Just months after his sophomore solo feature “Weapons” won Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan at the Oscars, Zach Cregger is ready to return to theaters with “Resident Evil.” At CinemaCon, Sony shared the first footage of the film, based on the video game series of the same name.
It looks bonkers.
Austin Abrams’ central character walks up to a house during a snowy night asking to use their phone after having “a little bit of a problem on the road.”
Abrams’ character calls his partner, saying, “Hey babe, I’m really sorry we got disconnected earlier, but some things have happened. I’m in like, a seriously f–ked up situation right now, and it looks like there’s a chance we might not get to talk to each other again.”
As he says this, he is shown encountering a series of monsters and creatures in the dark, including some that dive off a building towards him and explode onto a series of cars. The eerie sound of a failed phone call provides musical backing for the trailer.
“Resident Evil” (or “Biohazard,” as it’s known in Japan) is a horror video game franchise created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara in 1996 for Capcom. The series follows a series of stories in a world where various zombie-like monsters and infections wreak havoc on a collection of cities and towns.
The games mostly oscillate between the survival horror and action horror subgenres. The survival horror games, such as the original “Resident Evil” and the seventh game, “Resident Evil: Biohazard,” place players in highly tense situations with limited weaponry (“Biohazard” upped the ante further by placing players in the first-person perspective).
The action horror games (such as “Resident Evil 4”) meanwhile swap out the high tension for a more madcap tone, with big guns and bigger foes. The most recent game, “Resident Evil Requiem,” mixed these two genres, placing new protagonist Grace Ashcroft in the survival horror tone and beloved returning hero Leon S. Kennedy back in his action horror mode.
This dichotomy makes Cregger a natural choice to take over the franchise, with both “Barbarian” and “Weapons” demonstrating the filmmaker’s ability to switch between high tension and pure movie madness.
The franchise has been brought to the big screen several times before, starting with 2002’s “Resident Evil,” which was written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson starring Milla Jovovich. That version of the series got six films before getting rebooted in 2021 with Johannes Roberts’ “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.” Cregger’s take marks the eighth attempt at adapting these games, thus far.
The post ‘Resident Evil’: Zach Cregger Welcomes Audiences to a Snowy, Monster-Filled Thrill Ride appeared first on TheWrap.
