Attention zombie fans the end of the world is near or at least you’ll wish it were after enduring another installment of the videogame turned into a movie series. ‘Resident Evil’. Gamers are advised skip the cinema and save your ten bucks toward your next videogame.

With the dearth of bad news that fills our newsstands today, it’s no surprise that people gravitate toward the idea of the Apocalypse, the big shebang where it all goes horribly wrong and there’s only a bunch of heavily armed saps left to pick up the pieces. This is how ‘Resident Evil 2’, a movie that smells worse than the rotting corpses it portrays, can become the number one movie in America, a nation that skates along Armageddon every day.

Zombie films deliver us an end of the world scenario that we can deal with. It will be a simple life when civilization goes to hell. If a shuffling mob of flesh eating ghouls gets in your way, you shoot them in the head of course, otherwise they won’t stay down. There are basic zombie rules that you can follow as you and your fellow renegade survivors try to stay alive.

Too bad ‘Resident Evil 2’ doesn’t bother to abide by many zombie traditions and in fact has the undead masses play second corpse to an inane plot thread involving the evil umbrella corporation and our heroes fighting some experiment that looks like a leftover from the ‘DOOM’ videogames. Which if you’re the target demographic of 14-24 year old boys, have already beaten many times in a deathmatch game that delivered the kind of excitement that ‘Resident Evil 2’ will never achieve.

To compensate., the filmmakers throw us a couple of scantily clad heroines to oogle this time around. So if watching Milla Jovovich painfully pull herself through one ridiculous scene after another isn’t enough for you, the sequel introduces to us a hardened hottie street cop whose uniform seems to come from laracroftwear.com.

It doesn’t take long to see that ‘Resident Evil 2’ offers the zombie genre nothing new. You’re better off renting Danny Boyle’s ’28 Days Later’ which introduced the ‘olympic-class’ zombies to the undead mix, or pick up the recently released ultimate ‘Dawn of the Dead’ box set on DVD which features three versions of the timeless George Romero classic.

I suppose the only good news this week is for zombie fearing survivialists that live in one of the 43 states where military style assault weapons can now be picked up at the local sporting goods store before the dead walk the earth.

Stocking up on canned goods and hand grenades, for Movie Magazine this is Purple.

© 2004 - Purple - Air Date: 9/15/04