The original Broadway cast of Les Miserables!

Resident Evil is a video game brought to life, and if you’re not up for that, just don’t go. Simple as that.

Okay, more details. The movie takes place in The Hive, a massive, underground laboratory where secret and dangerous experiments are conducted. The Hive is operated by an enormous, multinational company known as The Umbrella Corporation. (Who knew there was so much research involved in making umbrellas? Must be bigger money in raingear than I thought.) Somebody decides to break a vial of something particularly nasty and The Hive initiates its security measures, which consist of killing every damn person in the place to prevent contamination of the outside world. A team of soldiers arrives to contain the threat and reclaim The Hive. Unfortunately, since The Hive is on kind of a roll with this whole killing thing, it decides to go after them, too.

But that’s only part of the team’s problem. The rest? Oh, a little thing called the zombified remains of the murdered lab staff! Zombies?!? I hate those guys!

Resident Evil is relentlessly loud and violent, with a certain amount of gore. It’s also, I have to admit, 100 minutes of good, B-movie fun. It’s the kind of movie where a character says, “There’s nothing to worry about,” and the audience laughs because, of course, there’s lots to worry about. It’s one scene after another of characters either being killed in new and creative ways, or cheating death through good, old fashioned brute force. It’s Night of the Living Dead with a Marilyn Manson soundtrack.

Oh yeah. Set designers know, nothing says "Secret Underground Lab" like lots of big, stretchy tubes and a low-hanging mist.

The nearly non-stop barrage of action works for a couple of reasons. First, there are quite a few moments of genuine suspense and dread. A particular favorite of mine had three soldiers trapped in a corridor, menaced by a laser beam with a few tricks up its sleeve. That one had me watching from between my fingers, horrified at what I was seeing, then laughing at how thoroughly it had hooked me. The sound effects, too, really draw the viewer into the movie. A train thunders by or a tank explodes and you can feel your seat rumble; a couple times I could have sworn I felt the breeze. I’d hate to be in the theater next door watching In the Bedroom.

Writer/director Paul Anderson (not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, who made Boogie Nights and Magnolia) is remarkably successful at translating the video game experience to the movie screen. The camera runs down hallways with characters, and it feels like the first-person point of view common in video games. There are animations of The Hive that include tiny, moving “heat images” of the characters that look like the maps that orient players in a game. Sure, these are novelties and I wouldn’t want to see them in lots of movies, but they’re a lot of fun here.

Milla Jovovich, modeling Versace's new Zombie-Kicker line of sports-wear.

Finally, the steady stream of fighting and gunfire works because, on the rare occasions when Resident Evil stops to let its characters talk, they don’t have much to say. The movie’s most recognizable stars are Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element) and Michelle Rodriguez (Girlfight). Jovovich plays an amnesiac woman, found at the entry to the Hive and brought along on the soldiers’ death trip. According to the Internet Movie Database, her character has three names (Alice, Janus Prospero and Marsha Thompson) though I can’t remember her being called by a single one in the movie. Rodriguez plays Rain, a tough talking, hard fighting soldier. Those cursory descriptions pretty much sum up the characters, but they’re more than I can say for any of the others. And, you know . . . so what. This movie is so not about the people. Don’t take that as a criticism; some movies are about heartfelt emotion, some are about thrills and chills. For the latter category, Resident Evil is at the top of its game.

Gorilla Pants rating: 3 out of 4 bananas