Guilty Pleasure

Rating: Null/10 (4 April 2002)

This film is extremely bad... among the worst I've ever seen. But I loved it anyway. The script was just terrible. I mean, the plot is extremely flimsy, not one character in the film is worthy of the term, and the whole thing is just a big budget excuse to to make a movie about zombies. It doesn't have any of the tension of the original video game, it doesn't have any of the characters of the original game, and, in fact, it bears remarkably little resemblance to the game at all.
Some people seem to think it's a prequel to the game. I don't understand how that works, exactly. I mean, the end of the movie looks exactly like the beginning of Resident Evil 2 (the game), so it's a prequel to the game's sequel. I don't know. But don't think about it. Just enjoy the cheese.

Like that elevator scene in the beginning. Tremendous. So bad you can't help but love it. The whole audience cheered when that happened. Great.

Just to illustrate how little this film cared about it's characters, I'd like to point out that Alice's name is never mentioned on screen until the final credits. I actually stayed in the theater and waited because I wanted to know her name. Apparently, she didn't want to know. Because even after meeting someone she believed knew her, she didn't ask. Of course, that begs the question why was she suffering amnesia at all? From a production point of view, it's a convenient (if hackneyed) way to introduce suspense. Or maybe, since the story was so bad, they wanted to conceal it from the audience for as long as possible. So, give your protagonist amnesia, and suddenly, none of the characters know what's going on, so the story doesn't present itself to the audience until long after the zombie brain-munching buffet has begun. But, from a fictional point of view, why would the computer have done that? Trust me, though, that is absolutely the smallest one of many, many plot inanities.
This movie it truly wretched. Unless you have a soft spot for big-budget b-movies starring talented actors masquerading as vacuous eye-candy, stay far far away.
But like I said, I loved it.