With Zach Cregger’s reboot of Resident Evil having a huge $100m+ opening weekend there’s been much talk of the monsters and set pieces. So we take a look at the Resident Evil Fat Man and Splat Street….
Bryan (Austin Abrams) enters RESIDENT EVIL’s subterranean world via the tunnels of Prague’s Sewer Museum, which tied in with Hammock’s vast, sewer set build at the city’s Jordan Studios. Upon rounding a curve in the sewer’s pitch-dark, sludge-filled confines, Bryan comes upon a naked, obese man whose massive belly undulates and splits wide open. “It’s very disturbing,” says creature supervisor Shane Mahan, with perhaps more than a little understatement. “It definitely belongs in a RESIDENT EVIL movie.”
Resident Evil Fat Man….
The art department constructed this elevated set around the nearly one-ton, eight-foot-tall animatronic replica to allow four of Legacy Effects’ puppeteers to operate the micro-movements of the figure from beneath, while another two controlled it remotely. “People are not going to realize that it’s a puppet,” says Cregger. “You can see every pore on his body.”
Production designer Tom Hammock says the obese gentleman was his favorite creature, explaining, “We designed the entire set of the tunnel around him. It was a huge animatronic build, so we had to use cranes to get him in the set.”
Resident Evil Splat Street…..
As Bryan exits the sewer system, moves on to the street, and guns his way towards the city hospital, which is visible in the distance, the infected catapult themselves at him from the rooftops, splattering onto the burned-out cars and pavement far below. Nicknamed “Jumper Street” by the filmmakers, this set piece and its so-called “splatter bodies” were so guts- and gore-soaked that director of photography Dariusz Wolski’s camera team employed splash bags to protect lenses and other equipment from the flying goo.
To mimic infected bodies detonating around a mid-sprint Abrams, the special effects team dropped 50-150 pound bags of simulated blood and guts from atop crane rigs. Every impact had to be timed with the utmost precision.
Stunt coordinator Jan Petrina trained Abrams and oversaw the many complex, stunt-heavy, in-camera action sequences. “I don’t remember working with someone so dedicated and so capable of listening to all of my safety and action notes,” says Petrina of Abrams. “He remembers everything you say and transfers it directly to the character.”
Movement coordinator Jakub Dvorak, an award-winning Czech dancer and choreographer, coached additional creature performers on how best to finesse their infected moves. The production deployed these creatures and built the complex sets on location in the Czech Republic. Though the stunning European metropolis of Prague was an unexpected double for the fictional American metropolis of Raccoon City, the filmmakers’ extensive scouting yielded urban pockets and remote rural expanses that could be modified and dressed to pass as Cregger’s desired version of Colorado.
related feature : Ian McCulloch reveals how Lucio Fulci treated Auretta Gay on the set of Zombie Flesh Eaters
related feature : ‘Resident Evil’ review
