Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Resident Evil (2026), Star Trek Strange New Worlds season 4

Thank you. Welcome back to Father Malone's Weekly Roundup, where once again I will promise to review The Stunt Driver about Canadian madman Ken Carter next week. I promise. I've seen it. I just need to coordinate with a friend whom I cannot name.

But his initials are HP. To that end, we will also next week be discussing that Wonka game show on Netflix. You might want to check that out between now and then because I have some motherfucking opinions. Ah, Star Trek Strange New Worlds has finished out its fourth season. Fifth is in the can and ready to go and resolve the saga of Captain Pike.

There's been some bad talk about this season, and I cannot disagree. You know, when a series had to pump out 22 or 24 episodes a year, you'd give it a little grace when a clunker came down the pike. Or they decided to indulge themselves with a comedy episode, or God fucking forbid, a musical episode. Hey, listen. We were all in drama club, okay?

We all love musicals. I don't need to see anyone on the Enterprise singing. Oh, it's a bit of fun. Save it for your fan fiction. Make your TikTok jukebox musical about Sam and Dean Winchester all you'd like.

I don't want to see it as fucking canon in Starfleet. This season of Strange New Worlds, we had a soap opera episode, a fantasy romance with knights and dragons and shit, and yes, the fucking puppets. Actually, the puppets one was fine. The others, though, and the comedy, and the in-general-ain't-we-having-a-blast attitude sucks. I never once turned on Star Trek with the hope that everyone behind the scenes was enjoying themselves.

On screen, neither. It's a drag, because when the show is firing properly, it's one of the best versions of Trek ever. This season gave us a genuine horror episode that actually worked. a time travel episode that felt like original Star Trek in its seriousness, and a finale that was as promising as anything we've seen from Star Trek in decades. Speaking of drags, we are not going to get any more adventures of this particular Captain Kirk, and that is criminal. I loved Chris Pine's take on the character, but Paul Wesley is the Shatner variant I'd always hoped for.

Pine leaned into the swaggering egotist. Wesley gives us the tactician. That's the Kirk I love. So on to Season 5, which should prove to be one devastation after another. There are a lot of great characters to kill off here.

So live long and prosper, everybody. It's spooky season officially, gang. Time to elevate your horror. Or devolve it. Do what you like.

As long as there are screams. To that end, we need to talk Resident Evil. Not the Milo Jovovich dropkicks inside-out dogs movies. No, not the animated features that seemed to have proliferated while no one was looking. No, we're not discussing any previous incarnation, including that unmade Romero screenplay.

Remember when that almost happened? And then a video game company said, this man who created the zombie genre is unsuited to pen our masterpiece that wouldn't exist but for him. I read it. I like it. Though it did lack in laser beams cutting people into tiny cubes.

No, we're not even talking the video game franchise from once those films sprang, although we kind of have to talk about them in a roundabout way, because Zack Kreger's new feature, Resident Evil, is 100% tied to those games, and yet delivers something no other adaptation has even attempted. It recreates the feeling you have when you're fully immersed in the world. This Kreger fella needs to slow the fuck down. Here's the trailer. Hey, man, I gotta be seven.

Do you know where I can take this? Excuse me, I got, oh my God. Anybody order a kidney or liver or whatever this is. Anybody, it seems like it's kind of important. Hey, you got time for another run?

No, I'm wrapped up. It's outside the zone, so it pays double. I can do that. Sweetheart, I'm sorry, the signal sucks here. Can you hear me?

I'm gonna stay with Katie for a bit. Michelle, please do not go stay with freaking Katie. Also, my feeling is that you don't even care enough to come home and have this conversation. Seriously, I'm working. This could be some eight-year-old boy's heart or someone's mom's brain.

Hello? Hello? There's an emergency here. I was wondering if I could use your phone? Hi, here for Michelle.

Leave a message. Hey, baby, I'm really sorry that we got disconnected earlier. Some things have happened, and I can't get a hold of police. Bullets, bullets, bullets, bullets. Could you just call me back on this number, please?

Everything that has happened in this town transpired in a matter of hours. You've got no idea what you've got there in your hands. Where was it going? Raccoon City General. Hey, no sweat.

It's not an overstatement to say that Resident Evil represented a revolution in video games. There had been other attempts previously at horror. Trust me, I played them all. Anybody remember Haunted House for the 2600? How about text-based games like The Lurking Horror?

In 83, there was an official Texas Chainsaw game for Atari. which I was terrified to play until I saw it and realized it looked like a fucking lame version of Pitfall, graphically. Castlevania was some side-scrolling horror shit, and who could forget Maniac Mansion? Not me. Certainly not HP. Then there was Alone in the Dark, which was so fucking limited, but had so much fucking potential.

Just the kind of potential they were looking for at Capcom. More specifically, Shinji Mikami and Takura Fujiwara, who came up with Biohazard. That's what Resident Evil is called in Japan. They couldn't duplicate it here because the name was already registered and because of that band. So in 96, they kicked the fucking doors down with survival horror at its most infant stage and yet so far ahead of everyone else.

And then, of course, we've had House of the Dead and Clock Tower and Silent Hill and Penumbra and Slander and a million other horror games since. Did you ever play Choo Choo Charlie? Where a giant spider train chases you? I just picked up a plush doll of it at a thrift store recently. and did not know the game prior to looking that goddamn thing up. It's a fucking nightmare of a video game.

Check that one out. Choo-choo, Charlie. Anyway, we're talking about Resident Evil, which I remember back in the day playing in a friend's basement, which were rare in Los Angeles, really late at night and being totally engrossed and completely fucking freaked out. Once I was underground and there were giant spiders, the web spinners. Fuck you, Black Tiger.

That's when the lights came on. And since that day, there have been dozens or so titles under the Resident Evil banner, each improving in gameplay and character building and world building. My god, by now Umbrella Corporation is as well known as Exxon. Probably more. There's so much baked-in mythology to draw from that it becomes kind of overwhelming.

So where to start in adapting it? Particularly after seven feature films have mined those stories and characters over and over again. Not to mention the TV series. Anyone remember that? There was a full live-action series a few years back.

It only lasted one season, and it was actually pretty good. It attempted to sidestep a lot of the most familiar characters and settings while adhering to the same basic body horror, survival horror, and quite frankly, kaiju-type horror. That series had a lot of giant beasts trying to scarf up the heroes. The answer, evidently, is to step the fuck back from the whole thing, apparently. That's what Krager does here.

This isn't some tale within the hive or some standard Matrix knockoff where everyone's doing kung fu for no reason. It's just about a medical courier enticed to make a late-night run through a densely wooded forest in the middle of a snowstorm with the promise of double his fee. The courier is Brian, played by Austin Abrams, who's been in a ton of shit I've never seen, but was a standout as the junkie character James in Krager's last flick, Weapons. He's great here, eminently watchable, and kind of a perfect everyman. It's Griffin Dunn without that fella's swagger.

There's a subplot of unexpected pregnancy woven throughout with Brian on the phone to his girlfriend whenever cell service or landline allows. That's Sarah Paxton as the disembodied voice of the girlfriend. Am I the only person who enjoyed The Innkeepers by Ty West? Everyone goes on and on about Pearl. Nobody loves The Innkeepers.

Ah well. This is a survive the night and complete the mission type film. The destination of question is, of course, Raccoon City, and the route there is treacherous, to say the least. Out on the roads and in fields and in remote farmhouses, Brian finds himself menaced by raging infected humans. His initial encounter with a woman he thinks he struck with his car is pretty fucking harrowing.

He also encounters unhelpful humans and mutated creatures alike. There's no team of badasses here. It's just some guy thrown into a situation he doesn't understand and trying to acclimate and persevere. There are purists out there shouting about the fact that this isn't the same universe as Alice and those Inside Out dogs, or that it isn't trafficking in the game's major characters and set pieces. And they can, and I say this respectfully, fuck off into the sun.

Because if all of those major gamers could crawl out of their own asses, they might recognize what Kregers has done here. which is recreate the fucking feeling this game gave you on a personal, intimate level. After you've been playing the game or games with any frequency, a zombie is just a nuisance at best. Even liquors and hell, the tyrant just become another obstacle you can reload and blast into oblivion. But when you first started and everything was new, the act of loading a shotgun was an issue. Resources were an issue.

There's a moment out in the snow when our hero is being chased by a multi-limbed menace and he's just hauling ass. And you can see every once in a while a few shotgun shells tumble from his pockets, and every time you will wince knowing that that's one less chance of survival for our lead. Standing around with a bunch of colonial marines feels different than climbing through an access tunnel with a jerry-rigged flamethrower. In other words, you've all been clamoring for aliens, and Krager is giving us Alien. And it's funny.

Alien is an apt analog, but so is American Werewolf in London. This film has laughs. Genuine fucking laughter. So much so that some people I know have described it as mislabeled as horror. It's hard to disagree.

And it's really odd because the horror is fucking spot on. And the humor is non-stop. It shouldn't work. But then, none of it should work this well. And it's my understanding that Kregers had to do an editorial pass previous to the final print in which he removed even more comedy.

Now look, Kregers knows what he's doing with the camera. I think he could take any mundane situation and wring some tension out of it. But there was something mystifying about this film. The scares feel as intimate as they do because of what he's doing with that camera. I was shocked how close and claustrophobic he was getting when in some cases the scene is in a wide open snowy field.

In reading up on the film afterwards, I learned something pretty fucking cool. A traditional 35mm camera, the lens and the film exposed are in line with each other, out of necessity. That's not true with digital. In fact, the lens itself is connected via a cable, so what's to stop you from just detaching the lens and using that any way you want? As it turns out, nothing at all.

And that's what they've done here, with scenes inside RVs that seem to float effortlessly within that super tight environment. It also allows a level of POV that feels fresh and stable, as opposed to previous shaky cam first-person features. Paul Walter Hauser pops in as an Umbrella Corp flunky about halfway through the film and just takes over for a bit, which is fine by me. He enlivens everything. And if you follow him on social media, you can see he's just a really decent guy.

Nice when they're cool and talented. I can't really say much more without spoiling this film, and I don't want to do that. It's too damned good. So I guess that's the roundup for this week. How's that for abrupt?

This coming Monday, we've got a new Button Switches and Consoles, the old tech series I do with Laura Grillo. We're looking at the granddaddy of computer mischief flicks, War Games. Shall we play a game? Yes. Yes, we shall.

Over on the Patreon, we've got a new Vault 702, the Fallout podcast, the show I do with New Kokoda Quantum, and I just recorded a bunch of stuff with Paul Waller, But that's his show, so I have no idea when it's coming out. But we did talk about Killer Nun, a non-sploitation Italian flick from 1978. Good stuff. I'll link it when it comes out. Until next time, gang.

Enjoy the spooky season and try to enjoy the daylight.