Main cast: Milla Jovovich (Alice), Michelle Rodriguez (Rain), Eric Mabius (Matt), James Purefoy (Spence), Martin Crewes (Chad Kaplan), Colin Salmon (James “One” Shade), Pasquale Aleardi (JD Salinas), Liz May Brice (Olga Danilova), Michaela Dicker (Red Queen), and Jason Isaacs (Dr William Birkin)
Director: Paul WS Anderson

Paul WS Anderson wrote and directed Mortal Kombat. Ssh, it’s my secret shame, but I love that movie a lot despite its trashy, tacky B-grade trappings. Or maybe it’s because of those trappings, heh. Unsurprisingly, Resident Evil is another movie based on the really popular video game.

But this one is pretty sucky: I can package the suck and manufacture vacuum cleaners out of the whole suckiness. Even the idea of two buxom, pouty, babes sexily-clad in a most impractical way blasting their ways through zombies can’t prevent my B-grade movie fan self from wanting to tune out after fifteen minutes..

I’m not complaining about the inane plot. Hey, the plot, if we can call it that, is that this super business corporation in the future, Umbrella Corporation, is secretly conducting nasty experiments in their basements even as they sell us people happy lollipops and candies. Or something. They make bad weapons and conduct genetic and cloning experiments using plastic-looking toys passed off as props. I think I saw that plastic gun-thing sold at Toys “R” Us the other day.

When something goes wrong, the mother computer at this secret lab (under the ground, of course) shuts everything down and drowns everybody in it. Cool. But wait – the doors will really be shut forever, after 60 minutes. You’d think if this is so, why even bother, right? Let the sad bastards drown and put this nonsense out of memory ASAP.

But no, we have a team of investigators dashing into the lab to discover the cause of the mess and get out. In 60 minutes. I can’t even get my mechanic to discover the cause of that guggling sound in my car for 60 minutes. What do these fools expect to achieve?

To the surprise of no one, they find the now rank and smelly dungeons of a lab filled with ugly, nasty, shambling zombies! Eeuw, the guy with that extra long tongue reminds me of a really bad date. But I’m still cool with this movie so far. I don’t watch a movie like Resident Evil for enlightenment.

But the movie is so choppy and loud it grates on my nerves like an orchestra of nails on blackboard. It doesn’t help that I don’t know what the names of the characters are (thank you IMDB for cluing me in, oh, two days after I’ve watched the movie that Milla Jovovich’s character is called Alice). The action scenes are either tacky and cheap (and hence fake) as a “designer dress” sold in Chinatown for $10.00, or they are so disjointed and inept.

But one thing though – Milla Jovovich really can carry off the cheesy super babe with guns thing very well. If her character in The Fifth Element is cool, well, she almost recaptures the magic of kick-ass ammos-and-leather babe archetype here.

But instead of gloriously tacky and cheesy, all I get from Resident Evil is a tacky and cheesy movie that actually annoys me rather than entertains. Inept techniques, lousy pacing, and Michelle Rodriguez’s zombified face (no, she plays a heroine, not a zombie, alas – can we say “miscast”?) bog down what could’ve been a super-cheesy and hence mega-cool bad script from making masterpiece MST3000 tour de force.