I saw Resident Evil Extinction last night, which I have to say I enjoyed a great deal.  I know these films take a fair critical pounding and fans of the game seem to be a bit dismissive of them, but I dug the whole post apocalypse vibe and Milla Yo-ho-hoavich is always pleasant to look at.

I’ve only ever really played the first and second Resident Evil games on the Playstation back in the 90’s.  Gaming tailed off for me as the kids came along, ange pretty much hates it and I find it prohibitively expensive when you have a family to feed, a roof to keep over your head and a serious toy collecting habit.  Who has fifty quid to spend on a new game?

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that the game wasn’t a holy cow for me that wasn’t about to be butchered by a film adaption that might of played fast and loose with the concepts, characters and settings of the game.  Sure, I would of liked to see a bit more of a ‘creepy mansion’ movie but as previously mentioned, Milla is lovely to look at and with Michelle Rodriguez also kicking zombie ass, who was I to complain?  Plus I dug the dobermen.

I own a copy of the first movie, I ordered Apocalypse and Extinction to watch at the same time but extinction arrived first, figuring that plot probably wasn’t the strong point of the series, I decided it was safe to watch them out of sequence.

Extinction is great fun, zombies in a post-apocalypse desert, biker chicks, evil crows, reasonable CGI and a surprising level of violence/gore for a 15, that’s a great night in as far as I am concerned.

But what I think I really enjoyed was the fact it reminded me of a story I started writing when I was at school, called The Walk.  It was a typically cliched magpies nest of stolen ideas that you might expect from a teenage boy, I stole mainly from Harlan Ellison’s ‘A Boy and His Dog’ (probably just as well I’ve never had any success as a writer, I suspect Mr Ellison’s lawyers would of come knocking and with good reason) but with bits of Romero, Logan’s Run and Judge Dredd liberaly scattered around.

The plot concerned the aftermath of some kind of apocalyptic world disaster, the exact specifics of which were kept deliberately vague.  Needless to say a great deal of people died and the land was greatly changed, the deserts grew larger, the forests smaller and stranger and a great in-land sea was also formed in North America.

Many animals mutate in the wake of the event, becoming more intelligent, in some cases as intelligent as humans.

The survivors were scattered few and far apart in various outposts and colonies, mostly walled and guarded as the dead had inconveniently decided to rise and consume the living.  There was no real rhyme or reason to this, the process was random, with no real way of knowing who would come back from the dead, some regions were safe from the phenomena, others replete with it.  The settlements were loosely controlled by a massive computer network, supposedly tied to a central AI beneath Washington, but many of the links had become severed, allowing the terminals to forge their own strange and unpredictable personalities, with a bewildered population forced to obey the orders passed down from their user interfaces, bomb-proof container like rooms called God-Boxes.

Some of these God-Boxes were affixed to instillations with robotic sentries, shelters and food supplies, others were just left with a shanty town of survivors waiting for news from the goverment.

The story followed a boy and his family who decide to leave their armored  enclave and make a break for the east coast and a supposed haven in a colony that is thriving, a trip that means crossing the entire United States.  The family are killed, leaving only the boy and his father, ‘The Scientist’ to keep going but eventually the scientist also succumbs and dies, leaving the boy to continue alone.

The boy gets a head start of a few days before his father rises, different to the other undead, he retains a purpose and intelligence and begins to track his son, bent on his destruction and forming an army of the undead in the boys wake.

The boy rests at a deserted gas station and is almost killed by revenants but is saved by an intelligent crow with the ability to speak.  The two form an uneasy alliance, the crow scouting for the boy and the boy feeding and protecting the bird.

As the story progressed we discovered that the boy’s blood contains the secrets of a cure for the malaise afflicting the land and in his cybernetic limb, the secret of the disaster and the key to re-instating the computer network to restore the country.

Like I said, pretty much a grab bag of a lot of 70s and 80s sci-fi, but it’s interesting to see something looking like I imagined the story in the shape of Resident Evil Extinction and the likes of the FallOut games to.

Maybe one day I’ll try writing it again, maybe not!