Resident Evil (2002)

Tagline: Survive the horror.

Curiosity: It’s my girlfriend’s guilty pleasure. Based on how many times she said, “This used to be so cool” during the viewing, I’d place a heavy emphasis on the “guilty” part.

Plot: Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked in the shower, as we are all wont to do, and can’t remember how she got there. She walks around for a bit in a skimpy dress until commandos come in from everywhere and make a big ol’ ruckus. They beat up Boring Cop (Eric Mabius) and take him ‘n’ Alice to a secret underground train to a secret underground facility. SECRET! Turns out there’s a team of scientists living on this base. Or there were; er’rybody’s dead now and the commandos need to find out why. They’re meddlesome like that.

OH NO THEY’RE ZOMBIES.

Thoughts: For very brief bursts, Resident Evil is a decent horror movie. Zombies walk around with broken limbs – one zombie walking on a broken ankle is particularly gnarly – and it’s a good time. But then these moments are interrupted by stupid shit like dialogue and feelings. Fuck that. It takes too long to get to these parts. Most of the time, the film wastes precious minutes on Alice having flashbacks to her life pre-sleeping naked or Michelle Rodriguez being irrationally angry.

The special effects are ho-hum. The final monster in the movie is a licker from the Resident Evil 2 video game. It was done with CGI, and it looks terrible. It moves a couple frames too few to look real, and the resolution just isn’t there. I just wrote about how Total Recall still looks great 20 years later. Resident Evil came out just eight years ago and it looks like a ScyFy original movie.

Reflection: …and yet we’re probably going to see Resident Evil: Afterlife. In 3D.