Resident Evil (2026)
Writer-director Zach Cregger, the newly crowned horror genius of 'Barbarian' and 'Weapons' probably didn't have to work as hard as he did to make us forget those endlessly repetitive 'Resident Evil' movies from Paul W.S. Anderson and starring his wife Milla Jovovich.
(Who the hell remembers them anyway? Maybe Anderson and Jovovich's immediate families...)
But given the amazing results here, just about everyone's glad he did make those films nothing but lost memories.....turning this new version into a hilariously entertaining, stripped down 90 minute rollercoaster ride......the kind with multiple 360 degree loop-de-loops.
So no one should waste their time looking for deep character development, plot complications or any rational explanations for what's unfolding in front of you.
Just lock in the safety bar down on your lap and enjoy that you're still alive when the ride's over. Which is more than we can say for any of the poor souls in the movie itself......
A moment here......one thing we've always wondered through all the R.E. moves, including this one......
Do the stockholders of the vast Umbrella Corporation ever question that every new innovation from the company's Research and Development department invariably touches off an extinction level apocalypse of zombies, mutants and assorted monsters? Leaving millions dead, dying or transformed into all of the above.....
Just askin'......given their track record, we would've unloaded our Umbrella stock decades ago. And with that amount of managerial incompetence on display, who's running the place anyway? The Trump family? (well, that would explain everything)
But let us now have some fun with Umbrella's latest disaster inflicted on their much beleaguered home base, Raccoon City.....(and whose residents should've know way better than to move into a town named Raccoon City.....)
Hapless shlub Bryan (Austin Abrams) ekes out a living delivering organ transplants to hospitals, presumably because it pays more than GrubHub, Door Dash and Uber. His new gig, unfortunately, takes him to, you guessed it, Raccoon-arama, where every single person he runs into (sometimes literally) is either a gibbering, multiple tentacled abomination....or a human due to go on the menu at any second....
That, dear BQ visitors, comprises the be-all and end-all of this movie. Abrams, very funny, by the way, mutters how utterly effed he is as every new variety of catastrophic carnage and squishy tentacles befall him. He's like a modern day Job and everything including the kitchen sink thrown at him. And he began this trip into hell thinking his newly pregnant girlfriend was the worst of his problems .....heh, heh, heh......
Let's not forget to give a shout out to that gem of a scene stealer Paul Walter Hauser, who briefly shows up as a panic stricken Umbrella underling. His moment with Abrams, with each of them outdoing each other in escalating comedic frenzy, is pure laugh out loud gold.
As for monstrosity maestro Cregger, he's not likely to enter the Oscar conversations with this one but he most definitely brings orgasmic euphoria to fanboys and fangirls everywhere. But whether he gets away with film's abrupt, nihilistic ending, well that's for you viewers to decide.
Given the film's drips with doom from beginning to end anyway, we didn't mind it all that much.....
We doubt we need to spend any time describing who this film's made for.....either hop on this coaster or move on to the cotton candy and the whack-a-mole booth.....
4 & 1/2 tentacles (****1/2).
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