Critics Banned from Resident Evil: Extinction

The big news around the Internet movie water cooler this morning is that the upcoming “Resident Evil 3: Extinction” is off-limits to professional critics, which explains why I haven’t been invited. (Har har, just kidding. As if, right?) But in any case, it’s an accepted “reading of the tea leaves” that one of the first signs that a movie is not good, and that the studio knows it, is the across the board media ban from a movie’s screening. I tend to look at it another way — when a movie is this critic proof, as “Resident Evil 3: Extinction” surely is, what is the point of letting a bunch of stuffy, freeloading critics see it for free? Hell, if they want to review it (and invariably trash it), let them pay to see it like the rest of us!

And this is a zombie movie, after all. The third installment of one, to be exact, and there’s nothing here for critics to get excited about, so what’s the point in inviting them anyway?

I’m still seeing “Extinction”, but then again, my idea of “quality”, when put against a movie about the walking dead, gets a little tweaking. Some genres, you just can’t measure against others. This is one reason why I thought Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” was mediocre rehashed junk stolen completely from Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy, while every “professional” critic squealed like little pigs to praise it. Likewise with the crappy sequel.

Get evil September 21st, 2007.