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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with 
COMPANION, which played in theaters a couple months ago and is now on disc and streaming, features certain genre elements that are strategically withheld for a while. For almost a third of its 97 minutes we can tell there’s something we’re missing about the main character because of some of the weird things people say to her, so we’re very intrigued. I don’t include myself in “we” though because I knew the premise of the movie, controversially (but understandably, I think) included in the second trailer and other promotions. There is good reason to go in blind, but I can confirm that the movie is still fun without being surprised by that part. And I’m not gonna write a review on eggshells, so I’m gonna get into it a couple paragraphs from now.
The trailer for BARBARIAN suggests an intriguing and pretty straight forward horror-thriller idea. Tess (Georgina Campbell, 
