by Eric Lindbom
With RESIDENT EVIL (in theaters) director and screenwriter Zach Cregger serves up a relentlessly breathless, ingenious action horror knockout punch. No lateral move for Cregger after BARBARIAN and WEAPONS, it’s instead exhilarating taken at its thrill ride face value.
At a tight 93 minutes don’t call it lean and mean. RESIDENT EVIL is also hilarious and humanistic largely because of a believable main character vs. a tired kickass avenger.
Austin Abrams is good company as Bryan, a medical courier schlepping needed organs to hospitals. On a wintry night, he’s delivering a high-priority package on a slippery road. He accidentally hits a hysterical woman, and his swerve alerts a cop. Thanks to the injured harpy, the squad car will flip and burn sending Bryan clomping for cover in the snow and that’s all before the title splashes across the screen!
In a real time rush, Bryan learns the beasties were born through a lab screw up and he’s actually delivering the antidote. As he nears the hospital, he’s plunged into an urban hellscape where mutants drop like bloody rain from the roof of a nearby building and plop on impact.
The mutant monsters’ whipping spaghetti-like entrails lead to grisly transformations. The creature effects by Shane Mahan (JURASSIC PARK and THE TERMINATOR) are a mix of the handmade make up mastery on view in John Carpenter’s THE THING and current digital tools. The music by Hays and Ryan Holladay jars and spooks.
While the escalation and scale of mayhem will sate the most gore-thirsty, RESIDENT EVIL stays grounded by Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten’s welcome insistence on a believable hero.
As his problems pile up, Bryan talks to himself out loud. Unlike the vid gamers with first-person shooter chops, Bryan is a refreshingly lousy marksman. When he first encounters an automatic weapon he suffers AKIA jitters trying to assemble it, can’t find the safety and then the gun goes off inside a van. This isn’t just ballistic slapstick. Cregger subverts cliches. How many times have we seen an everyman/woman who’s never used a firearm suddenly become a crack shot? Ditto a moving vehicle plowing through a fence like it’s a beaded curtain? When Bryan tries it, his borrowed truck is gnarled in metal wiring and totaled.
Some gamers gripe the film doesn’t adhere to the Capcom videogame which means nada to me; I ceased playing videogames after I could no longer pump quarters into Galaxian and Centipede in bars. I’ve also never sampled the previous RE franchise with Milla Jovovich. While I’m not part of any target demo, RESIDENT EVIL nevertheless thrilled and tickled me and made me stoked for Cregger’s next move.
Eric Lindbom is a hardcore horror buff with a strong stomach, weaned on the Universal classics from the ’30s and ’40s. He’s written film and/or music reviews for City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, LA WEEKLY, Request magazine and Netflix. He co-edits triggerwarningshortfiction.com, a site specializing in horror, fantasy and crime short stories with illustrations by co-editor John Skewes. He lives in Los Angeles.
