So first, a brief rundown of the movies. Resident Evil, based on the stellar videogame series by Capcom, stars my favorite sci-fi superwoman Milla Jovovich as Alice, head of security for a secret, underground research facility called The Hive, owned by the evil conglomerate, Umbrella Corporation. The Hive is researching and developing bio-weaponry and unfortunately, someone has released the T-virus, one of their research products, into the facility, infecting all within it. The Red Queen, the A.I. supercomputer that controls the facility, locks things down and systematically kills all of the employees, trapping them in various areas, in a futile attempt to contain the virus and prevent its escape into the outside world. Sadly, an elite team is sent in to see what happened down there and through their efforts to subdue and avert the Red Queen, they reverse the lockdown, unknowingly freeing all the employees who have now become blood-thirsty zombies as a result of T-virus infection. Soon, it becomes a race against time for the team, and the few survivors they pick up along the way, including Alice - can they escape before the hordes of zombies catch up to them and they run out of ammo?
In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Alice returns once again, only this time, she's been "enhanced" after being captured by Umbrella at the end of the last movie. She is now stronger, faster and one bad-ass soldier. This will come in handy because when she awakes to find herself with tubes and wires in her skin, obviously once again Umbrella's victim, she emerges into Raccoon City to find it has been overrun by the zombies she encountered in The Hive. The virus escaped and is quickly infecting the entire city. As bedlam occurs, Umbrella erects a wall surrounding the city to try and contain the T-virus. As the number of infected grows, they close the door to the wall, leaving thousands inside to fend for themselves. Among them are Raccoon City Police Officers Jill Valentine (who gamers will recall from Capcom's games) played convincingly by British actress Sienna Guillory, and her partner, Peyton Wells (Raz Adoti), weathergirl turned hopeful reporter with camcorder in tow Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt), hilarious gangster L.J. (Mike Epps), and elite S.T.A.R.S. team members Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) and Nicholai Ginovaeff (Zach Ward of A Christmas Story - "He had yellow eyes" - Scut Farkus). This motley group eventually find one another and stick together for survival - that, and the common goal of locating one Angela Ashford, 10 year old daughter of Dr. Ashford of Umbrella, stuck somewhere in the zombie-overrun city. Dr. Ashford uses the high-tech advantages of Umbrella to reach out to non-infected survivors in the hopes of saving his child from a fate worse than death. Not only are the zombies a threat, but Umbrella plans on nuking Raccoon City at dawn as a cover-up and containment measure, so time is running short on the group.
In the meantime, Umbrella unleashes a new, far more dangerous enemy, Nemesis, who seems uncannily familiar to Alice. As Nemesis searches the city, eliminating unfortunate S.T.A.R.S. members, he and Alice eventually collide in a showdown, engineered by Umbrella, of course, to test their two greatest creations against one another.
The special features aren't many in number, but each one (aside from the Zombie Dog POV) is quite long and detailed, a real treat for fans. It really shows what the team was thinking while they were creating the films and how they basically gave their all during filming. Especially fun and insightful are the features with Milla Jovovich, who just seems like an all-around wacky and fun-loving girl. The featurettes are definitely worth a watch, though, and I don't normally like featurettes, personally. Of special note is the sneak peek scene from Resident Evil: Extinction which is very satisfying and has me all hyped up to see the movie.
So, is this double feature worth the money? It looks to cost around $18 and for that, you get both movies, featurettes not found in the earlier releases of the films (although I personally think they should have also included the features from the earlier DVD releases to be more complete), plus both a sneak peek and a free ticket to see Extinction. If you don't already own the movies, this is definitely worth the investment. Even if you do already own the movies, you know you are going to see Extinction anyway, so you may as well drop the few dollars extra and pick up the Resurrection Edition. Again, I would have been more pleased and impressed had all the previous features been on this 2-disc set so that it would serve as a complete replacement for the earlier releases, but eh.
