This past weekend the Hopscotch Music Festival took place in downtown Raleigh. Approximately 120 bands covering a variety of music genres hit the numerous festival venues to perform concerts every evening, while special events and activities took place during the day. One such event was a screening of ODDSAC, a new film directed by Danny Perez with the collaboration of the band Animal Collective. Described as a "visual album," the film is an experimental mindbender with a combination of live-action vignettes and digital pattern and light manipulation. Let me put it this way: by the time it was over, I felt like I had done a few hits of LSD and my spirit-being was occupying the dimensional space between my chair and the Twilight Zone.
After the screening, I got a chance to sit down with Perez one-on-one to discuss the film. We were joined by one of the founding members of Animal Collective, Noah Lennox, who goes by the stage name Panda Bear. Danny was out-going and very open to talking about the movie. Noah, in contrast, was a bit quieter and seemed shy. But once we started talking it was obvious they both had a lot to say about the project and what went into making such a trippy film.
If you’ve read my reviews of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, you know that I'm not a huge fan of the series. In fact, I find them to be pretty terrible. At best, they’re mediocre shoot-‘em-ups with some decent effects work. Most of the time, their weak grasp of filmmaking craft and lackluster storytelling techniques make them pretty painful to sit through. So I was not looking forward to Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment in the film series based on the popular series of video games about a zombie infestation.
The plot takes place a few years after the previous installment, and finds Earth in a state that pretty much meets the definition of “post-apocalyptic” to the letter. The entire country is now a desert wasteland. It seems the vast majority of human beings have become ravenous zombies, and the remaining survivors have banded together into groups of outlaws and scavengers. Ass-kicking heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) has gone into exile, convinced her status as a fugitive from the Umbrella Corporation will put others at risk. Also, as hinted at in the second film, she’s now a fully-formed Jedi warrior with telekinetic powers. Don’t ask questions, just go along with it!
Meanwhile, Umbrella scientist Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is holed away in a secret underground lab – without one of which it wouldn’t be a Resident Evil film – attempting to synthesize a cure for the virus using clones of Alice that he created from samples of her blood. And by “cure,” I mean it will turn them into docile simpletons that Umbrella can use as slave labor. Oh, those evil corporations, always looking at the bottom line, even when the world’s gone to hell. How cunning and sinister! Somehow his efforts lead to the creation of crimson-headed Super Zombies that are even more aggressive than before. With results like that, I think somebody needs to go back to mad scientist school.