Yet, much to Bryan and even the audience’s surprise, the dog not only is able to smash its head through the wall, but it then unleashes a tentacled nightmare from its mouth, wrapping around Bryan’s leg and dragging him ever closer to its mutated canine clutches!
This for the record is nothing like the zombie dogs you might remember from the original trilogy of ‘90s Resident Evil games, or like those encountered in the 2002 and 2004 movies that similarly saw Milla Jovovich scuttle around a Raccoon City biohazard disaster. The undead dogs of Raccoon City are… undead. Reanimated un-good boys. But the beastie in Cregger’s film? He looks more like those infected by the “Las Plagas” parasite from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5.
At the risk of going deep on the nerdiness, the Las Plagas parasite and the T-virus are entirely separate things, and exactly the type of deep-cut distinctions that will most assuredly ruffle some fans’ feathers. Whereas the T-virus that makes zombies possible is designed by the Umbrella Corporation, the evil conglomerate responsible for the biohazard nightmares of the ‘90s games, Las Plagas is less George Romero-coded; it’s in fact a Resident Evil 4 conceit that let Capcom game designers turn every human, or indeed dog, salamander, cockroach, or whatever else into pure nightmare fuel. This includes creatures who have tentacles and other monstrosities sprout from their head after you blow their head off.
It’s quite clear that Cregger is a fan of Resident Evil 4 since he plays fast and loose with that iconography in his new film, even though he’s technically set “before” the discovery of the Las Plagas parasite by a cult of European Napoleon enthusiasts and Dracula fetishists. But the director’s also a fan of… just doing his own thing altogether. Hence the even more shocking revelation: after you blow off the head of a zombie or two, as Bryan does at the same farmhouse, they not only grow tentacles from the neck stumps… but they can actually combine and merge bodily forms. In fact, they seem to prefer it!
As the movie unfurls, it seems the ultimate form of Cregger’s take on the T-virus (assuming it is even called that in his movie) is not a zombie, Nemesis, or anything else we’ve seen in the games: it’s a Cronenbergian hodgepodge of body horror terror in which mutilated corpses (assuming they’re even… dead?!) form into giant piles of heat-seeking disease that chases you throughout the city. In fact, (MAJOR SPOILER), as the ending reveals, the final form for this even befalls poor, poor doomed Bryan.
In the movie’s closing moments, he grows the giant familiar eye we associate with William Birkin from the Resident Evil 2 video game (which by the by is a byproduct of the G-virus for anyone who cares). Now Bryan seems to need to spread his infection by mingling his flesh with the bodies of everyone around him, including the last scientist trying to “cure” him, if only to save his own skin. Tough luck buddy, you’re going in the body pile!
