‘Resident Evil’ Absolutely Rips!

Key takeaways

• Cregger throws out horror movie safety rules entirely: a little girl who bites the hero gets her head blown off, an elderly man and a dog die in the opening stretch, and there's no redemptive final act—just Austin Abrams' character screaming with tentacles as a National Guard helicopter closes in. The hosts call this refusal to sand off the edges the key to why the movie feels alive rather than formulaic.
• The film succeeds by fusing comedy and gore rather than choosing one, something the hosts say almost no horror movie pulls off well. They compare it to a short list of successful horror-comedies (Evil Dead 2, Fright Night, Shaun of the Dead) and argue Cregger's sketch-comedy background (The Whitest Kids U'Know) gives him precise control over comic timing around violence; knowing exactly when a body landing should be funny versus terrifying.
• Star Austin Abrams plays the medical courier Brian as an everyman who reacts to horror the way a nervous video-game player would (squealing, panicking, occasionally reveling) rather than processing trauma like a typical protagonist. Ryan compares him to Bruce Campbell, John McClane, and especially Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future for that blend of snark, sweetness, and reluctant competence.
• The movie captures the feel of playing Resident Evil without being a faithful lore adaptation: characters search rooms for bullets and keys, visual cues highlight interactive objects, and the pacing escalates level by level (farmhouse, RV tunnel, sewer with a rat-king zombie, a maternity ward full of infected newborns, a final skyscraper ascent). Paul Walter Hauser and Callie Reese show up as Umbrella Corporation stand-ins who mostly exist to wink at the IP rather than service deep lore.
• Both hosts see this as a potential turning point for video game movies, arguing Hollywood has only really cracked kid-friendly adaptations (Mario, Sonic, Minecraft) while everything else is a coin flip. They cite Cregger pitching the idea to Constantin Film unprompted as the kind of creative-driven approach (also happening with Alex Garland's Elden Ring and Michael Sarnoski's Death Stranding) that could finally make these films artistically credible.
• The episode opens with movie-business news discarded from this summary as inessential context, but the hosts do flag Cregger's next project (a big-budget sci-fi film called The Flood for Warner Bros) as a test of whether he can scale up the way Jordan Peele did after his first three genre films, a comparison they return to repeatedly given both directors' comedy roots and rapid, ambitious output.

Notable moments

• "It's got a lot of puzzles... he goes into a house and needs to find the bullets"; on how the film mimics the mechanics of playing the game.
• A theater audience member reportedly shouted "Kill it!" when the hero encounters a scared little girl in an RV, breaking the tension for the whole room.
• Ryan: "I hadn't just experienced 90 minutes of feeling completely present with a work of art... I completely lost myself in this movie."
• The maternity ward sequence, full of infected newborns and a bursting "sourdough loaf" birthing bubble, is singled out as one of the most audacious things either host has seen in a horror movie.
• A Die Hard nod: the hero's shoes start melting from elevator acid, forcing him to run barefoot; Ryan says he "held my fist aloft" when it happened.
• The final lab scene includes cameos from Zach Cherry (Severance) and Griffin Newman, adding what Fennessy calls "extra pixie dust" for movie-podcast listeners.
• Fennessy predicts the film could hit $300 million domestically and calls it "one of the greatest get in and get out IP jobs in the history of movies."

Time saved: 1 hour, 35 minutes.