How bad does a movie have to be before the average horror fan notices it's bad?

Rating: Null/10 (30 July 2002)

Like Anderson's previous work of science fiction horror ("Event Horizon"), "Resident Evil" is overloaded with gore, even more overloaded with noise (Anderson seems to think you can't frighten people without deafening them), and doesn't try to make sense on any level whatever. But there are some differences. "Resident Evil" has art direction which deserves more than just pointedly looking the other way, and one (alas, no more than one) likeable character - although, it could just be that I find Michelle Rodriguez attractive, or that the character she plays is never given enough rope to hang herself. On the debit side, there's a computer-animated monster which looks like a cartoon crudely pasted into live-action footage.
The whole movie is a series of miscalculations, but one in particular stood out. (Spoilers ahead...) The gimmick is a thing called "the T-virus", capable of re-animating corpses - in effect, creating zombies, which are almost impossible to kill and which behave so as to infect living individuals and create further zombies. The T-virus was engineered in an underground research facility, and the instant the virus escapes, the central computer ("The Red Queen") seals of all exits and kills everybody, so as to contain the plague. But since it didn't bother to tell anyone on the surface what happened (why not? Search me), half a dozen investigators find themselves underground, surrounded by flesh-eating zombies, one of their number infected with the T-virus, and trapped by the Red Queen, who refuses to let them escape.
Here's the problem: I didn't want them to escape. What's more, they shouldn't have wanted themselves to escape. They were carrying a dangerous plague capable of destroying the world. One reason I felt more sympathy for Michelle Rodriguez's character was that she was the only one willing to lay down her life - in a situation in which they were probably all going to die anyway, whatever happened - for the common good. Nobody else so much as CONSIDERED laying down their lives for the common good. The thought never entered their heads. How can we be expected to sympathise with such selfish people? I suppose it would have been easy enough, if we'd ever got to know any of them, but since we never did - since they were no more than vaguely unsavoury action movie stick figures - what little sympathy we have is entirely on the side of the unseen several million inhabitants of the city above. That's where the movie's loyalties should have been, too.