Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

Their tagline is: My name is Alice and I remember everything. My tagline is: My name is Staci and I remember the first Resident Evil. It's a much better film than this transient follow-up.

Also based on the popular video game, Apocalypse picks up exactly where Resident Evil left off. We see Alice (Milla Jovovich), a former employee of the insidious Umbrella Corporation, discovering that she's been infected with the deadly T-virus and left for dead in The Hive, an underground research facility. She was to be used as a human lab rat, but the zombies killed all the scientists so Alice is free -- free to roam the streets of Raccoon City, where everyone has been infected and turned into hungry undead things. Confused? If you haven't seen the first film, you sure as heck will be. The filmmakers try to bridge the gap with lots of voiceovers, but the fact remains that Apocalypse is not a very good standalone film. Enjoying and understanding it is definitely predicated on having seen Resident Evil.

Let me back up: maybe not "enjoying". I've seen the first movie about four times, and I really like it; it never gets old. It's a gleefully blood-spattered, shoot 'em up, slice 'em and dice 'em, horror sci-fi popcorn flick to the nth degree. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is a joyless exercise infected with "sequelitis" and serves only as a forum for one explosion after another.

Alice is still a pretty cool character, but she doesn't have the depth she had in the first film and if you don't already know her, you won't care what happens to her. Her cohorts this time around are competent actors, but they are given precious little to do. Sienna Guillory plays Jill Valentine (the actual heroine of the video game), a demoted member of the Umbrella Corporation's Special Tactics and Rescue Services (S.T.A.R.S.); Sandrine Holt is Terri Morales, a news reporter who gets caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; Oded Fehr plays Carlos Oliviera, gun-toting captain of the UBCS; and Mike Epps is L.J., a S.T.A.R.S sergeant. Their task is to find Angie (Sophie Vavasseur), a little girl who holds the key to their escape from the ravaged Raccoon City. Barring the way between the crew and Angie are several flesh-eating zombies; unscrupulous military types; undead dogs; and worst of all, a mutated man (Matthew G. Taylor) turned into an indestructible biological killing machine code-named Nemesis.

Although the original film's writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson did pen the Apocalypse screenplay, first-time director Alexander Witt does not carry his visual style forth, nor does he have the ear for music and score that Anderson did. The first film had a very memorable, affecting, blood-boiling soundtrack featuring the likes of Marilyn Manson, Wayne Static (Static X), Corey Taylor (Slipknot), Rammestein, and Saliva. I practically wore that soundtrack out when I got it, and I still play it from time to time. If I were to get a CD of the original score from Apocalypse, I'd probably use it as a Frisbee for my Chihuahua to play with. (Speaking of dogs, the zombie Dobermans are back. They are one of the few bright spots in the sequel, but they aren't onscreen for very long and they are not dispatched nearly as assiduously as they were before.)

I'm not saying that a sequel should be exactly the same as its predecessor, but if so few of the fun, kick-ass elements from Resident Evil are not carried forth, then why bother?

Review by Staci Layne Wilson for Horror.com