Resident Evil (Blu-ray) (2002)

"About as good as the genre gets.  Chris Kaltenbach, Baltimore Sun
"...a ditsy and dizzying spook-house thriller in high-tech, high-hemline gear.  Jan Stuart, Los Angeles Times
"Jovovich kicks butt like a champ and Rodriguez radiates...bad-ass attitude...  Joe Leydon, San Francisco Examiner
"...occupies a zone where science fiction and nightmares collide and intertwine.  Mick La Salle, San Francisco Chronicle
"...heart-pounding action.  Robert K. Elder, Chicago Tribune

Editor's Note The Umbrella Corporation's Vault, a secret facility located deep below Raccoon City, is sabotaged and a deadly virus is stolen. In the mansion that conceals another entrance to the Vault, Alice (Milla Jovovich) lies on the shower floor, naked except for the shower curtain. She can't remember anything but, as she dresses, she recalls memory fragments. Then, masked intruders burst through the windows. They tell Alice she is a Corporation agent living undercover in the mansion. She goes with them into the Vault to discover who sabotaged it. As they penetrate the Vault, trying to get to the Red Queen, the computer system at the heart of the facility, Alice and her confederates face many horrors--dead bodies suspended in water, blood-red flayed dogs, flesh-eating zombies, and "the Licker," a dynamically mutating monster. Basing RESIDENT EVIL on the popular video game, writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson delivers a tense, exciting science-fiction/horror film. Anderson and director of photography David Johnson shot the movie in rich silver-and-black, so that its few bursts of color are striking--like the image of the blonde Milla Jovovich in a very short crimson dress, with a trailing veil, and black boots dragging a silver axe behind her.

	Eric Mabius
	James Purefoy
	Michelle Rodriguez
	Milla Jovovich
	Alexander Berner - Editor
	David Johnson - Cinematographer
	Jorg Baumgarten - Art Director
	Marco Beltrami - Original Music By
	Marilyn Manson - Original Music By
	Paul W.S. Anderson - Producer
	Paul W.S. Anderson - Director
	Paul W.S. Anderson - Writer
	Richard Bridgland - Production Designer
	Robert Kulzer - Executive Producer

Entertainment Weekly
"...It's a splattery futuristic zombie thriller, designed as a jolt-a-minute freakout..." 03/15/2002 p.46-7

Eye Weekly 6 of 10
The latest movie adaptation of a popular video game, Resident Evil should be as gory as its namesake. Created in 1996 by Shinji Mikami, the original is one of a school of games -- including Silent Hill and The House of the Dead -- that feature creepy and explicitly cinematic environments in which plenty of zombies and mutants are ready to be blown up or hacked to pieces. Greatly indebted to George A. Romero's Dead trilogy and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, these games offer players the dread and charnel-house-like atmosphere they used to find in horror movies.The film itself is something of a cannibal, recycling its plot and imagery from The Day of the Dead and Aliens, right down to the inclusion of the latter film's hot-tempered Latina warrior, here played by Girlfight's Michelle Rodriguez...While writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson did a snazzy job with Mortal Kombat, his earlier game adaptation, here the task of creating a watchable movie is beyond his meagre abilities. It's a shame that Romero, who was originally attached to the project, didn't have a go at it. The undead deserve better than this. - Jason Anderson

Reel.com 8 of 10
Why Resident Evil succeeds is the result of well-executed expansion: making the ideas bigger, making the characters bigger, making the genre bigger. The dream of a video-game film is to stand on its own legs, to be its own entity, and though Resident Evil doesn't quite reach that pinnacle, it comes close. The entirely unsubtle combination of genres (sci-fi, action, horror) is audacious and confrontational. It's too ballsy to be an homage and too self-assured to be derivative, so it ends up being something different -- a direct but dreamy story that uses the basic conventions of horror to wind up at a chilling sci-fi conclusion...At its core, Resident Evil is a slasher movie that closely follows that genre's rules -- claustrophobic enclosed location, finite group of protagonists/victims, one leader, enthusiastic and imaginative death scenes, and a crippling sense of dread and suspense. The horror film in a sci-fi setting is hardly original -- Alien and even Resident Evil director Paul Anderson's own Event Horizon have done it before (and better) -- but Jovovich's convincing foray into ass-kicking is quality entertainment, and, like all good slasher movies, there are a number of great kills... - Neal Block