Resident Evil (2002)
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
When a virus leaks from a top-secret facility, turning all resident researchers into ravenous zombies and their lab animals into mutated hounds from hell, the government sends in an elite military task force to contain the outbreak.
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19 films that influenced Resident Evil
What critics say influenced Resident Evil
Sure, it is derivative of many other flicks from the obvious "Night of the Living Dead" and "Aliens" to things more obscure, like "Ghosts of Mars" and Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," but, even so, this modern horror/monster movie stands on its own as a sci-fi actioner.
Alice, Rain and their team spend the whole movie rushing about the Hive, fending off those "Night of the Living Dead" ghoulies (who have the power to infect the living by inflicting the merest scratch) and a pathetic handful of other beasties (namely, the aforementioned Dobermans and an Alien-like slime thingy).
First and foremost, however, "Resident Evil" is a genre film, the cinematic child of James Cameron's "Aliens" and George Romero's horror classic "Night of the Living Dead."
Enthusiastic and jubilant joystick jousters will probably get a rise out of star Milla Jovovich as the expressionless butt-kicking babe in a vehicle that's a weak-kneed cross between "Alien" and "Night of the Living Dead".
"Resident Evil" is basically "Night of the Living Dead" meets "Aliens," with the storyline of the former and the visual sense (and much of the dialogue) of the latter.
Its chief instrument of horror is a mob of flesh-eating zombies lifted part, parcel and gaping head wounds from Night of the Living Dead.
Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil is a louder, lazier, wholly jump-scare dependant rip-off of James Cameron's Aliens .
First and foremost, however, "Resident Evil" is a genre film, the cinematic child of James Cameron's "Aliens" and George Romero's horror classic "Night of the Living Dead."
Sure, it is derivative of many other flicks from the obvious "Night of the Living Dead" and "Aliens" to things more obscure, like "Ghosts of Mars" and Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," but, even so, this modern horror/monster movie stands on its own as a sci-fi actioner.
"Resident Evil" is basically "Night of the Living Dead" meets "Aliens," with the storyline of the former and the visual sense (and much of the dialogue) of the latter.
Worse, director Paul W.S. Anderson isn't immune to pilfering concepts or shots from Aliens, Forbidden Planet, George A. Romero's Living Dead epics, The Relic and even his own Event Horizon while screen-adapting a video game franchise.
Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil is a louder, lazier, wholly jump-scare dependant rip-off of James Cameron's Aliens .
Enthusiastic and jubilant joystick jousters will probably get a rise out of star Milla Jovovich as the expressionless butt-kicking babe in a vehicle that's a weak-kneed cross between "Alien" and "Night of the Living Dead".
Writer/director/producer Paul W.S. Anderson takes pages from the likes of "Alien," "Deep Blue Sea," "The Night of the Living Dead" and "2001" and presents a thoroughly unoriginal, but fast-paced and entertaining genre B-flick.
The director, Paul W.S. Anderson, made a nifty little outer-space chiller called ''Event Horizon'' a few years ago, but this time, working with a cast that features the girls-with-guns team of Milla Jovovich (not bad) and Michelle Rodriguez (all one-note pout), he shoots the works, complete with demon Dobermans, zombies that pop up like fun-house skeletons, a token ''Matrix'' fly-kick or two, and a bullwhip-tongued skinless giant that leaps and slithers like ''Alien.''
Yet even they are not enough to fill the bottomless void that is the plot of this movie, so it turns to Alien for a gross-out monster to scamper through the ductwork and rip open a moving train in what passes for a climax.
It's left to a small team of commandos to penetrate the Alien-style complex.
Salivation started in 1998, when George A. Romero, creator of classic zombie fare such as, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, plus the director of a couple of Japanese ads for the Resident Evil 2 video game, announced that he was to write and direct the Resident Evil movie.
Gore hounds will appreciate the homage to Romero’s Day of the Dead, and Marilyn Manson fans should groove to the metallic techno-industrial score cowritten by the shock-rock freak.
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The classics of the genre are, of course, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.
Salivation started in 1998, when George A. Romero, creator of classic zombie fare such as, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, plus the director of a couple of Japanese ads for the Resident Evil 2 video game, announced that he was to write and direct the Resident Evil movie.
''Resident Evil'' is a blatant recycling of those queasy pulp classics, notably ''Dawn of the Dead'' (1979), with its claustrophobic setting, its comic-book sociology, and its SWAT-team-on-the-defense ballistics.
There's one nifty sequence, inspired by the 1998 Canadian film ''Cube,'' in which two men get trapped in a corridor patrolled by a deadly geometric slice-and-dice laser.
I call this a cliché not because of its content (on the contrary; also, I hate Resident Evil even more now that I know that it's one halfway decent moment of gory terror was a rip-off), but because nothing here ever remotely informs the rest of the plot; it's just a way to quickly establish that the cube rooms are full of deadly evil, and also to provide an early boost of queasy-making violence in a film where hardly any actual gore shows up.
While some of the traps are frighteningly unpredictable and gruesomely satisfying—director Paul W. Anderson would blatantly rip off the film’s best death scene in 2002’s Resident Evil —the characters don’t amount to more than threadbare types.
But even that scene culminates in a slice-and-dice death that’s a direct rip-off of the superior Canadian sci-fi shocker Cube.
Worse, director Paul W.S. Anderson isn't immune to pilfering concepts or shots from Aliens, Forbidden Planet, George A. Romero's Living Dead epics, The Relic and even his own Event Horizon while screen-adapting a video game franchise.
Sure, it is derivative of many other flicks from the obvious "Night of the Living Dead" and "Aliens" to things more obscure, like "Ghosts of Mars" and Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," but, even so, this modern horror/monster movie stands on its own as a sci-fi actioner.
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Milla Jovovich ("The Fifth Element") stars as Alice, a woman who may or may not have something to do with the deadly contamination of a military research plant called the Hive - an underground bioengineering experiment facility controlled by a mega-conglomerate, the Umbrella Corporation.
Save for a prologue in which an evil computer goes postal and the aforementioned bit of prurience wherein Milla crawls around wearing a sheet of paper (shades of The Fifth Element), Resident Evil is a theatre-shaking, strobe-lit monstrosity, a prime example of low-attention span cinema.
Some might even say that "Resident Evil" star Milla Jovovich (“The Fifth Element”) is no match for "Raider's" Angelina Jolie in general.
Here, as in The Fifth Element , she is a woman of few words.
Also notable are Lucio Fulci's Italian exports, Zombie and City of the Living Dead.