Suburban Girl (2007)

There is a reason the producers changed the title of the film from The Girls Guide to Hunting & Fishing to Suburban Girl. Where the former paints a picture of life and nature, the film has taken this and transformed it to adapt to Brett Eisenbergs (played by Sarah Michelle Geller) more restricted life as an ambitious New York editor who falls for the charms and security of Archie Knox (Alec Baldwin). Through a series of organised chapters, Brett offers the presumed female audience mutual identification through personal issues that the audience will empathise with as existing in their own lives. Although the performances from both Sarah Michelle Geller and Alec Baldwin were satisfying, the narratives transition between solemn and humorous issues unfortunately turned a potentially pleasing romantic story into something more perplexing, obscuring the real emotion and energy that the film could have offered.

Resident Evil : Extinction (2007)

Resident Evil: Extinction follows the path of Alice (Milla Jovovich), who is now alone in the desert wastelands of the remains of the United States. Alice now has superhuman strength and psionic abilities gained from her brief imprisonment by Umbrella. With a whole new locale in the desert with an isolated fill, the film tries to somehow fill this sense of isolation with a rather complicated, hi-tech series of action sequences which actually erased what was a least a little scary from the previous two films.

Where the first films used the locale to create a sense of tension from this mindless creatures, the setting in this film relies so heavily on its action sequences and technology that it somehow loses its sense of purpose, disorientating the feel that made the series unique in the first place. It’s even more humorous how the film pays homage to the likes of Day of the Dead with their experimental ‘zombie’ but turns away from what made them films work into something unnecessarily complex and technological as if to develop on something that was already good in the first place. Resident Evil: Extinction without doubt tried to be ‘different’ from your average zombie horror film, but its own technology got in the way of what could have been a reasonable sequel to a series that has never quite set off anyway.