Review: Zach Cregger's Resident Evil brings back fun (and tentacles) back to horror
In which your humble reviewer attempts to discuss Resident Evil without using the phrase ‘Zach Cregger is 3 for 3!’
* This review contains minor spoilers*
What a disgustingly pleasant surprise Resident Evil was! Only one year after Weapons delighted and confounded moviegoers in equal measure, writer-director Zach Cregger aims a wobbly shotgun at franchise filmmaking and brings sorely needed fun back to the horror genre.
That damn pesky Umbrella Corporation has been meddling with genetics and unleashing rabid zombies and tentacled beasties (when will they learn?) for 30 years now, since the first game was released in 1996. Since then, the franchise has spread like the T-Virus to include 13-plus games, 8 movies, a TV show, and numerous other spinoffs and media.
Having never been much of a gamer, my first introduction to the world of Resident Evil was Paul WS Anderson’s 2002 film. As a huge fan of Event Horizon, I had reasonably high hopes for his return to horror, but I found the film a thudding disappointment. Despite a few choice moments, the laser-grid kills and practical zombie dobermans, the film was an ugly, repetitive slog peppered with questionable acting, a noticeable lack of gore, and a very 2002 nu-metal soundtrack. The best part was the final scene, which revealed Raccoon City's decimation and was then explored in the marginally better follow-up, Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
I tapped out of the franchise after maybe the fourth or fifth film, numbed into apathy by the increasingly convoluted, nonsensical plotting and the focus on action over horror and suspense. Milla Jovovich acquitted herself well throughout the series, but she never had much to play with beyond a steely, indestructible action heroine.
2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City started strong, with the rural industrial cityscape of Raccoon City offering a tangibly grimy setting, but the thin characters didn’t help, and before long the film regressed into reheated tropes and imagery: spooky mansion, police station siege, train escape, etc. I haven’t watched the Netflix TV series, as I had little interest in pressing play on yet another desperate attempt to bring the game to the screen.
Which brings us to Zach Cregger’s iteration: a 90-minute run-and-gun blast of comedic horror, refreshingly free of lore and recognisable characters. Austin Abrams follows up his memorable turn as doomed junkie James with the lead role of Bryan, a young man who may be the most ill-equipped person to enter Resident Evil's nightmare world. Bryan’s non-action-hero credentials are endearingly funny as he fumbles through the apocalypse, battling and being pursued by an ever-expanding horde of ravenous creatures.
The plot is almost non-existent, but that is by design -Cregger wants to take you on a ride and get you to feel what it’s like to play the game, and his camera does this brilliantly, often following Bryan from behind as he explores a tunnel clogged with abandoned vehicles. The constant fumbling with bullets, gun safety catches, and battling stubborn locks mirrors not only the gamer experience but also what 95% of us would likely do in a similarly harrowing situation.
The first 30 minutes of the film are my favourite (although the second half is shitloads of fun too), as we follow Bryan into and out of the snowy mountain roads leading to Raccoon City, battling with an ever-increasing infected threat that literally grows into a multi-limbed whirling dervish of a creature that seems weirdly transfixed on bringing Bryan down. The geography of this sequence is incredible, with the upside-down cop car remaining fixed in Cregger’s frame, flashing its red and blue lights into the snowy night even as Bryan holes up in the farmhouse a good mile away.
Once Bryan escapes the farm, things ramp up considerably, especially when he reaches the beleaguered Raccon City, rife with kamikaze zombies, a sewer-dwelling behemoth with a belly full of infected rodents, and an Evil Dead-esque ghoul with a penchant for spewing acidic vomit. And that’s before we get to the Maternity Ward, a brilliantly disgusting late-game set piece that’s almost hard to believe a movie studio signed off on and gave Cregger lots of money to create.
Like Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger pulled off one of those miraculous segues from comedy to horror, a feat that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, given how closely related these two genres are in construction. 2022’s Barbarian was a surprising blast of horror that, while it had its fair share of laughs, wasn’t afraid to go dark with its bedridden subterranean villain, a tragic monster, and another human monster in Justin Long’s despicable, self-preserving actor.
Last year’s Weapons took his storytelling to a new level with its Magnolia-like structure, where a range of characters bounce off each other as they search for a class of missing children, a deliberately paced mystery frequently interrupted by bursts of violence. It felt like a level up from Barbarian, so for his next trick, Cregger decided to do a hard right into an established franchise.
What makes Cregger’s take on this long-regurgitated franchise so refreshing after 7 middling entries is his unique point of view and disregard for what people expect from franchise films. There is no Claire, Leon, or Wexlers to be found; thank fuck. The previous filmic versions weren’t much to write home about, so why try and reanimate (let alone flog) that dead horse?
Cregger has clearly learned all the screenwriting rules along the way and gleefully ignored most of them, creating three refreshingly idiosyncratic, unique films. As Weapons took a leaf from Magnolia’s book, right down to the slightly bumbling sad-sack but likeable moustachioed cop, Cregger throws in some blatant homages to films like The Thing (hello split-head tentacled dog creature), while ultimately conjuring a Sam Raimi tone, from the gallons of red stuff, to the humour and his willingness to beat and bite the living shit out of his hapless protagonist. Bryan feels the closest we have to an Ash Williams since Bruce Campbell hung up the chainsaw after three seasons of Ash Vs Evil Dead.
Resident Evil feels like a modern-era VHS classic, like Evil Dead 2: a 90-minute gory ride you can throw on anytime, with friends or when you’re jonesing for a quick fix of horror fun. And in this day of ‘elevated horror’ and YouTube horror (not a criticism - those films have their place), Cregger’s film feels like a breath of fresh and fetid air.
4.5 tentacles out of 5.
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