RESIDENT EVIL

By Raymond Knowby

 

The term “oops” is usually applied to the little things in life; overdrawing your bank account, ejaculating too early, burning toast, forgetting an anniversary, and of course making a video game into a movie. In the case of New Line’s RESIDENT EVIL, british hand-for-hire Paul Anderson slaps together ninety minutes of ALIENS and DAWN OF THE DEAD ripoffs and tries to sell it to you with with a straight face. An embarrassed look can also be seen on Marylin Manson’s pasty mug, since his techno method synthwork is wallpapered without nuance on to this stillborn corpse.

While the flick has decent production design and an intriguing enough opening sequence, the mistake that can’t be ignored is the plotline, which completely throws even the GAMES IT IS BASED ON right out the window. Even as cliched as the Playstation original stories were, they were still scary and would have blown the rotting brains out of this here smelly cadaver. Instead, Paul and the gang puss out and give us a whole movie of Alice in Wonderland in-jokes, and possibly the worst computer generated creature ever seen outside of DEEP RISING. It’s a dropped ball of staggering porportions.

Alice (Mila Jovovich) wakes up alone in the halls of a lush mansion, without memory of who she is or why she’s there. Soon she finds herself alongside a rescue unit that is descending into the adjoining hidden laboratory to find any survivors from a viral outbreak. Cue hungry zombies and second-rate action movie posturing as the team are trapped and picked off while they attempt to escape the facility before it self destructs.

Shamelessly derivitive, overly noisy, and a waste of a nice budget. It could and should have been so much more with the groundwork of the game already laid.

"No, NOT Jill, it's ALICE! I'm the director's fuck buddy and I GET TO NAME THE CHARACTER!" Mila Jovovich poses tough for RESIDENT EVIL.

  1. I saw this on your list before I realized these were reviews and not a list of movies you like so I was glad to see you’re not encouraging people to see this film. A friend rented it. I sat through the whole thing but should have washed my hair or scrubbed my toilet instead. High five. What saddens me is that after this creation, he was compelled to create more.

    • admin says:

      I love you, Jessica. 🙂 And yes, there are like seven more of these God damn things. Sadder than his compulsion to make more, is that he gets to because they keep raking in a shitload of cash. 🙁