I come bearing good news: the new RESIDENT EVIL movie is a very fun time, even if you never played one of the games in your life, even if you wouldn’t notice that it “feels like game play,” even if “a more faithful adaptation of the games” does not remotely sound to you like a good alternative to 14 years of trend-chasing Paul W.S. Anderson joints about Milla Jovovich doing flips and stuff. I mean come on. How ya gonna keep e’m down on the farm after they’ve seen Milla flying around doing Matrix shit in 3D? Or at least, how are ya gonna keep me. I wasn’t looking for RESIDENT EVIL without the main thing that RESIDENT EVIL means to me. If not for some theories I’ve heard about auteurs I would not have gone to see this reboot on opening day.

Let’s face it, as a never serious, long retired game player, there is almost no chance I will ever play or see somebody play these games. It’s honestly none of my business what they’re about. Don’t even tell me, I’ll cover my ears. But I respect the games for the movies they’ve inspired. I really got a kick out of four of the six Milla joints (just not the first and last ones), and I thought the unrelated WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY was fun too.

But this is probly the best one. It’s directed by Zach Cregger, in what sounds in interviews like risky nerd dream fulfillment more than a sellout. I honestly thought the brand name would be a deterrent, but it’s his biggest opening to date. It’s simpler and more straight ahead than BARBARIAN or WEAPONS, but it moves, rips, etc., and it’s funny as hell. He told the Hollywood Reporter that “people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible.” I believe it, actually, because this has that rare, perfect EVIL DEAD II tone: so many laughs from the lead character and the absurdity of the situations, but not at the expense of the horror. Not a horror-themed comedy, but legit horror with a great sense of humor.

The setting is familiar: it’s the night of the outbreak, when something from the Umbrella Corporation weapons lab has started a weird infection that’s spreading from Raccoon City. At first it makes zombies, then they get more outrageous. Tentacles coming out of things, dogs with cthulu mouths, extra eyeballs growing here and there. There’s the spirit of THE THING in some of these things. Some good horror imagery.

This medical courier guy Bryan doesn’t know any of that when he accepts the assignment to make a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital late that night. He does know that his girlfriend Michelle (voice of Sara Paxton, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT 2009) just found out she’s pregnant and wants him to come home. Also that he lied about having the right tires for this gig (it’s snowing). He’s avoiding facing things and/or seduced by the high pay so he ends up slipping and sliding on a mountain road while trying to have an important relationship talk on speaker phone like he thinks he’s LOCKE.

It’s fair to say Bryan is a bit of a doofus. He’s played by Austin Abrams, who stole WEAPONS as the junkie James. Bryan is a more upstanding citizen, but has a similar comical cluelessness. He’s gonna do what he can to get out of this but he’s never gonna seem like a movie hero. There are frequent laughs in the ways he runs, screams and talks to himself. (And occasionally when he talks to the organ or whatever it is he’s transporting. Puts its seatbelt on. Calls it “buddy.”)

He’s out in the middle of nowhere when a woman (Andrea Miltnerová, “Blood Bank Nurse,” BLADE II, “Doctor Marsh,” HELLBOY, “Old Woman Captive,” SOLOMON KANE, “Music Teacher,” THE CROW 2024, “Hospital Nurse,” NOSFERATU 2024) steps right out into the road and he hits her. He finds her nearby, still kind of alive, and does something I don’t think I’ve seen in a zombie movie before: he belts her into his passenger seat and tries to drive her to the hospital. It’s such a good bad idea, in part because it shows he’s not a bad guy. So many zombie movies are about letting go of the rules and looking out for yourself, but he’s trying to do the right thing here.

It’s also the key to much of the humor in this movie. He keeps reacting to this horror shit in ways you never do in a movie but that immediately made me think yeah, that’s probly what you would do, or at least what this guy would do. My friend pointed out that the repeated instances of having to shoot off pad locks and doing a bad job of it is probly a joke about what happens in the game, but it also works as a joke about movies. People in movies always do that and make it look so easy, but I bet I would blow it. As soon as a gate he needed through was locked I thought “oh shit, I hope he tries to drive through it like they always do in movies and it doesn’t work.” I got my wish.

Shit goes sideways. There are detours, like he gets pulled over by a county sheriff (Johnno Wilson, “Incredulous Pro,” KING RICHARD) and he tries to get help at a house and nobody’s there but he borrows a shotgun because this lady is chasing after him. But, as he later says, “I fucking suck at guns!”

To me the funniest part of the movie comes out of his personality. It’s the fact that when he sees, for the first time, tentacles coming out of a dead body, and then other tentacles coming out of another body as if reaching for them, he can’t help but blurt out “Interesting.” I’m sure he’s scared as shit, but also it’s interesting that that’s how it works. He’s just being honest.

(Second funniest part is when he encounters an enormous naked man sitting silently under a lightbeam in the sewer and calls him “sir.”)

I was surprised to read that this has a bigger budget than any of the previous RESIDENT EVIL movies. It doesn’t seem cheap by any means, but it’s intimate, in a good way. It has a really strong atmosphere of being out alone on a snowy night. Hot damn, Cregger got Dariusz Wolski to be the cinematographer. The guy who shot THE CROW and DARK CITY and the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies and PROMETHEUS (plus THE FAN, which I reviewed recently). No wonder it looks so good.

Bryan is on the road having different encounters, including a fun guest appearance by Paul Walter Hauser (AMERICANA) and Kali Reis (CATCH THE FAIR ONE) as people who seem like they have this more under control than he does. Seem like. Things escalate when he gets to the hospital, which is on fire. Er, I guess they elevate. It involves an elevator. You know, before he was even in the elevator shaft, and before he lost his shoes, I had already been thinking of DIE HARD, but it wasn’t for some action gimmick – it was a scene that reminded me of when McClane tells Al what to tell Holly for him if he doesn’t make it. I’m not saying it’s as good as the scene in DIE HARD but I am saying they put just enough emotional grounding into this character to get me. I like this doofus. All together it really got me rooting for him to pull it together. This is a horror movie, however, I will note.

Cregger actually has a co-writer on this one, and it’s Shay Hatten, the guy who wrote BALLERINA when he was in his early twenties, sold it to the JOHN WICK producers who had him rewrite JOHN WICK 3 to connect BALLERINA to its universe, then did ARMY OF THE DEAD, ARMY OF THIEVES, DAY SHIFT and the REBEL MOONs. In my opinion an interesting filmography. And damn, Cregger is really on fire. Three bangers in a row equals new Master of Horror, right? We need ‘em.