sienna guillory

Though this 2-Disc DVD contains both Resident Evil 1 and 2, this review will focus only on the latter. Based on the vomputer game of the same name, both of these scary, sci-fi adventures stard Milla Jovovich as Alice, an action hero who saves the world from hordes of cannibalistic zombies unleashed by Umbrella Corporation, a malevolent outfit bent on global dominance.

RE2 picks up right where the first left off with Milla being the only original cast member. The new cast includes a few recognizable faces like Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, and Mike Epps.

The story is set in Raccoon City whose skyline resembles Toronto. We find Alice rousing from a deep sleep in the Umbrella lab where she has been genetically-altered to become a super-human killing machine. Although she's programmed to further the conglomerate's diabolical plan, she manages to side with the good guys.

Major mayhem has broken out all across the city, as the ever-increasing reanimated corpses outnumber normal people. Alice, armed to the teeth, takes to the streets where she teams up with other survivors in a last stand against an assortment of creatures that feed on human flesh.



Overmatched, she finds herself trapped in a church with Jill (Guillory), a gun-slinging city cop, Terri (Sandrine Holt), a TV reporter, and L.J. (Epps) an escaped-con. What gives all this senseless slaughter a semblance of depth is that our heroines are desperately trying to rescue a little girl (Sophie Vavasseur) and escape Raccoon City before an atomic bomb is dropped on the town.

A riveting, well-acted, female empowerment flick, RE2 is an above average example of the horror genre.

Although they've seen fine releases on DVD before, Sony has opted to re-release the first two films in the Resident Evil series just in time for the third film's theatrical debut. The two films are contained on the first disc, and all of the supplements (save for one but more on that later) are on the second disc.

Resident Evil:

In a small town named Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation holds its headquarters. The largest supplier of surgical and defense technologies in the world, Umbrella holds immense power and has access to all sorts of things that they probably shouldn't be messing with. Their less conventional projects have been squirreled away in a secret facility way underground, codenamed 'The Hive.' When a biological experiment known only as the 'T Virus' is accidentally unleashed in the facility, a few hours later things are starting to look rather grim for the scientists and researchers trapped in 'The Hive.'

The Umbrella Corporation sends in a crack team of military commandos to go into 'The Hive' and rescue any survivors they can find, but the only one left is Alice (Milla Jovavich), who's been trying to sort out her amnesia problem while all of this has been going down. Everyone and everything else that was in 'The Hive' when the 'T Virus' hit is now a flesh eating zombie... and the virus is contagious.

Director Paul W. S. Anderson (Event Horizon and Aliens Vs. Predator took a whole lot of flack from the horror community when this movie hit theaters. A lot of people were disappointed not only because the movie isn't a literal adaptation of the source material (the popular series of video games of the same name), but also because it seemed that the film was tailor made for George Romero to helm. Anderson didn't deliver a Romero movie, and that seems to be what a lot of us wanted out of the film. It makes sense too, when you think about it. After all, what was the most obvious influence on the Resident Evil games? The answer is obviously 'Romero's dead trilogy.' Anderson's film is more of an action-horror hybrid than a character driven Romero-esque piece.

The movie is full of stereotypes (Michelle Rodriguez is sorely underused and not given much to work with, despite the fact that she is quite a competent actress), and is definitely a gross example of style over substance but it still works - at least on an entertainment level. Whereas Romero's zombie films all had some sort of social commentary (be it the anti racism tones of Night Of The Living Dead or the commentary on crass American consumerism in Dawn Of The Dead) and there's none of that here at all. This is an action-horror video game adaptation that doesn't aspire to be anything more than a gory shoot'em up with hot chicks in the lead and a fast paced techno metal soundtrack. But hey, it moves along at a nice pace, provides a few good jump scares, and looks just as slick as slick can be.

So sure, the movie could have been a lot more than it was. There could have been a lot more character development and the competent cast could have been given better dialogue and a meatier story to work with, but that didn't happen. Regardless, Resident Evil does entertain, and in the end that's all we realistically should expect from it. On that level and that level alone, the film works just fine.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Alice's voice over introduction fills us in on the events that took place in the first film, and then from there a few flashback scenes show us how chaos eventually erupted throughout Raccoon City. With the Umbrella Corporation's control over the city as tight as a vice grip, all of the exit points leading out are blocked off by their soldiers, inspecting each individual to make sure that they're not carrying anything contagious out of the city. Eventually, however, the zombies begin to overtake the city and the Umbrella Corporation decides to wall off the bridge and to more or less sacrifice the survivors left inside.

With the stage set, we meet the central characters - a street hustler named LJ (Mike Epps), a reporter named Terri (Sandrine Holt), and a few STARS team members like Nicholai (Zach Ward), Carlos (Oded Feher), and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory). They meet up by chance and decide to team up and try to find a way to survive amongst the hordes of zombies roaming the streets around them. While they're finding themselves in increasingly dire straits, Alice (Milla Jovavich) is trying to figure out exactly what happened to her. She figures out that the Umbrella Corporation used her to perform experiments on and that she's been given a rogue strain of the virus that, rather than turn her into a zombie, has enhanced her abilities and increased her strength and stamina. Of course, Alice meets up with the group of survivors and they all team up for the best chances of survival. What they don't know is that the Umbrella Corporation has bio-engineered a creature called Nemesis who exists only to kill off all the surviving members of the STARS team and who is currently on the loose and looking for his prey. Their only chance is to find the young daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) of Dr. Charles Ashford (Jared Harris) who just may hold the missing piece of the puzzle that Alice and her team will need to lay this plague to rest. That is, if the Umbrella Corporation doesn't bomb the bejeezus out of Raccoon City first.

With Anderson relegated to writing and producing the film, first time director Alexander Witt is given a change to give audiences his spin on the Resident Evil universe. That said, his take doesn't differ much from Anderson's and the second film in the series is, like its predecessor, a very slick looking action-horror movie with fantastic visuals and a mediocre plot. Milla looks stunning here, even more so than in the first picture, and she carries things nicely proving competent in both the action scenes and in the more dramatic moments. She's been surrounded with a reasonably good supporting cast and the film benefits from decent acting courtesy of Feher and Ward - but the film feels shallow and at times almost pieced together, more a series of set pieces than a cohesive whole. We're definitely entertained by violence, gore, sex appeal and zombies but nothing resonates for very long and the end result is a mindless, albeit fun, time killer.

The soundtrack, again comprised of cookie cutter new-metal tracks, adds nothing to the picture and doesn't help build suspense at all and the cut-cut-cut editing style loses its novelty quickly. That said, there's enough here to amuse us. Milla runs down a building and attacks her enemies, zombies eat and explode, and Nemesis looks pretty neat. A few well placed jump scares provide some cheap thrills and the ending is effective even if its obviously setting us up for the third film...

Born in Fulham, London, Sienna Tiggy Guillory is the daughter of an Anglo-Cuban folk guitarist Isaac Guillory and his first wife, Tina. She has a brother named Jace, and also a much younger half-sister and half-brother, Eleanor and Jacob.

She grew up in a bohemian household in London and later North Norfolk. She made her screen debut in the British TV series Riders (1993) - she was selected for the role while still at Gresham's School. Her performance landed her in another small role in the miniseries The Buccaneers. She took a short break from acting in 1995 to continue her studies, working as a waitress to pay her way. The next year, she returned home to Norfolk after filming an independent movie in Russia, bringing a friend, a ballerina who wanted to become a model. Guillory went with her friend to an agency, Select Models, which signed both of them on the spot.

Guillory became one of Britain's most sought after models in the four years she worked in modelling. In 2000, readers of Esquire voted her "Britain's Most Eligible Woman". And in 2002, she was number 89 on Maxim's list of "The 100 Sexiest Women".

She studied acting at the New World School of the Arts and the Paris Conservatoire. By the time she returned to the screen in 2000 with a thriller, Sorted, she had developed a style of her own. Soon, she took to Hollywood, with movies like The Time Machine and Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

Guillory was married to the British actor Nick Moran from July, 1997, until 2000. She later married the actor Enzo Cilenti in 2003, and they mostly reside in Los Angeles and London.


[edit] Professional life
Guillory made her first appearance on the small screen in 1993, with the UK television series Riders, and followed it up with The Buccaneers, opposite Mira Sorvino. Since 1995, she took a break from acting and started working as a model for the agency, Select Models. As a model, she worked for labels like Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, Paul Smith, and also the face of Hugo Boss's fragrance campaign for three years. She returned to acting in 2000, by beating 200 hopefuls, with the BBC television series Take a Girl Like You. She garnered critical acclaim for playing the coveted role of the virginal heroine, Jenny Bunn, in the series, based on Kingsley Amis' novel of the same name.

Her potential as an elite actress is evident in the quality of the roles that she has attracted. Guillory is best known for her role as Jill Valentine in Resident Evil Apocalypse and in the TV miniseries Helen of Troy, opposite Rufus Sewell, playing the title role. About the latter, she has said, "I can't think of a bigger compliment than to be cast as the woman whose beauty has become legendary." The role of Helen required some partial nudity. She is quoted in Playboy magazine as saying that she "didn't like [her] nipples showing because they [looked] like targets".

Guillory took to the big screen as a natural progression. She starred in movies like The Time Machine, Principles of Lust and Love Actually, among others. But it was Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which Guillory did with Milla Jovovich, that gave her a firm footing in Hollywood. She beat out 2000 hopefuls to play Arya, an elven princess in Eragon, the film adaptation of the novel by Christopher Paolini.