Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast that watches all the zombie movies we can stomach. Today, we have a new film, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil from 2026.

You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something?

Zombie.

Zombie?

What's a zombie?

Well a zombie…there’s um... ...Mr. Bill there’s... ...the living dead.

They are the living dead.

Get me the zombies!

Against an army of zombies, no armies could stand!

The unburied dead are coming back to life and seeking human victims.

I’ve seen the dead rise.

Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Zombie Strains. I'm John.

And I'm Andy.

And producer Brad is not here again. One of these days, we'll get him to join us on one of these modern zombie film episodes, but that is not today. Today, fresh from the movie theater, we are watching the brand new, hot off the press Resident Evil movie directed by Zach Cregger.

Yeah.

Yeah. Where did you see it? Just out of curiosity, what was the environment you saw in it?

I saw it just at the local theater a couple of minutes from my house. I would say the theater was maybe half full.

Okay. And did you have, was it a modern theater with recliners and all that good stuff?

Yeah. It's all the good stuff, yeah.

I saw it at the Imagine Theater, which had, of course, all that stuff. Though they do sell booze there, I didn't get any, because it was 2 in the afternoon.

I do want to talk about if the audience in your theater was vocal at all during this movie, because they were a little vocal in my viewing.

Yeah. We should talk about that. That's interesting to me. And I have many other questions. So let me just do a quick breakdown of the movie we're watching. As we mentioned, it's Resident Evil from 2026. Directed by Zach Cregger, written by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatton. It stars Austin Abrams, who you may know from. Euphoria, Paper Towns. He did have the role in Weapons as the drug addict. And apparently, Zach Cregger liked him so much, he asked him to be the lead in this movie.

I didn't make that connection, but I remember we called out how good that character was in Weapons.

Yeah. Well, I think he was. I think Zach saw it too. So yeah. Speaking of Zach, we have Zach Cherry, who is an actor you would recognize. He was in Severance, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Succession. He plays the lead scientist at the end, which is very fun. And then Callie Reese, who's most famous for True Detective. I bring her up because she's famous. Her part in this movie is not that big, but again, we'll talk about all of that later.

So she was in the fourth season of True Detective, right? The Alaska one. Yeah.

Yeah. With Jodie Foster.

Yeah. That was fantastic.

Yes. Yeah. So we are going to do spoilers today, but we're not going to do them right away. We want to give people something to chew on about whether or not they want to see this movie. So I thought I'd ask Andy a couple of zombie related questions and movie related questions that don't have spoilers in them or have light spoilers. And then when we do full spoilers, I will announce that.

Okay.

Andy, do you want to give us just 30 seconds, not the whole movie, but just the premise so people can know what they're getting into?

Yeah. This movie follows the character Brian, who is a medical courier, one of those people that transports organs to hospitals and stuff.

Like the Flash.

Yes. And this movie, he is really the only major character in this movie, which is an interesting choice. I have a feeling we might be discussing that later. And the movie opens with him being tasked to bring a bag with an unidentified medical organ or something like that in it to a hospital in Raccoon City. Yes. Which is a very goofily named city that you will recognize from the Resident Evil video game franchise, perhaps. The movie follows his odyssey from all the way into Raccoon City and to that hospital. Along the way, early in the movie, he gets run off the road and he has some weird, creepy horror movie encounters. And as he gets closer to his goal, the horror and the tension escalate quite dramatically.

Yes.

How is that for an overview?

That's pretty good, though. I have questions about the escalating tension.

But before we go there. As I said that, I was like, actually, that's not true, but we'll get into that in a minute.

Well, I also want to talk about what is our video game history? Because I think, without doing spoilers, video game and understand... So I have never played a Resident Evil video game. But I could clearly tell when there were segments that were either stripped from the video game or designed to look like a new entry into a video game scenario.

Okay. I want to know if we can talk about that in this no spoilers section. I want to know what parts you clocked as being pulled from the game as someone who has never played the games.

Yes. And that speaks to the first thing I want to talk about. Let's talk about just video game history a little bit, because I don't think, you told me that you haven't played like every single Resident Evil game. I think you said you played four and maybe two. What was it?

Yeah. So I've played the first one, which is way back in the 90s, I think on the Playstation. Yeah. I've played it on a modern machine and emulation. I've played the remake of the second one, which came out maybe five or 10 years ago for modern consoles. I played Resident Evil 4, which I think is one of the better regarded ones on the GameCube. And lastly, because I know you were just dying, you were dying to get a definitive list of exactly which ones I played. I have played Resident Evil 7 on modern consoles.

All right.

And that one's quite recent.

And I have played none of those. Now, I have played video games. Andy, as you know, I play all kinds of video games. I play Slay the Spire and I also play Slay the Spire 2. And there was that one month where I played Hades until I escaped the underworld and then went back to Slay the Spire. So it's not like I don't play video games, but I don't play video games like Resident Evil. Now, I know there isn't just one type of Resident Evil games. So when I say that, I mean either first-person exploration games or third-person, not necessarily shoot them up, but problem-solving games where there's a lot of three-quarter height walls for you to hide behind and stuff like that. But you do play those on the regular.

Yeah, John, it is kind of interesting. I've noticed this about you. Listeners, when John says he plays Slay the Spire and Slay the Spire 2, I don't think just the word play conveys the depth of John's addiction to these games. I have also played Slay the Spire and I thought I'd played it quite a bit and fairly seriously, and then John started posting screenshots of some of his games and I mean, are we 1,000 hours in it? What's your Steam hour count?

Yeah. So on the old one, the original, it was 1,700. Now, that was over many years, but not that many.

Two years, right.

And then the early release came out in, oh my gosh, I don't want to do this math. It came out in March and I just noticed that 327 hours on the new one.

So well, it is interesting. You are an example of a person, I think, I know a number of people that are like this that they do play games, but they play like a small number of games really, really devotedly. Whereas I play every shiny new thing that comes out for my console, but I play it once and then I move quickly on. So I have played a lot of stuff, but nothing with the depth that you've done this latest fire. But that includes some Resident Evil games.

And I do, I always do this. And maybe it's from early video games, you know, when I was hooked on early in the life of video games and Civilization 2, which is something that required a lot of math and thinking. I actually was into Madden 2000 for a long time because there was a club mode where you could manage the club. I think Slay the Spire and games like that appeal to me because I've got to be keeping track of like 10 things at once and I kind of like that.

Well, I will say that I don't, I would not call myself a fan of the Resident Evil games, but my favorite type of game is the genre that the Resident Evil games created, survival horror. So if I were to list my favorite games, they would be things like Dead Space and Alien Isolation, and maybe, I don't know if this system shock, just games with a survival horror element to them. But for whatever reason, I've always kind of bounced off the Resident Evil games.

I want to say one more thing about video games here, and then I have a question. I want to ask a broader question about the movie we actually saw. So, there's a reason I don't play horror video games, and it's the same reason for years I actually didn't go to horror movies. I'm actually a huge chicken, and I remember playing a Doom game that was not that sophisticated, and having some pixelated monster jump out at me, and like nearly having a heart attack. So, when my friend was showing me Alien Isolation, I was like, I'm never playing that game or any game like it. Like, it's too much for me. It's too immersive, I think, is the problem.

Interesting. I am the opposite. I'm not especially timid when it comes to video games. But weirdly, I would say that Resident Evil 7 is the only horror game I can think of that I decided was too high stress for me to play.

Okay. So, it's a matter of tolerance.

Yeah. Interesting.

Well, we'll talk about that more. So, there is another aspect of the movie I wanted to talk to you before we got to spoilers. And we had in our conversation on Colony, we brought up a great point about fast versus slow zombies. And what are the differences there? What are the strengths and weaknesses? But this movie prompted me to ask a slightly different variation of that question is, what is a zombie even anyway? Like, most of the antagonists in this movie, and we won't go into the details of them until we get to the spoilers, are not humanoid walking zombies, right? There's multi-limbed constructs and giant vomit zombies and all kinds of stuff. But they're like the sort of walking dead, living dead style zombie is just, it's around, but it's not a focus of the film at all, and there's a bunch of different varieties. So I have to ask the question, these are like a scientific mutation, in theory, in this movie. I mean, is it a zombie at this point? If it is sort of unrecognizable, do you understand the question I'm asking?

I do, and I don't know if I have a good answer for you. So stop me if this is too spoilery. So this movie has zombies in it, at least by a certain standard definition. It has resurrected bodies of people that are no longer alive, that have a lot of the surface features of like a Romero zombie. They're mindless, they seem hungry or hostile in some way. They aren't intelligent, but they are hard to put down and they will keep coming at you. And they look like Romero zombies, right?

And the beginning of the movie, and this will be obvious to you from the trailer, features a zombie that is very much what I would consider a Romero style zombie, right? But a fast moving one. It's later in the film where we get a bunch of different ones that don't look anything like that, that sort of prompted my question.

Yeah, well, when we learn what is the driving force behind first the zombies, and later the more extravagant monstrosities that Brian runs into, I think the cause or the agent of creation or control of a zombie, it can take away the zombie-ness that I look for, if that makes sense. And I feel that was the case in this movie, while even the beginning where there is the most straightforward zombie you can imagine, once you learn what's powering it, you might say, it started to feel less like the kind of zombies I'm here for. And by the time we get to the more extravagant monsters, which are also, you know, reanimated corpses.

And are amazing. So let me be clear, this is not a complaint.

Yeah, they look really cool. By the time, by halfway through the movie, I no longer felt like what we were seeing could be described as zombies, although it is mindless, hostile, hungry, reanimated corpses.

Right. And I have a sort of follow up question to that, which is one thing that this shares with other movies based on video games. And I think more recent zombie movies in general is now that Millennials and Gen Z are making films, a generation that notably played more video games than Gen X. We are getting more video game style narratives, and I'll tell you what I mean by that, specifically around the zombies. An older zombie movie does not bother to offer you a variety of zombies. Right? They may offer you unique situations, like famously in Return of the Living Dead, there's Tar Man who's been trapped in a barrel of oil and is covered with oil, but it's still just another zombie despite being a unique looking one. But we saw it in The Last of Us, we see it in other, you know, video games have to offer a variety of foes and antagonists to stay interesting to some level. And I wanted to get your take on that. Like, how much do you think it, definitely in a Resident Evil movie, that feels like that's why that's driven. But I think, you know, well, eventually in 35 years when we get to this, we'll do more in this current area, like I would imagine we'll see a trend towards more zombie diversification driven by by video games. What do you think about that?

I think that's a great point, and I think you're right. I have been waiting and watching in our zombie movies. If you follow the podcast, normally at the time of this recording, we're in the early 70s. Yeah. And as of the early 70s, we have not seen zombie diversification in the sense you're talking about, where there's multiple types of zombie, you know, where some of them are fast and some are slow, and these kinds spit at you, and these kinds jump at you, and I am very curious. I do have a feeling that that phenomenon, which now feels very baked into zombie cinema, I do have a feeling that is a video game contribution. I mean, I'm sure we'll see all sorts of variant zombies in the next couple of decades of cinema, but honestly, I'm going to say, I think the video game Left 4 Dead nailed down some archetypes of zombie variants that now feel very, that they all appear in this movie, that now feel very part of zombie lore, I guess.

Yeah, and I remember, actually, I remember the trailer for that one in particular, and this was another moment of me saying, nope, I know I can't handle that. So yeah. All right. Well, I wanted to sort of cover that generally. We'll probably talk more about that in detail in the spoiler section because there's very specific zombies I want to get into detail on. But I think for that moment, let's just say how we felt about the film. Why don't you go first, Andy, and then I'll give my opine and then we'll get into spoilers.

All right. And John and I have not shared our opinions about this film with each other. So I don't know if I'm going to surprise you or not with this or not. So, John, I left pretty underwhelmed by this movie. I just, it is, the expectations were very high because this is the director of Weapons and Barbarian, two remarkable films. Even if you didn't enjoy those films, you can't deny the craft and the skill and the layers, like the thematic layers are. This is a movie and what I'm describing is probably, I'm probably describing a movie that very successfully achieved its goal. But this is a dramatically flat movie. There is no depth to anything that happens. There is nothing below the surface of what's going on in this film. There is the tiniest nod towards a, like an inner journey for the main character. And it did not convince me. So I left kind of impressed with the technical skill with which in a way I have not seen done before, the director created a movie that replicates the feeling of playing a video game. I think he genuinely does some interesting stuff I've not seen before. But unfortunately, I would have rather played the video game, I think.

Interesting.

What do you think?

So I enjoyed it. I was sitting there thinking like, and this sounds kind of sounding, I don't mean it to, but this is like a lesser work.

Yeah.

If I look at it in context, like he had this massive financial and critical hit with weapons that came out in 2025. This movie came out this year. This is clearly a director who's, there's sort of a stage in a director and actor's life where they have to do, I remember Ewan McGregor talking about this with the Star Wars movies. He was a sort of young, he was trained spotting that sort of cool actor and everything. And he basically said, well, you got to do a big one sometime. And why not Star Wars? You know what I mean? And I feel like for a horror director, you got to do a big franchise sometime. And I have a fun idea and a fun take on this genre. But like you, there's not a lot of depth here. It was a hoot. I enjoyed myself. But again, I didn't spend hours thinking about it afterwards like I did with Weapons. So, yep. So having said that, it's fun. If you like fun movies, first of all, the first half is actually scary. And the second half is more action oriented. And it's very fun and silly. So it's an enjoyable movie. Don't take this as like a negative review. It's just not next level, like we've come to expect after just two movies from Poor Zach.

Yeah, I sounded pretty negative about that. Probably a little more negative than I actually feel about the movie. But if you like movies, if you enjoyed like Abigail or Ready or Not, that kind of gross, funny, horror, action movie, this is a safe bet for you.

And the performances are great. Austin Abrams is actually fantastic, even though he doesn't have a lot of depth. So on that note, spoilers begin in three, two, one. So Andy, we're safe now. I want to start by, so one thing I noticed, and this is something I wanted to talk to you about. There were things in this movie that seemed to me to be set pieces from a video game, and having not played those games, I'm not sure which were actual set pieces pulled from a video game, and which were set pieces that were designed to have that feel but were freshly grown. You know what I mean? So let's just talk about the structure of the movie for the people who wanted spoilers a little bit, just to give a little more context of what we're talking about. So I would say certainly the first act, I think like the first half of the movie is a very different movie than the second half. In my mind, the first movie is sort of like a cat and mouse game in an isolated, desolate place in the middle of a snowstorm with a single and then eventually a pair of zombies that are overwhelming and terrifying on their own. Whereas the second half of the movie features tons of zombies. It has a segment where dozens of zombies are throwing themselves off buildings to try to crush him and hospitals full of zombies and that kind of thing. I was struck by those two separate tones and I think most of the video game set pieces that I feel I recognized were in the second half.

That's interesting. I think that both halves of it draw pretty faithfully from the video games. Okay. I don't know the games well enough. I do not think this movie was attempting to exactly replicate any scenes from the video games if I'm wrong about that, write me in. But the video games often within the same game, they also alternate between gritty, rural, scary, hillbilly with a chainsaw type of tension. That will exist. That is centered on a single location that you get to know quite well, quite intimately. And that will be in the same game as a plot about an evil megacorporation designing a zombie virus. And you're a secret agent trying to rescue the president's daughter who's been kidnapped. So I think both of those extremes actually are from the games. And I'm not too surprised he tried to put them both in this movie.

And I want to talk about some of the video game style narrative choices, but I kind of want to save that for a little later because I think the ones that really stand out to me are sort of in the transition between the two pieces. But what did you think of this first half? I got to be honest, I had my eyes half closed for about half of it. There's a lot of tension. I was waiting for a zombie to jump out. I know I just asked your opinion, but let me just make one observation. I'm not a cinematic expert. But one thing that Zach Cregger, he either does it a ton, and so it's just relentless or he just has a great eye for it. But one thing a director will do and he does it here constantly. Like as you're looking out the window of a moving car in a snowstorm, often someone will be in the back seat talking to someone in the front seat and that person is framed to the side and you can see the road. Or he'll be standing in front of a window and there's a field behind him. And what you are looking at as the viewer is he's doing something, but you are looking at that empty space going where is it coming from? And when is it coming? And that's where your tension gets focused. You know what I mean?

He's really good at it. This gets me in every movie it's ever been done in. It's such a good, it's such a canny understanding of how you are physically watching the movie, I think, because you're waiting for something to step out into the road, and it does, and it's pretty great. But he makes you sit for quite a while and just soak in that tension.

Yes. The one time he got me to just jump out of my seat is in, he goes to a farm house, and he knows the woman he's run over, been playing cat and mouse with lives there. He's pretty sure her husband lives there, but you get lulled into a false insecurity, and then the husband just jumps out, and I jumped six inches out of my chair.

He jumps out of nowhere. That was a good one. It's a spooky house, so you're primed for a jump scare, and he still gets you with it, I would say. Yeah, he got me with it, certainly.

Very well. And the tension of, I think having Brian, who's the main character's name, be a very everyman kind of guy, is really effective here. The tension is really great. First scene, he's gotta figure out how to even use a gun, and then he finds another gun, and he can't find the ammo, and there's this wonderfully tense scene where he sees this zombie that's been chasing him around for half an hour come running across, finally running across this open field he's trying to jam.

That was a magnificent shot.

Yeah, and he can't get the shotgun shells loaded, and I think that's when he hits you with the husband.

Yeah, yeah it is.

So you're now focused on this zombie woman who knows about to enter the house and run up the stairs. That's when the husband jumps out, and then, even better, as the husband is laying there, he's still trying to reload the shotgun, his hands are shaking, and you can hear her steps. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. I mean, it's just so good. That's why I wanted to take exception with your sense of tension in the second half, because it really drops off.

Yes, agreed. Yeah, so the first half of this movie, I loved, I mean, we're in personal opinion territory here. This is the type of horror movie I love. This is the type of zombie movie I love. It works great on film. This also was one of the strongest evocations of the experience of playing the Resident Evil games. Because if you played the Resident Evil games, they will, you will often spend a lot of time in like a rural location like this, a mundane rural location, like a house like this. And he is scavenging through the drawers looking for stuff he can use, exactly the way you do in the video games. And just like in the video games, he has a gun with a couple bullets in it. And every time he pulls the trigger, because the video games do this, it's part of the Resident Evil DNA, is that you never have enough supplies to deal with all the threats. So you'll have like a gun and seven bullets, which could kill a couple zombies, if your aim is good, but it won't kill all of them. And so that motivates you to avoid try and avoid problems, rather than confront them and try to defeat them, and to look for ways to deal with the zombies or the problems or whatever you're facing, without going through your very limited resources. I like that part of this film, it really captured that he has hit the big prize find is one box of shotgun shells, which then he takes forever to load, and he doesn't really know how to use the guns. Like 40 minutes later in this movie, he will be mowing down enemies with a super high tech sub machine gun, like an action hero. And that's a different kind of movie. I like this first one where he is fumbling to get two shells into the shotgun before the zombie bursts through the door. I love that, just give me more of that.

Yeah, so I mean, we could talk about the house all day because it's so great. And that beginning scene where he runs into the woman and she's sort of groggy and doesn't realize she's a zombie. And I just, the whole thing, it works so well. And we could talk about the police cruiser. I kind of want to move on, though, to after he leaves the house.

I want to call out one other video gamey thing that I thought was interesting. Did you notice that the use of the camera felt an awful lot like the way you use a camera in a video game? It's a striking use of the camera in that, like when you're in a video game, when you enter, when you're playing a Resident Evil game, you enter a new space or a new room. The first thing you do is you pivot, you carefully pivot the camera around, all the way to the left, all the way to the right, and then you center it. And I don't know that I've seen a movie be so cheeky with its camera in this way, but he does that with the camera. Like he'll move into a new part of the movie and the camera will pivot just like you're playing a Zelda game or something.

I want to get into that more as we go on, because I think part of what makes this a successful movie is it, regardless of what we think about its depth, is it is a love letter to video games. It does two things simultaneously. Zach Cregger clearly enjoys video games, right? And second, it is also poking gentle fun at them almost constantly, and those two things exist together in a way that I really enjoyed.

Yeah.

But I don't know how that would play out.

I think it's really successful. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I think it's really successful.

Yeah.

So where do you want to move next?

Well, I just want to talk about a couple of, there's two scenes coming up that seems so video gamey to me, that were hilarious to me. The first one is not hilarious. And this is both a classic horror scene, but definitely a video game survival horror scene that I thought was well executed. And I just wanted to get your sense of it, which was, he's got to go through a tunnel filled with stalled cars and potential zombies with only his iPhone flashlight for light. And it is super creepy. And I thought it was effective, but I also said, I don't play these games, but even I know that that is something you do.

It's very video gamey that the cars in this tunnel would be aligned in such a way to channel you down a particular path. That is, of course, riddled with set piece scares.

Yes.

Yep, absolutely. Yes. Yeah, that was, I like that.

What did you think of the little girl?

I thought it was pretty telegraphed.

Yeah, just for a little context. He runs into a little girl that briefly he thinks he can save, but it turns out she's been infected and one of her feet is like a giant octopus claw or something.

Yeah. And he ends up having to kill her after a big fight during which she mutates. And we should talk about just the nature of the monster, kind of the mutation monster in a minute. But so I thought this was fine. It was kind of a textbook. Like I mean, this scene works when something that looks sweet and innocent and helpless and in need of saving turns out to be a threat. It works when that catches you off guard. I don't think it's possible to be caught off guard by this scene.

It's so telegraphed.

Anytime in a movie where a little girl is facing away from you and covering her face, and the stupid protagonist is like, hey, little girl, and reaching out to touch her shoulder or something like that, it's like, well, what do you think is going to happen? I think that is a fine scene. That is also just right out of the horror movie toolbox. Right, you know, so.

Yeah, she, now, it is interesting what it sets up because she is clearly unaware what is happening to her. I don't think she's like pretending to still be human. I think she's genuinely scared. And this happens to Brian later. So I think that's important.

It does serve, it does start to teach you how the infection works because that's what, that's the danger under this is an infection.

Yeah, yep, so Brian gets bitten. And I'm not going to go through the whole movie, but I think the next bit we have to talk about, because it is my, it is one of the things I find most hilarious about video games, but it's something that we all accept as a necessary element because of the structure of the games. So he gets out of the tunnel, he's been bitten by the girl, but immediately a car pulls up and like a badass play, this is Callie Reese, she's a badass police officer, she starts dispatching this giant zombie, rolling zombie mound that is pursuing him, that sort of backs off. He gets in the car with them and there's what I think you just call an absurd exposition info dump from the guy he runs into, right? I wanted to get your impression on this, but to me, it happens in video games all the time, but he's like, yes, we were doing this experimental thing. It was a drug that helps people evolve to their maximum potential almost immediately, and we hired you as a courier, as a backup plan to have the right portion of the serum to stop it. And I was like, is he being funny about how obvious that is, or did that just feel natural to you as part of a video game?

I think he's being funny. Yeah. I think he's being funny. So a couple thoughts on that scene. First, the main effect that scene had on me was to make me wish there were more characters in this film.

Yes.

Because the handful of minor characters that Brian comes across in the course of his journey are universally really enjoyable. Like, so this badass super cop who's with us for a couple minutes, she's great. This super slimy corporate guy who's doing the info dump on how we got here, he's very entertaining and he has a great screen presence. But for most of the movie, it's just Brian and that's a lot of weight to put on an actor. I think he does a great job with it. He's like a very fun character to watch. But man, these juicy side characters, I wanted more of them.

Yes, absolutely. The woman's name, she played Kelly Reese's character's name, Maxine. She is not around very long. She kicks butt another time and then gets killed by a bigger zombie creature. And they make the joke, well, can't we get another Maxine? Which also played a video game to me.

It did, yeah. No, I think that that whole sequence was, I mean, mostly tongue in cheek. Not entirely, but there was a tongue mostly in a cheek during that scene.

He also, they also set up the great joke at the end of the film here where he says, he finds his sub-machine gun, the corporate guy is trying to coach him through it, and the corporate guy is such a slime, like he's such a coward. And Brian says, I'm not a gun guy, I'm a video game guy, which is like a total setup for later in the movie for sure.

Exactly, yes. Yeah.

So at this point, I don't want to go through every set piece, but at this point, this is when the tension switches, right? And they say, okay, now it's a quest movie. You have the thing, you have to go to the place and give the thing to the guy. That's the movie we're in now, right?

Yep, yep.

So part of the info dump is at the top of this hospital is a secure lab where they're trying to come up with an antidote. And so Brian has two motivations. He's been bitten, and he's just got to go there because he feels some moral compunction to deliver this thing because one of his consistent attributes earlier in the film is he always has it with him even before he knows what it is because it's like his job.

Yeah, just to be clear, he learns that he's carrying the last needed ingredient for the cure. Yes. That's what's in his medical bag. And we should also say by this point in the movie, he's been bitten. Yep. And so he has the motivation to get the cure for himself.

Exactly. So I don't know if there are any bits in here you wanted to pull out as far as video gamey stuff. I had a question because of all the humor that I wanted to pause. This is, I guess, more specifically about the Resident Evil games. Are they this funny?

No. I don't believe that they're this funny.

They play it pretty straight, right?

Yeah. They play it straight. I would say their painful straightness is part of what makes me not fall in love with them.

I think the Mila Jovovich series of Resident Evil movies tries to capture that seriousness, which maybe doesn't work.

Yeah. Well, what the earliest? I could be wrong. Maybe you can write in and tell me that some of the Resident Evil, that they're meant to be taken at tongue in cheek or more fun. I will say, one of the legacies of the first Resident Evil game, one of the things it's best known for, is it's a really painfully earnest bad dialogue. It's famous for having a, I guess it's a poorly translated, all the dialogue is poorly translated, and the voice acting leaves a lot to be desired. So I mean, in the early days of the Internet, these were, there were memes of this. If you go online, Google Master of Unlocking. At one point in the first Resident Evil game, somebody refers to another character as a Master of Unlocking, because I think, and there's just a lot of corny stuff. So the Resident Evil games, I said that they are earnest and not funny, but there is a point at which, when something gets so ridiculously over the top, either with its gore or just it goes so over the top with its self-seriousness, that it becomes funny, maybe intentionally. So there is a certain, I would say there is a strain of absurdity to Resident Evil that the games understand about themselves. And I think that's different from, it's not like meta humor, like it's not laughing at itself, but I think this movie is trying to capture that sense of you know, this isn't a movie that's, it's not making fun of its genre, but it is something that isn't afraid to play into the goofiness of the genre, even while kind of taking itself fairly seriously, I guess.

Yeah, and I think the choice of Brian as an everyman was an interesting choice, because just look, I just read about the video games, I haven't played them, and it seems like most of the lead characters are some sort of highly trained capable person. And so bringing the humor is having somebody who doesn't know how to do any of these things. And playing that up as a joke, one of my favorite jokes in the movie is he can't shoot accurately, right? Because he doesn't have any training with guns. So there's several moments where he's got to try to shoot a padlock. And if you notice in the background, Zach Cregger has put a little drum roll. And then he shoots and he goes, and there's a little and he misses. So clearly Zach is poking fun at all these kind of things.

I love the padlock gag. I think there's three padlocks and they are all funny. And you know, there's another gag I really like where he is going to try to drive a truck through a locked up fence. And instead of crashing through, he just high centers the truck on the fence. It's very, it's really funny.

I thought that was great. A dose of reality in a very fantastic movie.

We in watching our Zombie Strains podcast, we have not seen a lot of funny zombie movies. No. I mean, we have seen some comedies to, that are funny to various extents. But one thing you'll notice about a movie like this, Brian's reaction to what's happening really makes a difference between a scary tense movie and a fun, a fun over the top movie. Because his reaction is not, is not to be traumatized and to start breaking down mentally from fear. His reaction when something gross or horrifying happens is to say, what the F? You know?

But they do have him scream in a very high-pitched, terrified way, which is pretty funny as well.

It is, yes, yes.

All right, well, I wanna talk about the end scene and the end in particular, but there are a bunch of other bits that happen here. Another bit that seemed like, I had to believe this was in a Resident Evil movie, so I can't prove it. At one point, he's got to go through the sewers, and this point is clearly like he's the very first person. You actually see his gun at the angle you would see it in like your classic video game, and he comes around this corner and there's this giant bloated man who then explodes into a, whose body is filled with rats. And the way that scene is framed, first of all, the way Brian reacts to it is silly. He's like, hey man, are you all right?

Like, yeah, yeah. It's the least all right looking person you've ever seen in your life.

But that scene, I had to say, that has to be from one of the games. It's such a specific set piece.

Yeah, if that is from a specific game, let us know. But what's happening at that point in the movie is, each sequence of the movie is, it feels like a discrete video game level or a video game area. This is the sewer level. And then that's the, that is the boss at the end of the sewer level. Then he's up on the street level where he's fighting the rooftop zombies. That felt like a different level. Now he's at the hospital. This is the hospital level. And of course, every movie is going to move us from set piece to set piece. But the way this is done, it really felt like he was moving through video game levels.

Right. Because I think partially he doesn't casually move from one location to each other. He has to solve a problem to move to the next location.

I hadn't clocked that, but you are totally right about that. Yeah. So there's like an obstacle at the end of each area that he needs to get past to enter the new level.

Yeah. And just to take a different movie that maybe takes itself seriously and isn't more seriously and isn't based on a video game, you could see people running down that street with their zombies jumping on them. It could be terrifying. And you would then just cut to them barely making it inside the parking garage. But he has to solve a problem by getting that lock open. And that's how he can get out of that level and get to the new level.

It is very funny that probably about half of these obstacles we're describing are literal padlocks, which is the most video game thing in the universe. Honestly, the most video game moment in this entire movie is when they don't have keys to the car they're in and the keys are on the body of somebody that... Maxine, yeah. And it's a big scary scene where you have to track down the body. Like that is in every Resident Evil game to some extent. And every game inspired by Resident Evil has that exact sequence of events.

Yeah, and it works here. It's pretty cool.

Before we get to the... Well, I want to talk about the nature of the kind of quote zombie threat. Do you want to do that yet, or do you want to cover the final scene and then have a more meta discussion?

You know what? I think covering this first would be great because it frames the final sequence pretty well, I think.

Could you describe for us then, what is the problem here? What is the threat?

So the threat is that these zombies, if you're infected, you become this mindless creature. But what happens is the creatures are mutating and becoming more powerful and combining. So you get these super beasts that can track anyone down and kill them, and they're unstoppable and they consume everything in their way, in a way that zombies don't. We're not talking about people just biting their necks. We're saying you get grabbed by this thing and it consumes you and you become part of it, and it becomes bigger and stronger.

Yeah, it incorporates you into its mass. And these zombies, when the infection takes hold of a corpse and resurrects the corpse, it can reshape the corpse to achieve its ends like, so there is a dog early on that is a zombie dog. And I mean, it reminded me a lot of the way the thing operates in John Carpenter's The Thing. Absolutely. I think visually it is an obvious homage to The Thing. But so the zombie might be able to shoot tentacles at you, right, that it grows out of itself or something.

So he's got to take this one chemical. It's like, this is the third. You could almost see him like, first you have to get this chemical and then that chemical and then take it to the lab. So it feels very much like that. I do want to talk about the final sequence. I think there's one thing that's funny, and it's played for humor, but there's a sort of cavalierness about the solution that I think is funny. So once he gets inside the hospital, he's able to communicate with this secret lab via intercom. They're like, well, you're going to have to come up here. They don't offer any help. I mean, they offer a couple of suggestions, but it's all very matter of fact and like, well, you're just going to have to do it. Like there's no emotion to it on anybody's part. Does that make sense?

Totally. I've overused the word cheeky in this episode, but I'm going to say it again. The way that the scientists interact with them is cavalier almost. Yeah.

All right, let's talk about this final sequence. I want to talk about the sequence. And then I actually have a broader question about the movie and this style of movie, because the other movie I saw, so I watched three movies last weekend. This is the one I watched on Sunday. On Saturday, I realized, John, you have not seen Obsession yet.

Oh yeah.

And if you don't see Obsession, all your podcast friends are going to mock you. So I watched Obsession, which is great and terrifying. And then on Friday night, my son and I watched Nacho Libre. So anyway, one of these films is not like the other.

That is quite the trio of films, but yes. Yeah.

I almost thought maybe I should try to fit in back rooms just so I'd be fully traumatized for the whole weekend. Having said that, I want to... So he eventually gets into the hospital. He has to do a number of quests. He has to get up an elevator. We run into this zombie that vomits acid that he then uses as a weapon to kill another zombie. But at the end here, this final sequence, he is standing on a ledge of a blown out sky bridge, trying to get across. This felt so video gamey to me, trying to make your way across the ledge. And he has to solve this problem. And I want to sort of describe it and then describe the final sequence. He's being chased by the zombies. It's really the only time humanoid zombies are like a massive threat in this way. He's come through a door and put a broom handle through it to stop them. Coming up the side of the building under that door is one of these giant multi-person, 10 legged balls that's sort of climbing up the side of this building.

Yeah, it has been basically stalking him through the movie.

It's been stalking him through the movie. He's got a gun with one bullet, right? And so the mission is, he's had horrible aim this whole time. So he sees the job. This is such a video game solution. He's gonna shoot the broom handle. The zombies will burst out of the door and fall onto the creature climbing up the wall, right?

Yep.

So do you wanna say what happens, Andy? Cause I've been describing it.

Well, yeah. So he does it more or less.

Yes. But what does he shout as soon as he's successful? He shouts, video games.

That's right. Yeah, of course.

The cheekiest line in the whole movie of cheeky lines.

Yes.

So yeah, it was such a video game set piece. And so your enjoyment of the second half of this movie hinges on how funny you sort of found that bit, right? Do I want a cheeky movie that makes fun of video games while also presenting a good version of one? If you enjoyed that, then you'll enjoy this more. If you find that stuff irritating, then I don't think you'll enjoy the second half at all.

I think that's a good way to put it. And I will say, by the way, that big rolling zombie ball is also, that is also a characteristic feature of the video games. Many of the Resident Evil games, you are being stalked by something too powerful for you to defeat. So it'll make periodic appearances. You usually have to either evade it or fight it off. And then later in the game, you'll have the resources to take it down for good, which is exactly how it works out in this movie too.

The final bit is he makes it to the door, the scientists let him in, they take the vial of serum from him and start manufacturing the antidote. And what is happening while that is going on, Andy?

It's time. We've been seeing his wound get progressively grosser, which is our sign that he's getting turned. And while he retains, he seems to retain at least some of his humanity. He basically starts to rapidly mutate into a gross zombie monster that wants to eat you and add you to it and get bigger and grosser.

But what happens, and this is what I find interesting, is that he loses control. And he has this thing where he simultaneously wants to get the serum, but is also killing all the scientists. And it's like a conflict within him. And this goes back to the girl being legitimately scared. I think she was, whatever was left of that little girl in there was legitimately scared, and then she mutated in a way. And this is what happens to Brian. And he kills everybody. And there's a long sequence where you think somebody's going to get that syringe and stab him, Brian's going to return to normal, and they're going to save the day. And they set up this tension around the syringe right up until the end of the movie, where the syringe, where he eats the last doctor with his new mouth, his new stomach mouth, and the syringe goes falling off the side into the rubble of the building. And then the movie ends with him standing on this sky bridge and helicopters zooming into him and he's become full monster. He's got the tentacles and-

Yeah, it's like a shot from Godzilla. Or I mean, King Kong or something. Yeah, he's a monster.

So I want to talk more about this ending, but I also, I just wanted to hear your impression of this final scene. Does this feel like the final scene of a video game to you?

I mean, again, I can't speak to the Resident Evil games. It's pretty rare that video games end on a downer note. I mean, there are games that do it. It's pretty rare. So I would say no. This felt like a movie at this point, not a video game anymore.

So I wanted to see if you had any other points or questions you want to bring up, because I do have a capping question on this whole thing that I want to ask you. But I want to see if you had any specifics about this sequence or the movie you wanted to mention before I bring this up.

Well, I will say there are one or two very funny, gross scientist deaths. There's one that made me laugh out loud when it happens, when the desk squishes that guy. Anyway, it's a pretty wild scene, I will say. It's pretty unhinged. It is tipping heavily into absurd comedy at this point. I think starting with the video game, we are no longer in a serious movie, we are in an absurd, phantasmagoric experience. I don't have any other specific things to call out from this movie. For me, the questions I'm going to ask, and maybe we'll get to them, this is a zombie movie podcast, I want to talk a little bit about if this is a zombie movie or not, and if it is, why does it feel different than most of the zombie movies we've seen up to 1973 or wherever we're at. So that's what I want to talk about, but is there something maybe more specific that you want to talk about first?

Yeah, it's a trend, I think, but I don't know because we're talking about horror movies here. We're zombie movies specifically, but horror movies. So far, we have seen very few horror movies. Our most recent one, or not our most recent one, but a very recent one, Tombs of the Blind Dead, would be an example that fits in with the end of this movie. Because at the end of that movie, the horror is not defeated, right? And it has this sort of shocking ending where essentially the heroes lose, which is the same thing in this movie. And then I saw Obsession the night before, and spoiler, that film also does not have a happy ending, right? Like it's resolved, but in a very horrific way.

That movie's closing 15 seconds are brutal. It's bleak, right?

And I know up through the 80s and the 2000s, that we are going to get movies that still try to have a happy ending to some extent, right? Now, we've watched a couple early Aughts ones that didn't, but there's still a lot of Save the Day or Stick a Happy Ending in their Zombie movies in our future before we get here. The thing that was so similar about those two endings is this is just completely nihilistic. And in fact, I read about Zach Cregger said, you know what? I originally had just had the, I had the vial that could save Brian shatter very early, and then he just went on a rampage. And he realized it would be so much more effective if the vial was a point of contention that he had to fight over. But the reflex to just have that bleak ending as the default in a horror movie, I don't know when that started, but it's so strong, it's just how they work now often. And I just wanted to get your thought on that before we got into the zombie parts. Does what I'm saying make any sense?

It makes total sense. I actually think this is related to the zombie genre. I don't think the zombie genre invented the bleak ending to a horror movie by any means. However, we have already seen, we saw as early as the 1950s a zombie movie. The first, think about the first zombie movies we've seen John that posited a true global zombie apocalypse. Last Man on Earth and a decade or so later, Night of the Living Dead. And I don't think it's a coincidence that both of those movies among the first ones that really went, followed the premise of a zombie apocalypse all the way to its conclusion. I think it's pretty hard to find a happy ending you can believe in if that is your horror setup.

Can I make an observation about why those two movies are different than Obsession and this movie?

Yes.

The end of Last Man on Earth and of Night of the Living Dead had something to say. At the end of Night of the Living Dead, despite George Romero's denials, he was making a comment about race in our country. The shooting of Ben, which is bleak. He is saying something with that. Having Brian just turn into a monster and kill everybody, there's nothing there. There's no there. He's not making a point. It's just how he thought the movies. Does that make any sense?

It does. Now that you say it, I see what you're getting at. So here, let me throw out a different thing to you. And again, I'm not going to go into real world politics, but I would say there is for the last 15, 20 ish years, I would say I have perceived in my life a rise in the general, in the acceptance that the world is a pretty bleak place and that whatever the worst outcome is, we can probably assume that's going to be the default outcome. And I trace this back maybe to like the financial crash and its aftermath in the late 2000s. If you are looking for evidence that whatever you think the worst case is, that's probably what's really going on, or maybe it's a little worse than you think. I think there's a lot of material for you to grab onto in the last 15 years. I actually do not believe that this is like a uniquely bleak time in history, but there is a lot of bleakness out there, and I do think there is a certain attitude. And I think that is the attitude I feel when I watch a movie like this where it ends bad. It's not like the edgelord like Zach Snyder like, ha ha, I'm gonna kill the good guys. You thought you had a happy ending, but you are wrong. It's not that. This is more like a, of course, like sort of ending.

A happy ending isn't even contemplated. And in fact, what Zach Cregger is saying when he wrote an ending where it had less, you had less of a feeling that Brian might survive, is what he's saying is my default mode or default thought was the most hopeless thought. And adding some hope back in to make it more gruesome was like an afterthought, just because it would be more effective in the movie. I'm not criticizing Zach, but I, and like, look, I'm Gen X, boomers have been complaining about this all the time. I will occasionally engage a younger person in a conversation that goes something like this. You know, it's the worst time ever. And I'm like, well, you could have been in Vienna at the end of the second world war. Like, you know, like, and it just doesn't penetrate. This is not a judgment. I'm just saying, I've never had a conversation like that. And I try, because I honestly believe what you just said. It just does not track it all. Yeah, so that's a grumpy old man complaint, but I just wanted to bring it up.

It's a good insight. And yeah, I think it's just the background radiation of a lot of art right now. And I think it probably will be something that we look back and we'll be able to recognize what decade a movie was from by this sort of theme being all over the place for like 10 or so years, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I just, yeah, one last thing, another podcast that has nothing to do with us, the rest is history. When asked what he thought the biggest event of the 21st century was, Dominic Sandbrook said the financial crash. Like it's not that 9-11 is a big deal, but the financial crash, we're still dealing with that in a way that we're not.

I think that is a pretty astute take, but I won't go into it because I won't be able to stop myself.

So let's stop there. Let's go back. Everybody pull it back in. We're a zombie movie podcast who enjoy zombie movies. We enjoyed this movie, so let's do some wrap up questions. I don't think we need to do all the pillars and stuff, but do you have questions? Do you want to do our standard wrap up questions?

Yeah, let's do our standard wrap up questions. But can we, so we usually ask one of our closing questions is, is this a zombie movie or a movie with zombies? So I'm gonna throw that out there. What do you think?

It's a tough question because I don't think it's a movie with zombies because there aren't that many zombies in it. You know what I mean? But it definitely feels like a zombie movie is there's an outbreak and monsters that have been created by the outbreak who are out to get you. So the aspects of apocalypse, right? And, and contagion are here. Those are, I said I didn't want to do the pillars and here I am doing them. But those two aspects are here very strongly. It's the linchpin of the movie, right? But the loved one's turning against you, like that's kind of here, but that's not really the point. Like, the point is, the point is the apocalypse, not the zombies. It doesn't matter that they're mutated alien whatevers. You know what I mean? So I can't, I'm having trouble answering it. What do you think?

I had the same thing. I was thinking about this specific question before the podcast, and I don't really know how to answer it. It certainly has some zombies, and I would say it has some strong traditional zombie stuff with strong traditional zombie themes, especially in the first hour of the film. But that shifts as the film goes on to the point where I do have a kind of hard time saying this is a zombie movie. I think I'm gonna err on saying that it is a movie with some zombies in it.

Yes, it's a monster movie, and some of the monsters are zombies.

There you go. Yes, it's a monster movie. That's what it is. For a little bit of its runtime, the monsters take the form of a very traditional zombie horror.

Yes, which is, by the way, the most tense, effective part of the movie in my opinion.

Yes. Yeah, agreed. All fear goes away as soon as something becomes blatantly CGI. So there's this scene, this is kind of a little old man rant. There's seen the beginning of the movie where a dog is chasing the hero across a field and that is terrifying. Because what is scarier than a big, mean looking dog sprinting full bore at you? A few minutes later, he is trying to escape the dog and the dog like mutates. It turns out this was an infected dog and it mutates into a big CGI horror. And it stops, it instantly, the scariness goes down by like 95%.

It became a gross out, not a scare.

I mean, it still might be a fun part of the movie, but it stopped being a scary part of the movie.

And in fact, I think, yeah, exactly. That's the first clue we get that the scariness is going to go away here eventually.

Right, exactly. Okay. So let's, how about our final traditional three closing questions? John, would you and I survive in the mostly zombie-ish world of Resident Evil 2026?

I don't think so. I think Brian runs across an incredible streak of luck. He gets the luckiest outcome and always manages to get away. You know, if Maxine gets nuked after five minutes, like what chance do I have?

Yeah, I agree. I'm toast. I'm, there's no way. And this, one of the fun things this movie does is it starts you out with this very everyman person who can't use a gun. But you know, like in a video game, by the end of the movie, he's using a gun real well, right? He's making a crack shot with his pistol at the top of a windy skyscraper, or he's killing a whole wave of mutant rats with a sub-machine gun, you know? So like in a video game, you know, you might be clumsy with the gun at the beginning, but by the end, you're just mowing stuff down. You're an absolute ace, yeah. But I say that partly to say I would not make that, I would not make that hero's journey of becoming good at the weapons, and I would not survive.

Also, I mean, nobody survives, but also Brian can run and neither of us can run. So let me say that again. He can sprint, you and I cannot sprint. I don't think, maybe I'm underestimating you, Andy, but I don't remember the last time I tried to sprint.

I can't remember either, but I don't think it would end very well in this sort of situation. All right, so that's two of our three questions. And the final one, John, is, do you recommend Resident Evil 2026? First, to general fans of good action-horrory movies? And secondly, do you think Resident Evil has any special, holds special interest for the zombie-loving listeners of this podcast?

So I'll answer the first part, because it's pretty easy. This is a great Saturday night movie, right? Just go see a fun, you get scared some and you get some action. It's fun and then maybe you forget about it. In a way that obsession, which I watched on Saturday night, is not. I wish I had done the reverse. I intentionally chose to watch this movie at two in the afternoon. So in case I was really scared, I would come out into daylight. And then I watched Obsession until like midnight. I wish I had done the reverse, because Obsession is so dark and terrifying that I was like, God, you know, whereas this was sort of like, okay, that was fun, you know.

This is a safely scary movie. It's scary. It's a movie you will have fun being scared and grossed out by it, but the overriding emotion you'll feel is the fun part of that. Whereas like with your Obsession, you know, you kind of stagger out of the theater uncertain about what you've just watched, right?

Yeah, like you're sort of like, what's the point of anything? Yeah, it has that effect on you. For Zombie fans, I don't know. I mean, it's fun, but I don't, I think it breaks away from, it's challenging our concept of a zombie movie, and maybe that's a good thing, but I think it's actually confusing.

Yeah, I would agree with both of those. This is, you know, it's a pretty easy recommendation if you like this kind of, you know, action horror movie. Or again, like I said at the beginning of this, if movies like Abigail already or not made you laugh, this movie will make you laugh in the exact same way. I would agree it does not really hold anything new for zombie loving listeners. Although, I mean, there is a perfectly fine classic zombie sequence if you want it, but it's not something you haven't seen before.

No, it is real good. Alright, I have a question for you, Andy. Should your mom watch this movie?

Oh, heck no.

No, absolutely not.

Yeah, too much squishy gross things, yeah.

Okay, I hear that. Well, next week, we're going to return to the 1970s with a film called Bear in Blood. So you can look forward to that. And thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like-minded people find the show. See you next time.