Resident Evil

While delivering an important medical package on a snowy night to a remote city’s hospital, a courier finds himself in the middle of an outbreak of zombies and other terrifying mutated creatures.

Obviously, this is based on the well-known survival horror video game franchise first released in America in 1996. Originally known as Biohazard (Baio-haza-doe in Japanese), the name was changed to Resident Evil for its American release, due to the fact that a New York City hardcore punk band was already using the name.

Survival Horror is a very popular subgenre of horror and action-adventure games. Generally in these kinds of games, the players must survive (obviously), in what is usually a dark and maze-like place, by solving a bunch of puzzles and mysteries, all with limited resources—things like weapons, ammo, or health—while dealing with restricted movement, obscured lines of sight, and sudden attacks by various kinds of often horror-based enemies.

It’s usually a pretty tense scenario.

The first Resident Evil game was created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara for the very first PlayStation. It was immediately immensely popular, as it was an all-around revolutionary kind of game, and people loved the unique gaming experience. It was fun, it was full of jump scares, and it was pretty challenging too. I don’t mean just the game either, the basic controls took some getting used to too (“forward” is always “up” on the control pad). Plus, it featured 3rd-person and 1st-person perspectives while playing, which would switch depending on the angle and the situation, in order to heighten the tension. As a result, this would often force the players to put themselves potentially into unknown danger, simply because they couldn’t, for instance, see around a corner.

Like I said, it was a tense game.

It was so tense, in fact, that often the sudden sound of a rattling door knob was enough to make you jump. And playing alone? In a dark room? All while wearing headphones? …Difficult, to say the least. It became a thing, back in the late 90s, to watch someone play the first Resident Evil game for the first time, because it was fun to watch them jump at the scary moments. If YouTube had been around then, there would have been so many reaction videos of this, like when people filmed friends reacting to moments in the Game of Thrones tv show. That first Resident Evil game was a pop culture moment, and it’s now credited with not only defining and establishing the survival horror genre, but with returning zombies to the forefront of pop culture.

Basically, the Resident Evil franchise is a pretty big deal.

So naturally, it went on to spawn a whole slew of games, and eventually movies.

Terrible movies.

The first Resident Evil film came out in 2000, directed Paul W. S. Anderson, a director well-known for making some terrible but occasionally fun movies, who is not to be confused with director Paul T. Anderson, who usually makes great movies that are also sometimes terrible for other reasons.

Anyway, that first Resident Evil movie was awful.

It was then followed by a series of sequels, Resident Evil: Apocalypse in 2004, Resident Evil: Extinction in 2007, Resident Evil: Afterlife in 2010, Resident Evil: Retribution in 2012, and finally, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter in 2016.

These films were even worse than the first film.

All six films featured Milla Jovovich as a former covert operative, turned post-apocalyptic warrior, who is locked in battle with the evil Umbrella Corporation, the people responsible for creating the bioweapons that triggered a zombie apocalypse. The films didn’t necessarily follow the games, but they also didn’t necessarily stray all that far from them either, and generally featured characters from the games, a series of blank-faced interchangeable dipshits with names like Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine, Ada Wong, Carlos Oliveira, Chris Redfield, Leon S. Kennedy, and Barry Burton. Seriously, these were all really bad movies. Not even fun bad. Stylistically, they’re indicative of the ugly, dull, and bland ”action-horror” films common of the time, with a terrible and dated aesthetic that can be best described as if Nu-Metal was a movie genre. Still, despite being consistently terrible, the series grossed over $1.6 billion altogether. In fact, it’s not only one of the highest-grossing film series based on a video game, it’s also the highest-grossing horror film series ever, as well as the highest-grossing zombie film series too. It apparently also has the record for the most live-action film adaptations that are based on a video game, which feels like it's probably not a very crowded field, but whatever. My point is, the franchise was incredibly successful, despite never actually producing a good movie.

Still, all “good” things must come to an end, I guess, so finally, in 2021, the film series ditched its only positive, its star Milla Jovavich, and a reboot was attempted with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, an ill-conceived piece of “bad CW show” styled fanservice garbage.

It was even worse than the previous six films.

This was a dark time for Resident Evil fans, especially after the attempted TV show also turned out to be really terrible. But then, in 2025, a second reboot announced. But while it still wasn’t going to star Milla Jovavich, it was going to be directed by Zach Cregger, with a script co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten.

So this was great news.

It was great news, because Zach Cregger has quickly proven himself to be a very exciting and fun filmmaker. I really enjoy his stuff. Cregger was an actor, who was in a handful of failed sit-coms and comedy troupes before he became a filmmaker, and it was here where he found his best fit in Hollywood. His debut first film, in 2022, was the incredibly fun and tense and funny Barbarian, which he wrote and directed, and his second film, in 2025, was the even more fantastic Weapons, a film which he also wrote and directed, and which saw Amy Madigan very deservedly win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The less great news is Shay Hatten‘s involvement with the script. A screenwriter who is probably best known for working on John Wick Chapter 3 Parabellum and John Wick Chapter 4. Those are fun films, sure, but Hatten also wrote a string of terrible movies like Ballerina, and Dayshift, and Army of the Dead, and maybe worst of all, he also co-wrote the Rebel Moon films, Part One - A Child Of Fire, and Part Two: The Scargiver, which are almost irredeemably bad movies.

So, that’s unfortunate to hear, but I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, the 2026 Resident Evil went on to gross $401 million worldwide against a $75 million budget, which is a definite success according to Hollywood. As a result, it’s not only Zach Cregger's highest-grossing film, it’s also the highest-grossing film in the already very successful Resident Evil film series too.

So lets check it out…

It’s a snowy night, and medical courier Bryan Hodukavich is dealing with Michelle, his potentially pregnant girlfriend, over the phone, while trying to complete his last delivery for the night. Unfortunately, the discussion isn’t going great, so he when he is offered a very important, double-pay, last-minute package to take to the Raccoon City General Hospital, high up in the Colorado mountains, basically a well-paying chance to further delay a difficult conversation, he takes the job.

Raccoon City is, of course, where all of the bad stuff happens in basically all of the Resident Evil games and movies, so the audience already knows what’s waiting for him there… But Bryan doesn’t know this, and this film is obviously set right before, or right as the bioweapon/zombie outbreak is happening on the streets of that always doomed metropolis of Raccoon City, so…

Good luck, Bryan!

As Bryan drives, slipping and sliding on the snowy roads, while arguing on the phone with Michelle, a woman suddenly steps out in front of him. He hits her. Horrified, because he's is a good person, Bryan stops the car. He ends up finding the woman, seemingly still alive, but bloody, and possibly in shock, on the side of the road. With a sudden loss of his cell signal, Bryan has no option but to drive her to the place he’s already going to, the Raccoon City hospital. But soon enough, he’s pulled over by a Raccoon City police officer. The cop is dubious of Bryan’s story, but he agrees that the woman needs to get to the hospital, so he places her in his cruiser, and orders Bryan to follow him. They both drive off together, headed for Raccoon City.

As Bryan watches, the cruiser suddenly veers off the road and rolls.

Still a good person, Bryan stops to check on them. Bad news. The cop is dead, and the woman is missing. When Bryan tries to call for help on the cruiser's radio, she attacks him, but he manages to shoot her with the cop’s pistol. Unfortunately, while doing so, he accidentally shoots his own car, wrecking the engine.

“Luckily” there’s a nearby farm…

Bryan walks there, only to be chased by a rabid dog that also has a weird tentacle face and nearly kills him before he manages to shoot it. More than a little freaked out, Bryan makes his way to the farmhouse, and finds it weirdly empty. A struggle has clearly taken place, and recently too.

Luckily, he finds a shotgun.

Ammunition proves to be a little harder for him to find, and as he is looking out the window, Bryan sees the woman he thought was dead is now running across the snowy field toward the farmhouse. But before he can react, he is ambushed by a crazed man, similar to the woman. Bryan manages to shoot them both… whew!… But then tentacles emerge from their corpses, and begin to fuse them together.

Bryan does a classically terrible job of running, crashing a working pickup and dropping most of his shotgun shells, and is forced to run into the dark and snowy night on foot. The road to Raccoon City leads to a tunnel, filled with very clearly hurriedly-packed vehicles, all of which are clearly hurriedly-abandoned and eerily quiet, because the tunnel is blocked by a crashed RV. Inside the RV, Bryan tries to help a young girl with a weird tentacle foot, but of course, she’s infected. She bites him before he can shotgun the hell out of her. Finally, stumbling out the far side of the tunnel, Bryan sees the fused together corpses of the couple from the farmhouse are still chasing him, as they are tumbling through the snowy woods in what might be the creepiest way possible. Even worse, they have added more corpses to their pile along the way. It's just... the worst thing to see when you're alone in the woods in the middle of nowhere.

Luckily, Bryan is saved by the sudden arrival of an Umbrella Corporation scientist named Paul, and his escort, Maxine, a super bad ass mercenary, who chases off the multi-zombie with a few well-placed shots.

As the pair drives Bryan and the package into Raccoon City, Paul explains that Umbrella developed a serum for the US government capable of rapidly evolving organisms, and that a laboratory accident with the serum triggered the outbreak. It’s also insinuated that Paul is actually the one responsible for the lab accident. As a result, a group of scientists holed up on the top floor of the Raccoon City General Hospital need Bryan's package—a stabilizing chemical element—so that they can finish the antidote to the bioweapon, and hand it over to the National Guard.

Unfortunately, once they reach the city, Maxine is killed while taking out a horde of infected, and Paul is absorbed into the multi-zombie, which then chases Bryan, who escapes into the sewers. In the dank tunnels beneath the streets, Bryan finds a very large and pale man, whose stomach bursts open, releasing a flood of infected rats. Bryan shoots them all, and flees back up to the street as their remains begin merge together. With the hospital now in sight, Bryan runs down the street as the infected leap from rooftops in a rush to get him, splattering in the streets.

It's the shittiest night imaginable for a likely minimum wage worker.

With the hospital lobby full of agitated zombies, Bryan enters through the underground car park, but once there, he realizes that his bite wound is festering. Despondent, he slumps down and records a tearful farewell message for Michelle. But before he can give up, an Umbrella scientist sees him on a surveillance camera and directs him via intercom to take the stairwell to the top-floor laboratory. This means that Bryan must climb up to the 24th floor, then taking the sky-bridge over to the other tower, and then more stairs up to the 28th floor.

Exhausted, Bryan is like… fuck that.

So he takes the elevator instead.

As a result, he ends up not only fighting off an infected man who is vomiting acid, but the multi-zombie that is still pursuing him, as well as a maternity ward that is overrun with infected staff, some of the mothers, and the newborn babies too, all of whom chase him. He finally manages to escape out onto the ruined skybridge, barricading the maternity ward door behind him.

Clinging to the broken sky-bridge, Bryan spots the multi-zombie far below, climbing up the side of the building toward him. Using his last bullet, he manages a heroic shot, breaking the barricade he placed on the maternity ward doors, which causes the horde of infected on the other side to tumble out, and fall through the hole in the floor of the broken sky-bridge, crashing down onto the climbing multi-zombie, and sending them all falling to the ground far below.

Huzzah!

Finally, Bryan crosses the bridge, climbs the stairs to the 28th floor, and delivers the package to the waiting and eager Umbrella scientists in the secured laboratory, where… things go great. Everything goes just fine. Total happy ending.

One of the nice things about the Resident Evil franchise is that, unlike the 28 Days Later franchise, it contains actual zombies.

Just saying…

So, Alfred Hitchcock once said something like… surprise is a bomb going off beneath a table that neither the characters nor the audience knows is there, while suspense is the audience knowing full-well about the bomb, all while the gathered characters sit blissfully unaware around the table.

Zach Cregger excels at both here.

Cregger has described the film as a love letter to the Resident Evil games. What this means is he deliberately chose not to feature any of the established characters from the games, mostly because their stories were told in the games, so why waste time retelling them? Totally reasonable, right? Well, this creative decision upset a whole bunch of dumb nerds, which I love, because any time you upset the stupid nerds online, you’re on the right path. But as proof that this was actually the right way to go… despite otherwise not acknowledging any of the usual shit, no mention of Jill, or Chris, or Leon, or Ada, or any of the familiar Resident Evil tropes, or any of its more famous moments—save for a couple of Easter Eggs—Cregger has made not only the most successful film in the Resident Evil series, but the best one too.

Easily.

And he did it by instead focusing on replicating what it feels like to play one of these games, especially for the first time, when you aren’t that good at them. The confusion of what’s going on, the dread when you realize the impossible-seeming thing you need to do, and the truly awful-looking place you’re going to have to go to, as well as the sudden panic as something terrible lurches out at you, and firing wildly in response, wasting all your ammo… that’s it. That’s what it’s like to play one of these games. Basically, Cregger cut out all the dumb slavishly-devoted fan-crap that often weighs down these live-action adaptations, especially the ones that are adapting video games, and instead… just had fun playing around. And we all sat around to watch and had a blast.

Suck it, dumb nerds!

Plus, what few Easter Eggs there were, were great. The creaking doors slowly opening onto dark rooms just like the load screens from the original games. The old typewriter in a random room. The occasional green herbs in the background. The weapons progression in the movie, the way Bryan starts out with a handgun, moves on to a shotgun, and ends with a machine gun. The ridiculous amount of locks, all needing specific keys. The chapter-like set-up of each part of the film. It was all good stuff. Seamlessly inserted. I appreciated the way they were true nods that the people who‘ve played these games would recognize, but wouldn’t get in the way of the people who haven’t still enjoying the film too. Very clever and fun. Also, I really liked how Bryan left a voice note on his phone for Michelle. You can easily imagine some future player randomly stumbling across it while playing a different game later on.

But best of all, the monster effects and the gore are all fantastic.

While obviously there were a lot of digital effects involved, there was still a heavy amount of practical effects involved, and I loved that. This was the work of Legacy Effects studio, whose founder Shane Mahan worked at Stan Winston Studios for a long time, and was involved in films like The Terminator, both 1 and 2, Predator 1 and 2, Aliens, in multiple Jurassic Park films, and even with Iron Man too, which earned him a nomination for Best Visual Effects. Plus many more. And since he co-founded Legacy Effects, Mahan has gone on to work on multiple iconic films too, including The Shape of Water and The Suicide Squad.

And this film is a showcase of their talent.

The infected newborn baby monsters. The tentacle dog. The acid-puking monster. The farmhouse couple. The massive monster in the sewer, which was apparently a puppet that weighed a literal ton and required four puppeteers to operate.

They were all great.

And of course, there was also the multi-zombie.

This chaotic horror-show creature involved multiple acrobatic performers, who were tethered together by harnesses, and had to work together to tumble around the set. It’s a really cool-looking, and also honestly terrifying looking, idea.

Resident Evil feels like the best kind of Sam Raimi/John Carpenter type of film. It’s funny, it’s scary, it’s tense, it’s gross, but also, like in all of his movies, Zach Cregger does the “real people in a crazy situation” story really well.

This means that some people will complain when Bryan does a lot of the things he does—like stopping his car to check on the crazy woman who jumped out in front of him, and then, despite her clearly being a zombie, putting her in his car, or then stopping to check on the cop later, or when he tries to help the little girl with the weird foot in the RV who is also obviously infected—but that is only because these people can’t put themselves in the shoes of a normal person who has unknowingly stumbled into a situation that is very strange and very terrible, and also, much like the viewer, lives in a world that doesn’t actually have any zombies, at least, not in the real life, so it’d be supremely unreasonable to assume that a zombie existed, at least, not without some recent, terrible, and undeniable proof to the contrary.

Also, as a character, Bryan is basically a good guy, and while, yes, this almost gets him killed multiple times in the movie, that drives how he reacts to things. And all that having been said, it is somewhat revealing when a person complains about his concern for others…

Meanwhile, the film revels in the fact that the main character is in no way an action hero, who’s only pushed by the ticking clock of his spreading infection, and the very relatable motivation of needing to make money and trying to get home to your loved ones. The main tension comes from the fact that when Bryan aims his flashlight around a dark corner, his hand shaking, he is not at all ready for any of the terrible things he finds there, which, as I said, is the entire reason why this film is a much better adaptation of the Resident Evil games than any “source accurate” adaptations, it’s giving us the feel of playing the game. Plus, I really love Bryan’s constant stream of frustrated grumbling and swearing as he deals with each new obstacle. The way he screams uncontrollably whenever something scary happens is so funny, not to mention, very relatable.

So while, sure, a lot of the choices that Bryan makes in this film are really really bad, he honestly has no choice, given the situation. Mostly. Except for the time he gives up on the stairs and takes the elevator instead, that was just a straight-up dumb decision. Understandable, sure, but dumb.

Anyway, my point is, you’re gonna yell at the screen a lot during this movie, which is always pretty fun.

And that’s what makes this film a good time.

While it may not be as ambitious as Cregger’s other films—most likely because those films are both original ideas, and this one is part of the biggest franchises around, so there’s only so much freedom a creative gets in those situations—it still manages to deliver a lot of fun and surprises. Plus, I really like how it also proves that, yet again, in a zombie apocalypse, there’s no greater enemy than the guy who is hiding the fact that he’s been bitten.

My only complaint… if I had to chose one, is that I could’ve watched more. The film felt a little too sleek, y’know? A little too pared down. I felt like they could've... I don't know, taken their time? Expanded on parts? Not because what we got was bad, but because it was fun. And also, maybe a little rushed too, at times. Plus, the end was a little clunky in its execution.

But still… this was a very fun and satisfying good time. And while, yes, it is the faintest of praise to say that it’s the hands down the best Resident Evil movie, that’s also resoundingly and undeniably true.

Big thumbs up.