Oh boy.

So here’s a movie I’ve wanted to talk about in some way, shape, or form since I got into this Enema business – Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil. But why? Why would I want to dive deep into this series? Well, there are lots of reasons I can think of. First, it’s a movie based on a video game series. The genre of video game movies are lousy with movies that are, well, lousy.

Second, Paul W.S. Anderson himself. Look, I like his Event Horizon. I thought that movie was creepy, fun, and fine enough despite its bad reviews. I know people feel the same way about his follow up film Soldier. I didn’t see that one. Mortal Kombat… Eh… That’s a bad movie. It is a very, very bad, bad movie. That said, it’s kind of fun in its shitliness.

Third, I saw this movie. I was working at a movie theater on March 15, 2002 when this film came out. I saw it. It was bad. It was a big, dumb, bad action movie. But it made a shitload of money. Piles of dough was thrown at this movie by its fans. Five sequels later, people freaking love this movie and series. All this from a really bad movie that is kind of emblematic of the entire first decade of movies that launched the 21st century.

Let’s start with what the Resident Evil video game series is all about. The first game in the series was released in 1996 by Capcom. Capcom did Mega Man, Commando, Street Fighter, 1942 (I played a lot of 1942), and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Motherfucking Ghosts ‘n Goblins. I love that game. These are all massively popular arcade and/or early Nintendo heavy hitting masterpieces. So to say Capcom knows what they are doing, well, that’d be an understatement.

Sure enough, Resident Evil was another massive hit. It’s a kind of role playing game, but that first entry in the franchise was the first in a brand new genre for gamers – survival horror. Basically, you follow two characters, Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield, as they investigate the disappearance of some team members only to discover they are trapped in a mansion that are filled to the brim with zombies and various other monstrosities. The basics that needed to be known here, outside of monsters, zombies, Chris, and Jill, are that this takes place in the fictional midwestern town of Raccoon City. In Raccoon City, a biomedical company known as the Umbrella Corporation oversaw some secret and illegal research and experiments that created a very contagious and mutagenic biological agent known as the T-virus.

In game after game in the series, you walk around really creepy ass places and suffer multiple massive heart attacks as things jump out from shadows and attack you and hunt you down. This is very much fun. I only played a little bit of the second game (I think it was the second game – guys, it’s over 20 years ago and my memory bits don’t work as they once did), and it was a bad idea to play it late at night. But the appeal was there and holy shit did other companies and game designers copy the idea in this new survival horror genre.

Now, I will say this… Resident Evil, and other games like this, seem to be perfect fodder for a TV series or a movie, right? It’s got a story. The game is built with various endings that are dependent on what you do in the game. So I’m not surprised that both Hollywood and TV, er, -wood came calling. Obviously, Paul W.S. Anderson had a love of video games. He made that Mortal Kombat movie in 1995. He’s better at making movies about video games than, say, Uwe Boll, so I actually have no problem with the attempt. The execution? Well, that’s gonna be a different story.

As for Anderson himself, I kinda feel like I’d be great friends with him. No, I mean it. Sure, I haven’t seen a damn movie of his since 2002, but in those 19 years since, he did what he wanted to do. He wanted to see Aliens and Predators fight. He made not one, but TWO of those goddamn movies. He liked the idea of a Death Race movie, so he made, like, three of those. He likes The Three Musketeers. I appreciate his fandom and wanting to do things like those movies. I feel like he’s a bit… extra. Like, it’s one thing to love a video game series and wanting to adapt it, but it gets fairly bonkers in this series. It’s just a little too much fandom, ya dig? I get it, you want to throw in all the things you love, but sometimes the things you like about a thing doesn’t translate to things the wider audience will appreciate.

Or, check that, the Resident Evil film franchise has made, like a billion freakin’ dollars, so the fuck do I know?

It should be noted that this first film does not have any direct adaptation of the video games that were released prior. Milla Jovovich, our primary protagonist for the entire series, and wife of Anderson, and someone I like to look at, plays Alice – a character not present in the games. She will eventually meet other characters from the game series, but Anderson wanted the movie to use very little of the game itself. He didn’t want to sully the good that was Resident Evil with a poor adaptation…

…so he took out the creepy mansion that gave off a haunted house vibe from the video games, removed all the characters, and turned a survival horror game into an action movie.

Look, I kind of get it, but I also don’t – and, yes, I already know you are probably angry at me because you like these dumb movies or whatever, but stick with me here. So, you keep the Umbrella Corporation, the T-virus, monsters, and Raccoon City. Okay, good. However, the people had spent time with Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield in the first game and Leon Kennedy and Chris’ sister Claire in the sequel. Removing them seems odd. Then, to change up the dilapidated, spooky, terrifying mansion to feature most of the action of the movies in a crisp, clean, underground facility is an immediate problem with me. That’s what engrossed me so much about the game I played about 10 minutes of before I huddled under the blankets so the monsters under the bed wouldn’t get me.

And, again… I know there are big fans of this movie out there. In a way, I have no right to say what you should or should not have fun watching or enjoying in terms of movies. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SITE?!? But there’s a reason why I did not pick up the series after this movie. This is emblematic of a serious problem Hollywood had. In the 90s, a lot of cheap action movies flooded the video stores and cable channels. Some fun, some bad, some awful. Then, along came the over the top action flicks from producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and directors like Michael Bay. Say what you will about them, but they knew when to have fun. They made big dumb action flicks for people who just wanted big dumb fun and they knew when to throw a joke in or when to take things seriously. It didn’t work for every one of their movies, but it worked for many of them. The early 00s took all the action stuff with cardboard cut out characters and left all the fun out, or didn’t know how to interject fun in a way that was endearing to the movie itself. I have more to say about this later on, but this is a huge problem with the early 2000s action/horror/science fiction movies that poured into theaters.

But whatever… It’s been 19 years since the only time I ever saw this movie, so let’s end that drought now and dig into Anderson’s flick and see if it was better the second time or if I should have just left it in the past.

We get a brief history of the Umbrella Corporation before the title card. Basically Umbrella became a mega-corporation, and by the beginning of the 21st century, 9 out of 10 homes in the United States had Umbrella products within them. They were the leading producers of computer technology, medical advancement, and healthcare in the country. They had grown massive power and influence in politics, but what most didn’t know was that the funding for all these breakthroughs came from military weapons, genetic experiments, and just generally bad shit.

After the title card, we see an unknown assailant gathering up stuff that is probably bad because one vial has something oddly blue colored and another thing that looks like Kool-Aid Ecto Cooler in a case and walking out. He tosses a vial of blue stuff and it breaks and releases into the vents of the Umbrella offices.

You ever notice that movies with scary bio agents always have vials that are incredibly easy to break? Also, what’s up with the twisty twists in the vial? Is that important for this agent or is it just cool looking? I may be focusing on the wrong thing here…

That’s because the bio agent in the air has led to it being detected by the building’s artificial intelligence, Red Queen. The A.I. has initiated a lockdown. People think it is just a fire drill, but they are locked inside and the sprinklers are filling up rooms with water. Also, elevators are being total dicks and dropping people and raising at incredible speeds. Soon, clouds of T-virus are sprayed on the people trapped inside the main office space.

The people in the elevator that was dropped way down about a dozen floors are still alive, and when they manage to open the doors as far as they are able, they see the people in the office gassed to death by Red Queen. One of the ladies in the elevator decides that the opening is just right for her to be able to squeeze through.

You know what they say… “Whenever you’re trapped in an elevator, the very first thing you should do, especially if this elevator is in a horror movie, is make sure you only have your head sticking out of it as you attempt a futile escape.” Now, I will give the movie some major props here. The people inside the elevator hear the brakes disengage. So you think Curly here is gonna get her head lopped off by the ground, but it stops just before the floor bonks her into eternal sleep. She, and the rest of us, thinks that she’s gonna be just fine, but then the elevator blasts its way upward and she gets a face full of ceiling.

Well done, movie.

Then, we see an eye open and focus on us. That’s when we see something that is equally enticing as well as something similar that had to have happened to me in order for me to schedule all six of these goddamn movies on the 2021 slate of B-Movie Enema articles…

This is Alice. She realizes she has a scar on her shoulder as well as a nasty bruise on the other. She has flashes of something making her faint in the shower, and here we are. She steps into the master bedroom to find a sexy red dress waiting for her on the bed. She also finds a note that reads “Today, all your dreams come true” that is not written in her handwriting. As she rifles through the dresser, she finds a bitchin’ machine gun locked away under some glass.

She’s in an empty mansion. Now, I suppose this is meant to represent that setting in the game, but, at least for right now, it is in relatively fine condition. Aside from some gusty winds and the need for the yard boy to come and rake up the leaves, the place doesn’t look too much in disrepair. However, she’s confused about where this place is, and who the guy is in the picture on the phone stand in the hallway.

Well, some other guy, who is also apparently in the house, snatches her and tries to escort her somewhere, but a flash bomb is tossed through the window and a bunch of SWAT dudes come crashing in through the window. The guy says he’s a cop, but the gasmasked men don’t really care about that. One of the invaders checks to see that the house’s security protocols have been triggered. That would explain why Alice can’t give a status report to one of the other guys when he asks for it. The dude who claims to be a cop is, indeed, a guy who just transferred to Raccoon P.D. He’s Matt Addison and the SWAT member holding a gun to his head is Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez). The man apparently in charge of this operation is James Shade, who goes by “One”. He’s played by Colin Salmon who appeared in a trio of James Bond films during the Pierce Brosnan era.

Alright, so let’s pause here for a second because I have things to say. First, I hate this kind of scene that just happened. I rather liked the opening. I am okay with Alice being confused and in a weird place and not understanding what’s going on. I hate when this sort of high tension action sequence takes place and I don’t have ANY information. Yes, yes, I know this is a way to place you in a similar situation as our primary protagonist, Alice, but this is also, like, a movie…? If this was a book, we’d get some additional thoughts and ideas and context. In a movie, while not exactly realistic, you’d get someone saying something about who these people are. Instead, we’re just tossed right into the deep end.

And I can’t swim.

Also, yes, I’m going to go here. That outfit Alice is wearing above is not a fashion. It never was. It never will be. This is not something normal people wear. This is what you call an ACTION PERSON OUTFIT. It’s meant to say, “Look! The dress is sexy!” From there, it also says, “But she’s wearing boots like a soldier who can kick ass!” In reality, no one would wear this. You’d either wear the boots with a jumpsuit or a pair of army pants or you’d wear the dress with, like, I dunno, high heels or something. When you mix this, it feels weird and really makes it obvious that you are pushing these people to be edgy and video game-y. Stop it.

Okay, so this team of very heavily armed agents/cops/army guys/security detail, whatever, go into the basement of the mansion. They have to bring Alice because apparently she’s, like, an assent or one of them, or whatever. For some reason, they also bring Matt. Sure. When they get down into the compound, Michelle Rodriguez goes to get the power back on, but she hears some skittering around, and sees a chewed up grate. Anyway, she gets the power up, and the very heavily armed guys and Matt and Alice ride a choo choo train deeper into the compound. Another heavily armed guy falls out of a door on the train, and Alice gets flashes that this is her husband or something. She sees that her wedding ring has the inscription “Property of Umbrella Corporation”. The husband also doesn’t seem to have any memory of who he is.

And neither do I.

But, at around the 15-minute mark of this movie, Alice demands that One tells her what’s what. He tells us, er, I mean her that they all work for Umbrella. She and her dude are not really married. It’s all a fake. She was found at the mansion that serves as a secret entrance to “the Hive”. This is where all the bad shit happens. Basically, there’s some classified stuff down there. They give us a video game map of the Hive and that their location is shown by way of heat signature. How and why we would need that is stupid.

So just when we are beginning to learn things, One says that when something happened, a nerve gas was released that knocked out Alice. It also maybe was released to knock out her dude? Anyway, her memory loss, which is the secondary effect of the gas, will last *some* amount of time. An hour, a week, days, months, whenever it is no longer logical for it to be around for the purposes of this plot – he cannot say for sure. Matt then says this place must have been attacked and that’s why all these protocols have gone into effect. One says it is more complicated than that.

Do we learn why it is more complicated than that? NO! Why is that? Because Michelle Rodriguez comes along to say she got those doors opened to the Hive. Oh, how I hate to be stymied in these types of fucking movies. Just tell everyone there be monsters, yo. This will indeed lead to people dying. I mean, this is a horror movie and people must die, and I guess you have me there, movie, but people can simultaneously be knowledgeable, good at their jobs, and die. Just tell us what the goddamn plot to this fucking movie is!

It also doesn’t help that this brief exposition dump happens with the camera circling around everyone in a disorienting way when I’m trying to understand what’s going on.

Alright, so the elevator is out, so they all have to take the stairs, but like in an action way. Like, if I was there, I would have said, “Takin’ the stairs like a motherfucker!” as I action my way down the stairs with my gun raised, aimed, and my itchy trigger finger on the trigger. We first learn about what Red Queen is and that she is the advanced A.I. that controls the Hive. They come across the labs that were flooded by Red Queen. They will have to go through those labs to get to the Red Queen to, I suppose, shut it down? That’s because Red Queen went homicidal some number of hours ago. So they have to shut it down.

Also, it was stated that Red Queen has locked onto these dudes and that she knows they are there. I’m gonna guess that is bad? Or maybe it’s good. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. This movie isn’t giving me much to grasp onto. I know this was totally expected though…

I guess they tell us why the heat signature thing is important. The scene transitions show us the video game map of the Hive and so we can see which rooms they are going into. This takes us to Dining Hall B. What’s here are not dining tables, but big boxes that are used to contain monsters. Like, really gross goopy brain cocoons.

As the team continues to work through the Hive, people do say they really don’t want to know what Umbrella keeps in those crates or what goes on in this place. All they want to do is shut down Red Queen. They get to the room before the big boss battle with Red Queen and it’s this very bright room full of crazy futuristic lights and a narrow pathway to the door where the A.I. mainframe is, right? Well, they have a big brain hacker guy on the team and he opens the door, and One takes a few people in with a big ass bomb that will cause Red Queen to shut down and forced to reboot, but without the evil part. Naturally Red Queen is smarter than this so she locks them in and sends a laser through the room to some fun results for the members of the team who didn’t quite get out of the way fast enough.

So finally the movie does a cool thing. It has that laser thing and the guy in charge of shutting it down is not fast enough. Also, the laser is super smart. It knows that One, and the dude missing his fingers were on the floor, so it sends the laser closer to the floor. Then, as Fingers Malone tries to jump over the laser, it shoots up to cut him in a couple pieces. One uses some acrobatics to avoid the laser that time, but when the laser returns for a third pass, it does something real fancy. It creates a whole net of lasers which dices up One pretty good.

Now, I’m gonna be that guy. I think One got it fairly easy. Maybe the one chick who lost her head over this mission too, but it looked like she still was kind of thinking about stuff as that head was slipping off. Pretty much the very second the laser grid hit One, he was Deadsville. I’d rather go out that way than being eaten by an Umbrella monster. There’s not even one second of pain from One.

Anyway, the guy who wasn’t too good about the door and the laser part of the mission says that it’s time to try the bomb again because he’s pretty sure the weapons system is down. Spence, who is the guy Alice was stationed with at the mansion (her fake husband), is really smart. He says that maybe they shouldn’t try it because, ya know… lasers? Anyway, Quick Draw McDooropener, who is named Kaplan, pushes on. Alice helps and they are met by a computer hologram of a little girl. This is the representation of Red Queen. She says please leave and that all this is probably a bad idea, but then she also tells them they will all die down there.

And, yes… Since they shut down the mainframe, things start to happen. Doors open… ALL the doors open – even the ones on the weird brainy cocoon monster things in the supposed mess hall. One of the former lab technicians is now zombified and bites Rain. When one of the other soldiers tells the zombie lady to stay down, she keeps coming. He shoots her in both legs, but it doesn’t do anything. Eventually they light her up with many, many bullets.

That still doesn’t stop her. Matt realizes that the blood left behind by zombie lady is coagulated. That’s impossible because blood doesn’t do that until after you die. Soon, the rest of the employees approach. They are all zombified and unresponsive to their commands to stay back. They shoot them, but it doesn’t keep them from approaching.

It’s at this point in the movie that I’m realizing how much life kinda sucks. Allow me to explain. First, this is the part of the movie that I should start feeling some horror. You know, some real terror should be pulsating through my nerves. The problem is that this movie doesn’t have any interest in being scary. It is an action movie. It’s got no atmosphere whatsoever. It uses a hard rock/electronic score that usually accompanies an action movie. This came out in 2002. This is the era of The Fast and the Furious and xXx. That should give you some idea of the “attitude” of this movie. It’s for Southern California beefcakes who think shooting tactical assault rifles are cool and everyone is Action Man and there’s no room for pussies like these motherfuckin’ lab coat dorks that worked at Umbrella.

This movie is loaded with everyone who look, talk, and act the exact same. If any of these actors took the time to ask Paul W.S. Anderson what their motivations or backstories are for their characters, he’d probably go on and on about how they were top marksmen in some bullshit military outfit or mercenary group and they had X number of tours in hellholes and jungles and shit. These are not real people. These are guns and black outfits. That is it. So, no, even with gross monsters and zombies around, this is not a horror movie. It’s just action and some gore.

What makes this worse is my second point – the progress bar on the DVD program on my computer stopped working around the 15-minute mark of this movie. I have no idea where I am in this movie or how much more of this I have to endure.

Oh yeah. Alice is still here. You may have noticed I haven’t said much about Milla Jovovich’s Alice, like, hardly at all. I mean I’ve said she’s in the scene doing a thing with one of the people. Or I’ve even mentioned that she is wearing clothing that no normal human being has ever worn before. But what’s going on here with her? Is she not the lead star and the face of the franchise?

Yes, she is. However, she has spent half this movie in an amnesiatic state. She’s supposedly important, but no one has said what she is or how important she is. I get it, you want to ramp up to her doing something… anything? Okay, fine, but we need her to do more than have quick flashes of a life that isn’t real for her. We need her to actually do more than generally do things that anyone would do to try to protect themselves. Show her responding to a threat in a way that shows off training or something. Don’t just have her look generally confused the whole way through.

Honestly, we’ve seen nothing about Alice that indicates anything other than she’s played by the director’s wife.

Now, here we are, halfway through this movie, or at least I assume this is the halfway point because I’ve been watching this for about a decade and no movie has ever been longer than two decades… Alice finally shows some kind of aptitude. She was chased into a room by one thing that I definitely know appears in the game – the skinless demon dog things. There was a zombie in the room she was using to bunker herself. She does a spinny kicky thing and has a brief moment of connection to what One said to her earlier about being a security operative. She takes the zombie’s gun and starts blowing away monster dogs.

I wanted to say something about “Oh hey! Welcome to the movie! Better late than never!” but then the below happened and my brain imploded, then oozed out of my nose holes.

Okay, so it’s been three hours since my brain oozed from my nose face. For the most part, I think everything congealed back together properly. I don’t know how to use a fork anymore, but that’s okay. At least I can remember how to breathe again. That was scary. I can also continue with this article.

So, let’s check back in with this movie that is somehow still playing three hours later. Matt is here on a mission. He was not there at the mansion by accident when One and his merry men (and ladies) arrived to access the Hive. He’s a non-character to be sure because for most of the movie he’s been handcuffed, but he’s there looking for his sister, Lisa. She was someone we saw at the beginning getting her ass gassed.

He finds her, or I should say she finds him, but, uh-oh Spaghettios, she’s a zombie. It looks like for a second she recognizes him and is happy to see him and they are going to embrace, but she attacks him and tries to bite his stuffs. Alice brains her, and then has a flashback of this chick talking to her about getting access to the T-virus. Matt is not a cop for Raccoon City. He’s a government agent. He knew Umbrella was up to no good. Lisa, his sister, infiltrated Umbrella and had a contact, Alice. Not sure what might have happened, Matt wonders if this contact set up his sister. Either which way, I guess that didn’t end well.

Alice and Matt reunite with Kaplan, Spence, and Rain and they tell everyone that they have an hour to get out before Red Queen locks them inside. Alice decides to turn Red Queen back on to find out how to get out. Red Queen also explains that the T-virus got out through the air duct, so she had to kill everyone inside to prevent it from getting out. So she wasn’t so much homicidal, she was only doing what she had to do. She does help our team with a path to get out, but there’s a lot of zombies out there. Like an unbelievable amount of zombies.

Good news, though, Alice is starting to remember how to do bad ass action things in slow motion. So I guess that’s something. Kaplan gets bitten and a reanimated member of the team attacks Rain and she’s now got several bites that, according to Red Queen, will make her one of the zombies. As the crew continues to escape, Kaplan gets totally munched by the zombies. In a hope to save him from the zombies, it’s up to Rain to fire a shot to free him from a zombie, but she can’t focus or see. Alice frees Kaplan and he’s left with a single bullet to kill himself. But he can’t even do that. He shoots a zombie climbing on top of him instead of himself – which helps no one.

This movie is shit. Full of shit characters. Doing things I do not care about. I hate this movie.

Seriously, does anyone like Kaplan in this movie? Was anyone like, “Oh, I’m glad he survived. He was such a good guy and strong character who did good things.” Does anyone cosplay as Kaplan from the first Resident Evil movie? In fact, does anyone like anyone in these fucking movies? Is there anyone here in any of these six movies that people really like?

I kinda feel like the answer is no. But I also know the answer is an emphatic yes. They made a lot of movies in this franchise. Alice definitely appears in all of them. Then, I guess some other recurring characters come up later. I guess people think there are actual characters in this series.

I do feel that, you and I, we know this movie has no interest in characters. Just action set pieces.

People love these movies. What kind of people? Well, people who don’t like good movies. Okay, maybe people who don’t know what makes a movie good or not good. So, the general moviegoing public? There are things that are good about the 2000s. I mean the first two Spider-Man movies are pretty dope. And speaking of, the first movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe came out! There were many times I saw Tom Petty in concert in that decade.

But there are things I hate about the 2000s too. Namely the Resident Evil series. And 9/11. And the George W. Bush years. Movies like this that want to push a style way over content and characters and all the things you can do with an interesting topic. Oh! And the Underworld series…

Oh, goddammit, I’m gonna have to do Underworld, aren’t I?

Anyway, while I was lamenting the 00s, I guess Alice remembers something really important. There’s a cure! Remember there was blue stuff, which was the bad T-virus stuff. Then there was that Ecto Cooler stuff I said was also in that guy’s case at the beginning? Well, that’s the cure I guess.

Alice reveals that she was Matt’s sister’s contact on the inside. The only problem is she can’t remember if she betrayed her or not. She doesn’t know anything but that she needs the green stuff. The problem is that it’s gone, because no duh, we saw that. However, it turned out that it was Spence who recorded the conversation between Alice and Lisa, and he was the one who released the virus, and stole the stuff at the beginning of the movie. He got out just before the place locked down.

So Spence has the antivirus in his bag on the train. While he explains everything to Matt, Alice, and Rain, the one waterlogged zombie from earlier sneaks up from behind and bites him. He is able to prevent Alice from getting the gun after he takes care of the zombie. He leaves the room and locks the door by shooting out the controls. Matt, as angry as a wooden piece of board says, “I can’t believe he’s going to get away with this!”

Red Queen chimes in and says that she’s been a bad, bad girl.

Now, I think that is supposed to seem kind of badass or something. Like these characters that we care SO much about are gonna win the movie and the bad guy we hate SO much will be punished for being a jerk, but it really isn’t. It’s just mind numbing.

This thing shows up.

Now I think that is a video game thing, but it was running around about 10 minutes ago. Red Queen says that now it has fed on fresh DNA, it will mutate into a faster, better hunter. The rub with the antivirus, based on what Red Queen has to say, the antivirus is not a guarantee fix for the T-virus. She will give them the code to leave the room before that hunter thing breaks in, but in order to get that, Rain has to be killed. The Red Queen demands that Rain be killed, but, instead, Alice smashes the coms thing to shut Red Queen up. Kaplan comes around to shut Red Queen down again to open the doors to save the other three, and they get on the train with the virus and the antivirus to escape.

Alice, shoots Rain with the antivirus and then Kaplan while the train speeds toward the exit. Rain seemingly dies, and Alice weeps. Why she weeps, I do not know. It’s not like Rain was particularly nice or that Rain and Alice spent any real quality time together, but Rain wakes back up before Alice shoots her. The hunter monster thing starts attacking the train and nabs Kaplan – which ultimately wastes the antivirus given to him.

The monster uses its tongue to try to grab Alice. Matt tries to help Alice with the monster and is about to open this door to make the thing fall through the floor and out of the train, but Rain is there to block his way… as a zombie.

So that antivirus is apparently shit. Matt shoots Rain in the head that makes her fall backward onto the door button and the monster falls through and burns up in fire. The train comes into the station, but let’s not forget something very important… Matty boy was scratched by the monster thing. He’s probably not long for the non-zombie world.

And sure enough, his arm starts doing a weird twitchy thing as they talk about having the proof that the Umbrella people are bad guys and everything is gonna be fine. She plans to give him that shit antivirus, but just then weirdos in biohazard suits come in to take them away. They want Matt for the “Nemesis Program” and they have to knock Alice out.

She wakes up in the hospital. We hear the doctors say they are going to take her to a facility, run some tests, and find out if she’s infected. They also plan to reopen the Hive. She wakes up, rips all the shit out of her body, finds herself alone in the hospital she was taken to, so she finds the exit and learns that some real bad shit happened. Namely, the world is gone to balls.

She gets a shotgun from a cop car and plans to do… something… in another movie…

Guys… This movie suuuuuucks. There’s nothing particularly interesting or new to it. The effects and makeup are fine I guess, for 2002. The characters are just stock military-lite people. They say badass things. They do the hand movements that you always see military people do. They shoot guns. That’s it. Alice is a blank slate for like half the movie and, while she gets a little more competent later, she is hardly a super character herself.

The whole thing is devoid of tension or scares, two things you’d like your action/horror movie to have. The music is just the worst of the 2000s. This is a very bad movie and a terrible experience for me. As I previously mentioned, it has this style over quality element that confuses me a great deal. It’s possible to do all the things. You can be stylish, and write a handful of decent characters who can still do all the badass things, and you can work within your interesting concept of a powerful corporation making literal monsters. This is within most people’s capability… if the right people are involved.

So that’s maybe my biggest problem there… This movie seems to be singularly the vision of Paul W.S. Anderson. Remember, I did say that I appreciate his appreciation for the things he enjoys. But when you have the production company who made The Fantastic Four movie in the 90s involved, you may be asked to sacrifice certain things, or you may have the worst ideas massaged a bit more than the better ideas. This makes the entire movie joyless and a real stretch to not want to shove all the T-virus I can get my hands on right into my eye sockets.

That said, I had planned to cover the five sequels in October. I think I need to call an audible on that. Five of these movies would be very dangerous to not just my mind but my soul. I’ll need to think this over. For a while.

But the good news is that I don’t have to make a decision on that for a little while. Instead, I’m going to bounce back with some movies that should be more fun. First up, I’m going to look at 1973’s The Severed Arm which is the first screen appearance for the Tall Man himself, Angus Scrimm! So while I prepare for that, do me a favor and go over to the B-Movie Enema YouTube channel? There, you can find the first season of B-Movie Enema: The Series. You’ll also find several clips that I pull when I need some extra help fully describing something crazy. Also, check out the site’s Facebook page as well as Twitter too!

See you next week, Enemaniacs!