“As Resident Evil is, in effect, the game of Night of the Living Dead, making a film of it seems a fairly pointless exercise. And as the computer game audience is made up of young people, the companies which produce them are going to want a movie that gets a 12 or a 15 certificate. As a kind of nod to that fact, the Tokyo-based company that developed Resident Evil hired Romero to make a million-dollar trailer for the game, which has only ever been broadcast on Japanese television.When a movie was mooted, Romero accepted the invitation to make it. The game – in which you are a Swat team member deadheading zombies in smalltown America, owes much to George Romero’s classic exploitation film Night of the Living Dead.
And as Stephen Spielberg made that in 1981, there’s surely little point in Stephen Herek doing it all over again 20 years later.This auto-cannibalism has also caused problems for a movie based on the trigger-happy arcade game Resident Evil. Extracting a great film from a video game might be a similarly absurd cause. Turn Tomb Raider into a live-action movie and remove its all-important element of interactivity, and you’re left with Raiders of the Lost Ark. As for the “real” Lara Croft, she’s selling Lucozade on billboard advertisements.Are all of these cross-media projects doomed to failure? When Harmony Korine went on The David Letterman Show to promote his movie Gummo, he announced his ambition to write “the Great American choose-your-own-adventure novel”. Names such as Liz Hurley and the topless model Anna Nicole Smith have been bandied about, but there has been no official announcement. Although the Tomb Raider movie is supposed to be on our screens next summer, no actress has yet been cast in the lead role.
Paramount had the scriptwriter of the film Mortal Kombat knock off a screenplay. Then the studio assigned Stephen Herek – director of the live-action 101 Dalmatians – to the project, pairing him with screenwriter Steven De Souza, the man responsible for the disastrous Streetfighter film. Mitra even got herself a show on Channel 5 on the strength of her association with this wispy project.Today, however, little concrete progress has been made. Eidos man Nick Thorp – formerly of the 1980s pop band Curiosity Killed the Cat – told me (from the side of Dave Stewart’s swimming pool in the south of France) how the unknown actress Rhona Mitra was going to step into Lara’s desert boots.
Two years ago, the British software company Eidos declared that Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft was going to be a movie star. In June 1997, I spoke to some of the people who were planning to make a mint from Lara’s cross-media exploitation. And Wing Commander will crash straight to video in the UK at the end of this month.The combined weight of these turkeys has retarded the progress of the many video game-based movies currently in development. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was so dreadful that its distribution company refused to screen it to British film critics.
