Buffalo Film: Zach Cregger’s adaptation delivers laughs, zombies and an original story

By Matthew Turner

(Above: Austin Abrams as Bryan Hodukavich in ‘Resident Evil’)

Zach Cregger brings franchise fanboys their worst nightmare: an original Resident Evil film, and that is good enough.

For the uninitiated, Resident Evil is a horror franchise full of impressive highs and embarrassing lows over the past 30 years. Serving as a bridge between George A. Romero’s zombies and The Walking Dead mania that we are familiar with today, Resident Evil provided gamers with a uniquely terrifying experience in its titular debut back in 1996. While the narrative style and quality have shifted back and forth over the years, one thing has remained consistent, aside from the zombies: the fan mentality.

As is the case with any franchise’s fanbase, Resident Evil followers often act as pretentious snobs ready to eviscerate anything that deviates from the norm or switches it up. For the rest of us, however, the franchise has been a consistent object of fascination that shifts from ammunition-conservative horror to bombastic insanity, as seen in Resident Evil 6. Naturally, when Cregger announced that the first film following his Oscar-winning Weapons was a Resident Evil film — and one not adapting any established characters or storylines, at that — the purists had to attack.

Fanboy culture is an epidemic ready to shoot down any source of originality or change, in such a way that storytelling is trending toward being less exciting than in recent decades. Think of The Matrix Resurrections, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Like Resident Evil, these films posed as fascinating, daring and flawed entries in franchise filmmaking that sought to break the formula and subsequently angered the fanboys. Luckily, in the case of Cregger’s Resident Evil, he has pulled off this feat on a more mainstream-friendly level that is sure to please any skeptics.

Like Weapons and Barbarian before, Cregger structures his narrative on the everyday person who is thrust into bizarre and gruesome threats that their heroes are wildly unprepared for. This recipe for horror and suspense luckily folds in Cregger’s signature humor in a way that makes us laugh and scream, knowing full well that we would react the same way. Our protagonist in the film is Bryan, a courier tasked with delivering a top-secret package to a hospital during a blizzard. The location of this hospital will speak to fans of the franchise, albeit in a heavy-handed way that would make even the uninitiated notice the importance of this setting through the film’s heavy-handed dialogue. This choice to establish the film’s climax in a city central to the franchise bogs down any attempt to make it a true original, and, along with the need to cram many meta-referential jokes into the dialogue, sadly makes this film Cregger’s weakest screenplay.

Where Resident Evil succeeds is as a gory star vehicle for young character actor Austin Abrams, who previously gave the funniest performance in recent horror memory in Weapons last year. Whereas Abrams played an emaciated drug addict with Carrey-esque physicality in Weapons, audiences are now treated to a cherub-faced goofball that is showered in goo and viscera while shrieking like a “SpongeBob” side character. The laughs come more than the screams in Resident Evil, but it gives the franchise a much-needed shot of adrenaline that the previous film adaptations lacked. Purists of the games and Paul W.S. Anderson’s works of gonzo auteurism need not apply.