There have already been seven Resident Evilmovies — six of them in a more action-oriented series starring Milla Jovovich, four of which were directed by her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, plus an unrelated “reboot” in 2021 called Welcome to Raccoon Citythat went for more of a John Carpenter vibe and was more of an attempt to truly “adapt” the games. There’s also a <a href="https://tech.yahoo.com/streaming/review/netflix-review-142822267.html” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Netflix TV show version that ran for a single season in 2022. Countless other works in the horror genre have unofficially cribbed from the Resident Evilgames over the years. It’s an incredibly influential series.
And yet, Zach Cregger, hot off his Oscar-winning original horror film Weapons, is the first filmmaker to truly feel like he’s adapting the experienceof playing the games, arguably the scariest survival-horror ones ever made, rather than simply incorporating story and plot elements to explain the outbreak of infected people. In Cregger’s hands, Resident Evilis pure crowd-pleasing popcorn cinema, best experienced in a packed movie theater with dozens of other people reacting loudly to the madness.
The premise couldn’t be simpler — and the runtime a brisk 90ish minutes — as we follow a medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams, proving himself to be the Bruce Campbell for a new generation) who unwittingly finds himself fighting for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in a swirl of chaos. Fans of the video games will recognize various easter eggs and nods to game mechanics, including the importance of conserving ammo and checking every last drawer for more of it.
But you don’t need to be familiar with the games at all to enjoy the movie, which is an efficient horror set-piece machine that just keeps putting Abrams in increasingly concerning situations. I can’t stress enough how much this is a one-man show anchored by Abrams, and he crushes it. He’s in every scene, earning tons of laughs simply by reacting as a normal person would in this situation; he’s a true audience-surrogate character, ushering us through the chaos. His comedic timing, paired with Cregger’s assured camerawork and editing, is a match made in genre-movie heaven.
I didn’t expect it to be so heavily inspired by genre classics like The Thingand Evil Dead.In fact, it’s a better Evil Deadmovie than the last several movies with “Evil Dead” in the title, nailing the horror-comedy tone that only Sam Raimi and a few others can pull off with aplomb. Cregger has a ton of fun with the various monstrous forms that the infected take here, from fusing multiple humans together to crafting his own horror take on a big, scary guy like Dune‘sBaronHarkonnen. Resident Evilmovies have thus far treated the zombies as pretty traditional movie zombies; Cregger’s version gets at the attempt to create the next stage of human evolution.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evilmay not feature characters that gaming fans recognize, but it’s spiritually more in line with the games than any of the ones that do. Adaptation stuff aside, it’s also just a heart-pounding, adrenaline-fueled roller coaster ride of a movie that has no grander ambitions than getting a rise out of the audience over and over again. It’s a blast, and this time, you can’t pause it, put your controller down and walk away when things get too intense.
Resident Evilhits theaterson Friday, Sept. 18.
