By Nathalie Moreno, Staff Writer

How did I, the world’s biggest scaredy cat, find myself in the movie theatre watching a movie about horrifying zombie abominations? The answer would be peer pressure, a free movie ticket and popcorn cravings. But what I believed to be a regular zombie movie instead had me hiding behind my friend’s jacket sleeve, constantly dreading the next jump scare.

The Resident Evil franchise is 30 years old, with the first game being released in 1996, and the first live-action movie coming out in 2002. Despite its extensive list of media, including about 11 games, 12 films and a couple of TV series, my journey into the Resident Evil universe started with the most recent movie released on Sept. 18. Though this movie is standalone in the Resident Evil universe, I believe it is worth watching even without the beloved characters from the original.

The movie follows Bryan, a medical courier tasked with delivering a special package to Raccoon City General Hospital. But delivering organs in below freezing weather is the least of Bryan’s worries, because his girlfriend Michelle just announced she was pregnant over the phone. This jumpstarts the themes of accepting responsibility, fatherhood and pregnancy that are prevalent throughout the film.

After hitting an oddly behaving woman in the middle of nowhere while arguing with his baby-mama-to-be, Bryan finds himself shoving the clearly zombie-like woman inside his car to continue to the Racoon City General Hospital. He later puts the zombie-woman with a cop that has pulled him over, and that’s when the real horrors of the movie start. The cop car crashes, and he finds himself fighting against the zombie-woman, picking up the cop’s gun as he runs away.

This begins a part of the movie I really enjoyed, Bryan “upgrading” his weapons throughout the film just how you would in a video game. He starts with a pistol, then a shotgun, and later a machine gun. Every time he finds a new gun, there’s a comedic learning curve you would expect from a regular person.

It added a layer of realism to the film, which is usually lacking in most survival horror media. Instead of finding a gun and immediately being able to pose a threat to his enemies, he first needs to find ammo and figure out how to work the gun without accidentally killing himself.

This starts up a funny, yet terrifying sequence of events that leads him to shooting his own car by mistake, leaving him stranded in a desolate cabin in search for help.

There, Bryan finds creatures that had me giving the stink eye to my friend who said, “it’s just a movie about zombies.”

Director Zach Cregger once said that limiting zombie-like creatures to a traditional zombie would be a “squandered opportunity.” These monsters had tentacles, puked acid, birthed zombie rats, and could all terrifyingly merge with each other into one monstrous beast. In retrospect, I am glad he took that creative stance, but the uncertainty of how these monsters functioned had me on my toes for the whole movie.

To get out of the cabin, Bryan must face one of his biggest obstacles of the movie – borderline indestructible bulletproof padlocks. At some point I thought that he might’ve had better odds of surviving with a bobby pin or a toothpick from the sheer amount of ammo he wasted trying to break those locks.

After narrowly escaping the cabin, Bryan makes it into a dark tunnel and attempts to cross over to continue his mission. An RV blocks his path which leads him to entering and encountering an infected little girl with a mutated tentacle foot. His attempt to help her fails dramatically, and she bites him before he can kill her.

Before he can fully process his future undead fate, two Umbrella Corporation employees pick Bryan up, and that is when he finds out the truth about the package he is meant to deliver. He has not been transporting organs, but rather the special ingredient for the virus cure. All he has to do is make it through the zombie infested Racoon City to the hospital, walk up almost 30 flights of stairs, then a sky bridge to where the most “qualified” scientists can make the cure.

The most frustrating part of the movie had to be the incompetent scientists that were waiting on the delivery to create a cure for the virus. The fate of humanity has been placed in the wrong hands; these scientists are incompetent, awkward and plain goofy. Even though I know the creators were trying to continue the comedic aspect of the movie, this last part just felt sloppy.

In the end, all the character development of Bryan accepting the fact that he was going to be a dad was flushed down the toilet into the sewer with all the nasty zombie rats. Byran becomes a tentacle monster and destroys the scientists and the cure. Well, I guess he escaped his fatherly responsibilities in the end.

As someone who can count how many horror movies they’ve watched on one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. The zombies were equally creative and terrifying and the characters were humorous. If you are looking for a movie that will keep you on your toes while also making you laugh, Zach Creggers’ “Resident Evil” is the movie for you.

I give Resident Evil a 7/10 padlocks.