SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Resident Evil,” now playing in theaters. There’s not a moment in “Resident Evil” where star Austin Abrams isn’t making you laugh, scream or feel bad for the zombie-infested nightmare his character Bryan finds himself in. For almost the entire 95-minute runtime, he’s either running, shooting or getting covered in gore from various undead monsters, like a rat-filled behemoth, a roly-poly ball of bodies or an acid-puking fiend.
After teaming with director Zach Cregger on last year’s horror hit “Weapons,” Abrams takes center stage in “Resident Evil” and proves he’s more than capable of leading a feature on his own. Based on the popular horror video game series, “Resident Evil” tells a fully original story with some nods to the original source material that fans will love. Abrams plays a bumbling medical courier who finds out his girlfriend is pregnant, but agrees to one last delivery before heading home.
He must make his way to a hospital in Raccoon City (which is ground zero for the zombie outbreak in the games) to drop off a mysterious package, but the snowy drive is far from easy. Almost immediately, he hits a strange woman with his car, then buckles her in and starts driving her to the hospital without realizing she’s slowly turning into a zombie. They get pulled over by a cop and things quickly go awry.
Bryan is able to escape to a nearby farmhouse, but the woman doesn’t stop pursuing him for the entire movie. Bryan finds a shotgun at the farm to defend himself, but he realizes the undead creatures will stop at nothing to kill him. After blasting apart the woman and an infected farmer, their bodies fuse together with stringy tendrils from inside each of them.
Bryan books it out of there and gets picked up by some scientists from the Umbrella Corporation (an evil institution from the games) who explain that the package he’s delivering contains an antidote to the zombie virus. Along the way, Bryan gets bit by a zombie but hides the wound, which slowly infects him. As his condition worsens, he makes it to the Raccoon City hospital, but he doesn’t get the chance to use the antidote.
He transforms into a gigantic, tentacled monstrosity in the Umbrella Corporation lab and rips apart the scientists trying to save the world. With their bodies fused to his own, the monstrous Bryan roars atop the hospital as a military helicopter takes aim at him. With Variety, Abrams discusses how he transformed into the monster, the cold and messy shooting conditions he endured and the one scene the “Resident Evil” team couldn’t allow him to film.
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