, and at this point, I just want Hollywood to just stop trying, because they’re not doing the franchise any favors.

  1. One of the episodes I watched was on Plex, so I could watch it on a device that didn’t have Netflix. The version of the episode had audio narration for the visual impaired, and I couldn’t turn it off; but the funny thing?  It actually helped the viewing experience, because it filled in the gaps of character names that the show doesn’t really put much effort into trying to educate viewers on, and it really helped pinpoint the endless back-and-forth time skips between the past and the present.
  2. Netflix’s 1899 wasn’t a bad show. It was pretty intriguing up until the weird Matrix-like ending.  Resident Evil, however stunk from start to finish.  What do both have in common?  They’re both cancelled!

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

Continue reading “Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?” →

Thoughts on The Walking Dead “Finale”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Although I can’t promise that what words come from my fingers in ensuing paragraphs might not be blatant spoilers, don’t read too much into the quotation marks in the title.  S11E24 of The Walking Dead was most definitely the finale to the series, but there’s a lot of nonsense in the final eight minutes of the runtime that very much implies otherwise, and that’s all I’ll say about that, at least not without a tastefully placed cut.

Honestly, leading up to the long-coming series finale, I actually did not have any high expectations that it was going to be any good.  Frankly, I still maintain that the series still peaked with Negan and the Saviors, which I think was season 7 or 8, so that means the last 3-4 seasons have definitely been on a downhill trajectory.

However, all things considered, in spite of the low bar I had set, the final episode was actually better than I had anticipated.  Without giving anything away, the episode resolves the supposed final conflict fairly early on, so the rest of the episode was actually allowed to breathe and methodically wind things down, instead of a mad dash of trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible in a sloppy manner /coughGameo Thrones.

I make the analogy a lot, but The Walking Dead also feels like the Rurouni Kenshin bell curve, where the television series peaked hard with Shishio and the Kyoto arc, but then went downhill until the series was mercifully ended.  TWD’s surprisingly positive finale still doesn’t save it from a similar fate, and much like Breaking Bad ended with generic Jack the White Supremacist when Gus Fring was so good, Pamela Milton and the Commonwealth seems like such a weak antagonist to end with, especially after Negan.

Alright, enough with the eggshells.  Continue reading “Thoughts on The Walking Dead “Finale”” →

OFC The Walking Dead is resuming right as soon as I catch up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

To think I was just about to write about congratulating myself on how I’ve overcome the insurmountable adversity of never having enough time to actually indulge in watching tv and keeping up with the litany of shows and films that I want to watch, but how I somehow heroically found the time and desire to watch what I thought was all of season 11 of The Walking Dead, I find out that not only have I not completed it, the season resumes, literally this coming weekend, and suddenly I’m in a position of where I now have to wait along with everyone else to finish out the series a week at a time.

Either way, I have to say that it’s probably for the best that this is the final season of TWD, because going through the eleventh season of this show, I couldn’t help but feel that the show was basically, at an architectural level, Dragon Ball Z.  The cast runs into bad guys, overcomes hardships and defeats them.  And then they run into badder guys, overcomes hardships and defeats them, and so on and so on.  There’s literally no end to the revolving door of big bads that enter the lives of the main cast; from the Governor, to Negan and the Saviors, to the Whisperers, and now the Reapers, and the white collar bads in the Commonwealth.  It’s simply a formula that can’t expect to chug along and succeed, especially if you’re not actually DBZ.

And the show has been playing this corporate downsizing game over the last few seasons, where, I don’t follow the show politics and cast drama at all, but one by one, key carries to the show have been removed from the show, and it’s like the show is trying to see how many they can write out and expect others to pick up the slack and keep the show compelling.

It was a bold move to write out Rick, considering he was basically the sun and moon of the show since the beginning, but then removing Michonne seemed reckless, especially in the manner in which she departed the plot, but it’s abundantly clear, at least to me, that part of the slog of season 11 is simply the fact that a cast revolving around Daryl, Maggie, and Carol just can’t shoulder the immense load.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Negan storyline, but Rosita, Gabriel, Aaron and Eugene aren’t at this main event level in which they’re expected to perform at, and the OG cast is just stretched way too thin to keep this ship steady for much longer.

I’m anticipating some sort of payoff in the form of the return(s) of Rick and/or Michonne in the final eight episodes, but I also feel like that there’s this final season of Game of Thrones problem in play, because cards on the table, everyone knows that this is it now.  Eight episodes until oblivion, but there’s a lot of plot, lot of loose ends that are still unresolved, and probably still a lot of deaths of some substantial players that have to occur in order to get those pipe bombs everyone wants from dramatic storytelling.

And much like shows like Dexter, Breaking Bad, and even Rurouni Kenshin, TWD seems inevitable that they’re going to be winding down their television existence on a downhill slope of a weak adversary waiting at the end of production.  Negan and the Saviors were undoubtedly the pinnacle of antagonism in TWD, the equivalent to the Trinity Killer, Gus Fring and Shishio.  And the series has been gradually tilting downward since they peaked.  It’s an interesting strategy on how they’ve been trying to rehabilitate and redeem Negan, but even he can’t change the fact that Lance Hornsby and the Commonwealth aren’t basically the equivalent to the generic white supremacists that Walter White ended Breaking Bad with.

I digress though.  Just when I thought I could heroically remove TWD from my watch queue, it’s two more months of slow releasing episodes, instead of leisurely binging it like I had been doing over the last weeks, but at least for a rare instance, I’m actually caught up and can be on top of watching the crawl to the end along with people I won’t want to know their opinions and analysis with, but at least I’ll be less apt to be spoiled if I’m watching remotely at the same time as others.

But I will enjoy filling out any character death Bingo sheets if any start to emerge in preparation for the end of the series.

Don’t even want to consider the meanings behind these dreams

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been having some weird dreams.  And when I say weird, I really mean more like fucked up, in the sense that in these dreams, there’s killing going on.  Someone is out to kill me.  So I feel the need to kill them first.  People getting killed.  Animals getting killed.  Guns.  Strangulation. 

And with each time that a dream like these occur, I wake up feeling relieved that they were just dreams, and I don’t even try to rationalize the notion that dreams are our brains trying to tell us things, because in no world do I want dreams about killing things to have any modicum of involvement in how I operate my life.

But the last dream I had, was also the most vivid one, the one that stood out the most, and the one that prompted actual writing to occur.

I’m in a zombie game.  Basically I’m in Left 4 Dead’s interface, but in this particular zombie universe, the rules are slightly different.  Mainly, those who become infected, do not immediately have a fairly uniform amount of time before they inevitably turn into zombies themselves.  Not all of them.

In this dream, for those who become infected, there is no uniform amount of time left before someone becomes a zombie themselves.  For some people, it might be fairly instantaneous, but for some, it could be a few hours, the following morning, even a week, or even a month.  Maybe longer. 

Regardless, I imagine anyone could see the complications in such a mechanism there, because in all other forms of zombie literature and media, infection usually has a pretty predictable mortality clock on it, ranging from a few hours to several days, depending on the number of bites they’ve incurred.  So corresponding characters typically know that their time with the condemned is limited, and to start making peace with them while they’re still with the living, before having to make the most difficult act ever.

But what if that predictable timeline didn’t exist?  What if when someone was infected, nobody had any idea of when they were going to turn?  Could those bitten, simply continue to live their lives among the living until they would spontaneously expire?  Could those around the bitten cope with living among bitten people, knowing that they could spontaneously drop and return as zombies and threaten their lives?

And that’s where this dream had me placed.  In a zombie-infested world, among the living, several of whom were bitten, and were, at least in this particular shelter, being allowed to live out.  Me wrestling with my own thoughts and concerns over personal safety and the safety of others.  Struggling to accept the fact that there were people who were on death’s door, among us, still lucid, still alive, and still helping as best as they could.

I don’t recall in the dream having to murder a living person, which I suppose is something to be relieved about, but it also didn’t end without me having to pull the trigger a few times either.  Someone had dropped and was convulsing, and in a zombie world, decisions need to be made quick, so I brought up my shotgun, and it was the hardest decision in the world I’d ever made.  The game itself seemed to have a last second are you sure function that effectively stopped my first trigger pull, forcing me to put something over the person’s head before making a kill shot.

But because of the way things were, I’m left wondering if I made the right choice.  What if they were an epileptic and were just having a seizure or something?  What if they weren’t actually turning right then and there?  Why the fuck am I having so many dreams lately of killings going on?

My alarm goes off, and it’s time to let the dog out.  Unlike most mornings, I’m not happy to be woken up, but I am relieved to get out of yet another fucking weird killing dream, and hope this doesn’t mean anything in the grand spectrum of things.

Zombie shark, est. 1979

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I saw the clickbait headline on social media for this, I of course clicked it, but I already knew that this was going to turn into a brog post: Dr. Mario releases what ultimately becomes a zombie shark, off the coast of Spain

To horror fans, all one has to do is say the words “zombie shark,” and literally only one thing pops into their minds: Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 film, that very notoriously, contained a sequence, in which a zombie takes on, a shark.

Spoiler alert, as if anyone’s going to read this, drop what they’re doing and rush out to go find out how and where to watch Zombi 2, but the shark rips off the arm of the zombie and more or less “wins” in the sense that it swims away still living.  However, the zombie definitely succeeds at ripping a chunk off of it to eat, but it’s fairly unclear that it landed any actual bites onto the shark, since sharks skin are pretty tough.  But the zombie is all over the shark for some bit of time, so it is presumed that it probably had to have gotten some bites in before its arm is ripped off and the conflict is over.

Well, it only took 42 years but it looks like we’ve got our answer to that specific scene from that documentary.  Clearly, the zombie got some bites in, or perhaps it’s by virtue of the shark ingesting some of that wack-ass green zombie blood, but it clearly got turned, was caught by Dr. Mario, presumably studied because it was a fucking zombie shark, and then released into the wild, where some other sharks whooped its ass, leaving it to actually, ultimately die, finally.

Really though, I’m not sure why it’s some sort of shocker that a shark that’s all mangled open is still searching for food.  When they’re at full health, it’s all sharks do in the first place, I’m not sure why one being practically ripped open would behave any differently, than to seek out food before it eventually succumbed.

All the same, good on the internet for giving all us zombie fans reason to make the never-not entertaining reference to Fulci’s zombie vs. shark, because even to this day, there’s never been a more wildly insane fight sequence than this was.

I get why people abandon The Walking Dead

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’ve been churning my way through two and a half seasons of The Walking Dead to try and catch up.  Naturally, as I’m nearing the finish line, unbeknownst to me, I was days away from the premiere of season 11, and just as I’d be finishing up, there’s already more fucking TWD available to me.

But fuck that.  After finishing season 10, I’m fucking done for a little bit with TWD, and I need a god damn break from TWD.  I fully understand and get why the show, regardless of its actual ratings, seems to feel like it’s being abandoned by those in my peer groups and those people I communicate with.

Because it’s basically a live-action version of Dragon Ball Z, in the sense that the cadence of the show is basically the very definition of the meme shown above of most shonen anime.  The residents of planet Rick come across some shitty people bent on killing them, they band together and overcome them, and without missing a beat, the next episode, and sometimes in the very same episode as the penultimate finale, the next big bad shows up and the whole cycle starts all over again.

Over the span of ten seasons of TWD, we’ve had the Governor, twice actually threaten the cast and be repelled.  Then they traveled north and ran into Negan.  Then came Alpha and the Whisperers.  And not even one episode after them, they introduce the seeds of some new groups of bads, with the people hunting Maggie’s crew and the people in West Virginia.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that season 11 is just going to be more of the same, except that it’s branching off into separate storylines, like it were a season of Game of Thrones.  It’s like the sacred timeline has been deviated from because the group has branched out, but either way it’s going to be basically two sets of the meme up above, until the paths of the characters eventually reunite, only to take on the next greatest evil ever.

Either way, the last few episodes of season 10 were a definite weird way to end a season, and by doing so, they really did put a stamp on the cadence of the show to where I have no qualms with taking a fucking break from TWD, crossing it off my list, and moving onto some other show(s) to watch in my very limited time of television.  I’ll let the episode queue build back up, so I can marathon it, because frankly I couldn’t imagine watching TWD episode by episode again anymore, after running through as much of it as I have over the last few months.