Resident Evil: Apocalypse
With Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, and Mike Epps
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I’m not claiming that poverty is a virtue in and of itself: low budgets certainly didn’t prevent Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Dead series from blowing chunks, and the last time I saw the original Dawn of the Dead (it was remade by Zack Snyder this year) I was both stunned and bummed at how crummy the makeup and effects looked. (How could I not have noticed during all those midnight screenings back in high school?) But even if its zombies are just dorks in green paint and wide-leg pants, Dawn of the Dead still does a way better job of selling the basic premise than a megabucks extravaganza like Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
What I’m getting at, I suppose, is that a truly great zombie flick needs soul, and the Resident Evil franchise has none. Which
At the end of the day Resident Evil: Apocalypse isn’t the worst zombie flick I’ve ever seen. I’d rank it somewhere above Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972) and below Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1979). But since it’s clear that these game-based blockbusters are here to say, I have to hope they become less aggressively stupid. Hellboy and the Spider-Man movies have shown that comic-book-based properties don’t have to be soulless, stupid, or humorless. Is it utopian to expect better of the next first-person shooter that comes to the screen?
