"You are all going to die down here."

Rating: 2/10 (13 February 2005)

We've had movies based on books, based on the Bible, based comic books, based on songs, and ever since the mid 1990s, movies based on video games. Resident Evil is based on a video game, but probably could have been based on a night of heavy drinking and watching "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Night of the Living Dead," one after another. In Resident Evil, an evil bio-research company, called Umbrella Corp, or something silly like that, manufactured a virus that brings the dead back to life and causes them to want to eat other people. The standard horror movie rules apply, if someone is bitten by a zombie, they will become a zombie, zombies can only be killed after certain parameters occur (almost always where something is severed), and the girl with the most revealing dress and the biggest boobs will be the de-facto hero of the film. Milla Jovovich plays Alice who wants to steal the virus to somehow protect the world from it gets caught up in the building where the virus is stored has a security breach, and that causes all heck to break loose. This is where HAL 9000 takes over, errr, rather "Red Queen" takes over, as the computer has to shut down the building to make sure the virus does not escape, and will do anything to make sure it doesn't happen. Some computer rebooting occurs, yada yada, and by the end of the film, only 1 or 2 of the people who were in the building at the beginning are alive by the end. The movie is directed by Paul Anderson, who also directed "Alien vs. Predator," so action scenes are to be expected. Some of the action sequences are so dark, so frantically edited, that while the scenes convey "chaos," the message is lost in the inability to figure out what is going on. I would tell you who the men actors were, except they all look alike, so I couldn't tell who was who, they all had the same height, same haircut, one guy wore a blue shirt, but most of the others were even dressed alike. I know there is only one casting list out there anymore, but this is ridiculous. Not the worst film I have ever seen, but after seeing it, I have to wonder why they felt compelled to make a sequel. I for one have not heard about "Resident Evil Mania" out there.