Resident Evil 7: Welcome to Racoon City (2021)

Plot of Resident Evil 7: Claire Redfield gets a lift from a truck on its way to Racoon City, which accidentally run down a figure standing in the road, but while they are looking round it disappears, not before the truck driver’s dog has licked up some blood, and been turned. The dog bites the truck driver. Meanwhile in flashback we see Claire and her brother in the Racoon City Orphanage as pre-teens. When Claire is selected for night time experiments she escapes. In the present she breaks into the house of her brother, who is now a policeman, and by now we have also seen a few policemen joshing in the local diner. Two of them have been sent out to investigate reports of a body in the Spencer mansion. The two have disappeared and so the rest apart from Leon, the rookie, are sent out by helicopter to find them. About now there is a broadcast announcement that Racoon City will be destructed at 0600 on the following morning and we begin to see count-downs in screen. Also, the former boss of the orphanage, William Birkin is trying to escape with his family. So now the police group are in the mansion, finding that there are zombies in there eating people, Claire, Leon and the police chief are trying to escape from the police station, with zombies chomping at the gates and Birkin and his family are attempting to drive away. How will it all end?

Content: No sex or nudity, or smoking. I think in the diner the police might be drinking beer. In the orphanage Claire is sort of befriended by Lisa Trevor, a girl who has been the subject of experiments and is never seen unhooded. There is joking amongst the police in the diner and later the police chief gives them a hard time, then they travel by helicopter to the mansion where they find zombies in lab coats eating people. Back in the police station we see zombies slavering at the gate, their numbers gradually increasing. The Claire group find a secret passage under the orphanage, and they briefly operate a cine film seeing twins destroying a dragon fly. They meet up with Birkin and his family, and end up shooting them except for the daughter, although Birkin injects himself with the G-Virus with alarming results. One of the police has inside information and gives the survivors a means of escape.

A View: Despite the fact that this film has a very thin plot I seem to have written quite a few words about it. Apparently this is a return to the original Resident Evil computer game, and the film is full of references to it, from the sets, the police station and the mansion, which are faithfully reproduced, to Claire’s clothing which is as worn by her in the early versions of the game. But while this may be fun for the players, the rest of us are left cold by it and are left wondering why we are back to the undead being shot, with little more to hold out interest. So, not a watch unless you love Resident Evil, the game.

Fun Fact: This quite ambitious film suffered a lot when the budget was cut from $40 million to $25 million.