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'Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City' Takes Us Back to the Beginning

By Nate Parker | Film | October 8, 2021 |

By Nate Parker | Film | October 8, 2021 |

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What’s a film series to do after the great evil is defeated, the hero has retired, and the undead finally rest? Start over at the beginning, of course! Because beating a dead horse actually makes sense when it comes back to life. As TK pointed out in his review of The Final Chapter, the original series turned into an exhausting affair. Weighed down by its increasingly bonkers mythology and a lead actress tired of the whole thing, the series needed to be put down like a freshly-risen corpse. But a lack of new ideas never stopped a movie studio before and why should it now? So we return to Racoon City, back where it all started. It’s 1998, and Claire Redfield is determined to discover what the Umbrella Corporation is up to before all hell breaks loose.

I have to admit it’s an effective trailer, and a really great use of 4 Non Blondes. The cast is stacked with quality genre actors. It might lack the sexual one-two combination of Milla Jovovich and Oded Fehr in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but Kaya Scodelario (Crawl), Robbie Amell (Upload), Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp), Tom Hooper(Umbrella Academy), and long-time Pajiba favorite Donal Logue all in the same movie? That’s a promising start. Even better, the director\screenwriter in charge is Johannes Roberts of the hugely effective 47 Meters Down and Storage 24, a great little monster movie that was much better before we knew Noel Clarke was a shitbird. That’s a great pedigree, and I would love it if this fresh injection of talent made Resident Evil scary again. Certainly the characters and game callbacks are there - that Licker introduction couldn’t be better. All that remains is to see how it’s put together.

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Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City premieres exclusively in theaters on November 24. As of yet there’s no comment from Sony Pictures Entertainment on the irony of going to the theater during a pandemic to watch a horror movie about the beginnings of an apocalyptic plague. I desperately hope some mouthbreather in a red cap refuses to believe zombies are real and attempts to kiss one.