Resident Evil fans have it so good. A steady release of high-quality games from Capcom and now this: a sincere, tense, funny, icky, and overall astonishingly competent horror caper movie adaptation from a horror director who’s quickly establishing himself as one of the greats. In a way, it’s confounding that a great screen adaptation of Resident Evil hasn’t happened sooner. This game series has always been a B-movie pastiche, freely lifting elements from the likes of Dawn of the Dead, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (among many others), yet every previous movie take on Resident Evil to date has been at best sort of okay, and at worst outright unwatchable. The core problem is that adapting a Resident Evil game story to a movie is a fool’s errand. The video games are effectively horror-themed set pieces strung together by two-dimensional action heroes whose appearance, personality, and motivations turn on a dime between games. The many-tentacled, writhing heart of ‘Resident Evil’ Take it from someone who’s played all the games (yes, all of them, even the one on Java dumbphones), following the overarching plot of Resident Evil – which can be summarized as a rat’s nest of monologuing science perverts working their way through the virus alphabet – is not a useful way to spend your time. Resident Evil director Zach Cregger sweeps all that nonsense away and zeroes in on why Resident Evil has been a video game horror titan for three decades. The conceit is simple, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier tasked with transporting a box from A-B. Unfortunately for Bryan, that hyphen between A and B is filled with nightmarish biological weapons, each more disgusting and unkillable than the last. Cregger’s script, which stays locked in on Bryan and ditches all but the most essential exposition, simply puts various obstacles in his way and then shows him finding entertaining ways around them. Watching Bryan work through these endless miniature problems (a locked gate, an RV blocking a tunnel, an unresponsive elevator, and so on) doubles his character development… and is also game design 101 realized on screen. Perhaps the bits where Bryan repeatedly fumbles with guns, says he’s only familiar with them through games, and then yelps in fear as he sprays bullets wildly in the general direction of an oncoming monstrosity are a little on the nose, but it’s undeniably Resident Evil. “In a gooey and disgusting manner that’d make David Cronenberg blush” Cregger also smartly cranks up the volume on the biological horror of Resident Evil (the series is literally called Biohazard in Japan). The franchise will always be primarily associated with zombies, but anyone who’s gotten more than a few hours into these games will know that these are entry-level monsters. By the time you’ve picked up an acid grenade launcher or explosive crossbow, you’ll be squaring off with some asymmetrical flesh abomination bristling with equal amounts of eyeballs and claws. That side of the franchise is not only fully present, but delivered in a gooey and disgusting manner that’d make David Cronenberg blush. Cregger doesn’t even really bring many existing Resident Evil monsters to the screen, though what’s terrorizing poor Bryan could easily slot into any of the games. But, as much as Cregger brings to the movie, Resident Evil wouldn’t work half as well without the star-making turn from Austin Abrams. I’ve seen many people compare him to Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead movies in this and, while I’d love to have a more original take, the comparison is impossible to deny. Both Bryan and Ash Williams are pitch-perfect everymen, both amusingly narrate their own misfortunes, and both successfully tiptoe the line between horror and comedy. That last element might be the most surprising, as I didn’t expect Resident Evil to be an outright horror comedy with a finely honed sense of the absurd. But perhaps comedy is the unsung final piece of the Resident Evil puzzle. Early games were unintentionally funny (Jill sandwich and so on), but by 2005’s Resident Evil 4, the franchise was already leaning hard into its inherent ludicrousness. Cregger capitalizes on that, gradually building towards the movie’s punchline final shot. Resident Evil is easily the best video game movie adaptation to date, though that’s not exactly a difficult feat to achieve. What’s more impressive is that it’s also easily one of the finest horror movies of the year, delivering a straight-down-the-line masterclass in horror cinema that’s confident enough not to have to worry about deconstructing the genre or ironic winks at the camera.