A terrible fright / We’re scrounging tonight / for weapons in a winter wonderland!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Horror won big at the Academy Awards! While Sinners and Frankenstein carted off a combined seven categories on behalf of the 2025 field, Zach Cregger’s child-abduction plot-twister Weapons darted out of its own dark corner and took home Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan — best known by Gen-X as Field of Dreams‘ Concerned Wife and Uncle Buck’s annoyed girlfriend — who was completely unrecognizable as the mysterious Aunt Gladys, a fiend who one day might be called “iconic” once enough time has passed that revealing her existence isn’t a major spoiler in itself. (I hated skating around her gloriously creepy performance in my own write-up, but knowing nothing made her entrance all the more unnerving to see.)

Like Cregger’s debut Barbarian, Weapons was a sharply crafted, time-shifting puzzlebox that didn’t even reveal the spooky subgenre at its core till you’re lured halfway inside. Its staggering box office performance was even more surprising, and heralded this year’s high-grossing horror wave that’s seen films like Obsession and Backrooms luring millions back to theaters without the sort of old-fashioned Hollywood star power that once made for reliable audience bait. It’s less surprising that some corporation would take heed and entice Cregger to inject new life and/or financial viability into one of their stagnant IPs.

The lucky winner of his undivided attention is Resident Evil, the long-running game series that scrounged up seven films’ worth of zombie-virus mayhem, some of which I watched on a DVD boxed set I bought at a yard sale for a buck, then paid it forward to Goodwill. (I don’t remember how many of ’em it had — at least the first two.) Of the games, I only played through a few levels’ worth of RE4 on my son’s old PS2 — maybe 15 years ago? — till I found myself wishing there were a Bethesda Studios-style option for Leon to shove the President’s daughter Ashley off a roof, accept the bad karma and keep playing through. So I’m not an authority on the world of Raccoon City or the Umbrella Corporation unless seeing dozens of RE cosplayers in every Dragon Con parade counts.

The Gist: The eighth RE installment ignores the previous reboot and stars young stick figure Austin Abrams — Weapons‘ hapless, homeless junkie who ran afoul of crooked cops and Avon Lady witchcraft — as a medical transporter named Bryan who could use extra cash to deal with a recent complication in his love life, and who complies with HIPAA by never looking inside the shoulder-strapped organ coolers he’s paid to deliver. In the middle of one wintry night he’s offered extra bucks to tote one such confidential lunch bag to another faraway hospital. Unfortunately his goal is in the heart of Raccoon City, but clearly he hasn’t played the games or else he’d recoil at the name and go straight home.

That’s it, that’s the bare-bones plot of the whole film, barely the length of a DLC mini-game. Here’s Point A, there’s Point B, go. Call it Stopping by BLOODS on a Snowy Evening. The first half is an arduous trek on blizzard-blanketed roads through shivery forests, where the drive is fine even without chains (as a Midwestern blizzard survivor I don’t get New England’s tire-chain fixation) until a distraught pedestrian runs out in the middle of the road. There’s a deep misunderstanding, an unhelpful patrol officer, a quiet farmhouse, an occasional animal, and stark raving fear as certain elements reveal themselves one by one. The second half, Bryan arrives in Raccoon City having truly been through some stuff — not dead yet but absolutely not home free, either. Bloody hi-jinks ensue again and again!

The familiar faces: Emily Piggford (Ruthye’s mom from Supergirl) is the doctor serving as Bryan’s NPC quest-giver. Once he emerges from the woods, he’s not-so-warmly greeted by Academy Award Nominee Paul Walter Hauser (last seen in the Naked Gun revival) and Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) as corporate employees who know what’s in his bag.

Jo Martin (Doctor Who‘s Fugitive Doctor!) is a receptionist at Point A. Personnel at Point B who might or might not help save the day include Severance‘s Zach Cherry (I just saw him in Camp Miasma!), Griffin Newman (Prime Video’s Tick reboot), and Will Merrick (FI: The Movie, Silo). Cregger’s lead repertory player, his wife Sara Paxton, phones in her part as Bryan’s Concerned Girlfriend.

The Impressions: So very unlike him, Cregger resists the urge to convolute the timeline and whittles the proceedings down to an efficiently back-to-basics Scary Movie — arguably extra basic, with barely an ensemble for the monsters to pace their one-by-one shredding. Maybe the IP’s proprietors mandated the simplicity, or it was a self-imposed challenge, or it was the influence of the normally solo writer/director welcoming a co-writer for once — Shay Hatten, a veteran of three Zack Snyder films and three in John Wick’s world (including Ballerina). The duo shows a clear affection for gaming and has tremendous fun working the mechanics into the film. A few scenes switch to FPS mode (even though most of the games are TPS) without feeling as cheesy as Doom did. The play-by-play progression nails the vicarious walkthrough feeling and you can almost sense Bryan leveling up a little as he goes. Rarely seen in other game-based films: the never-ending search for loot, especially ammo and new weapons. Each time Bryan enters a new space, any gamers watching may find themselves scouting the background for containers as he rifles through various drawers and boxes. I half-expected a flashing tutorial prompt for the audience to perform an action command in the opening scene: “Tap ‘Square’ to sign delivery receipt.”

Too bad Bryan’s controller doesn’t give him any cheat codes to override the obstacles ahead, and no time for side quests to earn new perks or skills. Same as with Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger is not precious with his characters — nobody’s safe, no innocent is out-of-bounds (one of the tensest sequences is a stealth-level walk through a maternity ward repainted in slaughterhouse-chic), and the body-horror madness can happen to anyone at any time. The creatures (of course never called “zombies”) come in assorted shapes and power levels, are uniformly persistent yet not smart, and often have their own special attacks. The most relentless among the phantasmagoria is a Lovecraftian creature with Road Runner-esque resilience that just won’t stop amalgamating. The jump-scary monster parade is at its horrifically prettiest in the first half, when cinematographer Dariusz Wolski turns the wintertime surroundings into a frosted twilight flecked with just enough visible light sources to cut through the murk…including, in a bit of inspired visual continuity, one particular set of lights that persists in the distance in several scenes.

When it isn’t coasting on “Let’s Play” channel showmanship, Resident Evil also campaigns for the title of the year’s funniest horror films (narrowly edging out The Bone Temple‘s Headbanger’s Ball climax). In Weapons as well as in the Apple+ crime drama Wolfs, Abrams has shown off an uncanny knack for embodying jittery, put-upon losers who’d rather be anywhere than where they are, and a gift for old-school slapstick timing that’s a perfect vessel for Cregger’s frequently morbid wit. It’s tough to imagine Bryan surviving all the way to the end as his high-pitched screams pierce the night skies at sighting each new disgusting opponent. He mumbles strings of expletives to himself for lack of a scene-buddy while stubbornly shambling forward. He struggles to figure out each new weapon he finds, sucks at conserving ammo, and is The Worst at the lock-picking mini-game.

In a normal survival-horror film Bryan would’ve died in the first ten minutes and someone else — anyone else — would be Our Hero. Abrams gives him an easygoing charm that comes through even when he’s yelping at volume-11 and wondering why all of this is happening to him and why is this even happening. We feel sorry for the dork, especially the majority of us who can’t say we’d do any better if this were real life and not a game and we were the dork dropping shotgun shells everywhere or ignoring every stranger’s zombie-bite symptoms.

Technically it’s Zach Cregger’s Worst Film to Date, but he’s still three-for-three in quality terms, even earning a PlayStation trophy for Highest-Rated Video Game Film in Tomatometer History as of this writing. The ending isn’t quite the relieving denouement we’d crossed our fingers hoping for, but it is consistent with his established ethos. He refuses to feign any sort of higher-level meaning, unless you count “Man Vs. Unnature” as a vaguely Hemingway-ish riff, minus any boredom. But it’s a fiendishly wild ride, and convincing proof-of-concept for an ongoing film series called Austin Abrams Shrieks at Everything. As it happens, the trailers in front of our showing included one for his next film, the underwater disaster thriller Whalefall, in which his shrieking will come from inside the belly of an enraged whale. Here’s hoping it’s not a zombie whale.

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Resident Evil end credits, but they reveal one of the storyboard artists was former comics creator Richard Bennett, the Additional Voices include Kellen Goff (a voice actor who’s guested at one or two of the comic-cons we’ve attended), and the overabundance of diacritic in the crews’ names is no coincidence — much of this was filmed in the Czech Republic, premier horror-flick spawn point for some 30+ years and counting.