ANI-MOVIES, *Resident Evil: Degeneration

Resident Evil: Degeneration is the first fully-animated movie based on the Capcom horror/survival video game series. This has NO affilation whatsoever to the live-action franchise starring sexpot Milla Jovovich(Alice doesn't live here!), and takes place in the same fictional universe as the video game storyline.

Happening supposedly about a year after RE4, we meet up with RE2 survivor Claire Redfield, who is working with an enviromental preservation originization, and ends up going to an airport which has been the target of a alleged terrorist attack who are using the T-Virus to make zombies, mainly to get stop a U.S. senator who is working on an act to clean up the damages left by the Umbrella Corp. After getting herself and a few others safely away from a zombie hoard, Claire is rescued by Leon Kennedy, fresh from his European vacation in RE4. The movie then takes a different turn after the first half-hour. Where as the first third is a setup for the plot and a basic zombie "shoot 'em up" scenario, the rest of the story involves an overly-detailed plot about a company called WilPharma which is responsible for creating vaccines to the T-Virus for terrorist outbreaks around the world. Claire goes with the company rep Frederic Downing to their research plant, while Leon heads out with Angela, an SRT officer whose brother Curtis is responsible for the outbreak in the airport. What follows from here is a shutdown of the pharmacy facility, and Curtis making off with the G-Virus(which is like the T-Virus on steroids)that he uses on himself. Leon and Angela just make it out alive, while leaving the mutated Curtis behind to go down with the rest of the lab. Its revealed that Downing set the whole thing up as a sales pitch to promote their vaccine to terrorists who were using the T-Virus.

Alot of what's missing from this to make it a decent zombie flick is the actual lack of zombies in it. After the part at the beginning with the terminal of the living dead, the rest of it just falls very flat as a horror movie. There's also a random zombie bunch that show up in the research lab for about 10 seconds for almost no explained reason, other than the movie hadn't had any other zombies in it for a good 45 minutes or so. Where as the live-action movies derailed alot from the original video game premise, there was at least enough monsters and explosions to keep the average horror buff satisfied. As an animated movie, this is fair. The CGI isn't as good as say FFVII: Advent Children(heck, even FF: The Spirits Within was better!), but just as good as most of the cutscenes in any of the games. If your looking for a truly gory animated movie based on a video game, you'd probably be better off with Dead Space: Downfall.