George A. Romero's Resident Evil
George A. Romero is most well known for birthing the modern zombie genre with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. In the late 1990s, however, his career had fallen on harder times with his latest features Monkey Shines and The Dark Half (the latter of which was based off a Stephen King novel) being box office bombs. It was during this less fertile period of his career that Constantin Films announced Romero was going to write and direct a film based on the popular Capcom zombie-filled video game series Resident Evil. Writer-director Brandon Salisbury’s new documentary George A. Romero’s Resident Evil goes into great detail about why Romero’s Resident Evil feature never came to pass.
After starting with a brief history of the rather well-trod ground of George A. Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) and some fun anecdotes of fans who got to play zombies in the latter two entries, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil sets up why the video game was so popular before going into how Romero got involved. It’s a bit of a lengthy start, but it provides needed context for the fetid meat of the real story.
After shooting a commercial for the video game Resident Evil 2 that starred Brad Renfro and only aired in Japan, George A. Romero made a deal with Constantin Films (best known outside of their native Germany for The NeverEnding Story) to write and direct a feature based on the first Resident Evil game. Unfortunately, Romero only got as far as the screenplay before Constantin Films decided to go into a completely different direction. A few years later, they would make a Resident Evil feature directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Monster Hunter, Pompeii) with more of a focus on bloodless action than gory horror.
Brandon Salisbury has a lot of material to work with here and presents it in a fairly entertaining fashion. Detailed descriptions of earlier attempts on a Resident Evil screenplay before Romero was involved as well as Romero’s crack at the story are provided over cheeky footage from the amusingly jagged original PlayStation games. A wide range of podcasters, journalists, game designers, and actors are interviewed, giving viewers a broad scope of how the original games were designed and how Romero’s cinematic adaptation night have been. Charlie Kraslavsky, who played Chris Redfield in the live-action video segments bookending the first Resident Evil game, and Pat Jankiewicz, who played a zombie in Romero’s Resident Evil 2 commercial, are particularly amusing with their anecdotes.
At times, the scope here seems a bit too broad. We get moving anecdotes of George A. Romero’s passing, his widow setting up the George A. Romero Foundation, and the last encounters some of his collaborators had with him. However, the topic of Romero’s cinematic legacy seems better suited for a documentary of its own instead of a postscript to a documentary on his unproduced Resident Evil creature feature. While it’s frustrating that there’s no interviews with people directly involved with Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil films (Anderson wrote all six and directed four!), there are opinions of his first film on display from critics. Collectively, Anderson’s pictures earned over a billion dollars at the box office, and it would have been interesting to hear what inspiration he gleaned from Romero’s films and/or original Resident Evil script when starting to make his cinematic take on the zombie video game franchise.
A rather detailed look at both George A. Romero and the screenplay for his unproduced Resident Evil movie, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil is a great documentary for fans of the game and the filmmaker.
George A. Romero’s Resident Evil is now available on digital and on demand platforms. A screener was provided for review purposes.