George A. Romero’s Resident Evil

Beyond the zombies, it is easy to understand how Umbrella, the evil pharmaceutical company in the Resident Evil video game franchise would resonate with an old-fashioned liberal like George A. Romero. Ironically, that distrust of big pharma has become more prevalent on the populist “right” in recent years. Similarly, Romero’s commentary regarding government censorship and misinformation during times of crisis probably seemed “leftwing” when he made Diary of the Dead, but it lands very differently today. If the government ever starts censoring his films, it will start with Diary. Unfortunately, fans never had the chance to see Romero’s take on the popular survival horror game, even though he scripted several drafts. Friends and insiders consider what might have been and offer their tributes to the master in Brandon Salisbury’s documentary, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, which releases today on VOD.

Everyone at the Japanese video game company Capcom fully understood the Resident Evil game never would have existed without George Romero. He essentially launched zombie horror with Night of the Living Dead and maintained it as a subgenre with his subsequent sequels. Evidently, Romero felt the same way, so he had mixed feelings about the game (which he claimed to enjoy). Nevertheless, Capcom was eager to forge a closer association, so they hired Romero to direct the commercial for the second installment of the game (known as Biohazard in Japan).

Inevitably, the commercial caused a minor sensation in the horror world and it helped propel the new game to record-setting sales. Consequently, Capcom recommended Romero to direct the feature film adaptation. Although the surviving rough drafts of his proposed scripts are all pretty rough, fans agree they would have captured the spirit of the games much more successfully than the Paul W.S. Anderson live-action movies. However, a key executive at Constantine Films, the Germany production company, just didn’t understand the IP they bought—and eventually fired Romero, because he did.

Salisbury’s doc grows a small but growing list of films that document films that never came to be, but should have, as previously exemplified by Jodorowsky’s Dune and Henri-Georges Cluzot’s Inferno. Sadly, Romero’s Resident Evil never advanced as far as either of those non-films.

For Romero fans and admirers, this is still a fascinating what-if story. However, most of the talking heads are decidedly fannish in their commentary, which is a drawback. Sadly, Romero passed away in 2017 and Brad Renfro, the troubled teen actor who starred in Romero’s commercial died in 2008. For whatever reason, regular Romero collaborators like Greg Nicotero are entirely absent. Probably the biggest participating names come from the video game side, including the original game writer, Kenichi Iwao and Tokyo-based actor Charlie Kraslavsky, who appeared in the in-game dramatic vignettes.

From Constantine Films’ perspective, they weren’t really wrong about nixing Romero’s very gory vision, because the Anderson movies have been cash cows. However, Romero’s vision might have been embraced as genre classic (that conceivably could have out-earned Anderson’s initial film over time). Frustratingly, it was one of many Romero projects that never materialized. Recommended for the torturous fun of considering what could have been, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil releases today (1/7) on VOD.