How many more Hollywood movies can be churned out based on video games?

We've had Mortal Kombat, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Streetfighter, Final Fantasy and now this. What's going to happen when the amusement arcade well runs dry?

Are the studios going to resort to normal games for their source material... Ker-plunk - The Director's Cut anyone? Or how about Spirotot: The Movie.

Until that happy day arrives, there still appears to be an unending supply... and Resident Evil - based on the best-selling Capcom computer game - is one of the more enduring.

Sophisticated as today's arcade games are, plot and characterisation were never right up the list of priorities for the designers of these electronic bloodbaths.

So this relies on its shock-horror potential to pull the punters in. After all, the dialogue isn't going to have them queuing around the block of the local multiplex.

A virus is loose inside the Hive, a vast underground genetic research facility run by the Umbrella Corporation - yet another faceless bio-engineering conglomerate.

Special agent Alice (Jovovich) is sent in with a team of commandos to isolate the leak after the Hive's supercomputer - the Red Queen - has sealed the facility killing all the employees.

Except that, strictly speaking, they're not brown bread. The rampant T-virus has the ability to reanimate dead cells so a great army of the undead has risen up... and Alice and her team are on the menu.

Not only do they have to face the zombie predators, but they also have to run the gauntlet of a laser mandolin, which can dice a human body, and genetically-modified hell hounds that make cerberus look like Spot the Dog.

Anderson, who was behind both Mortal Kombat and Event Horizon, plays this like a hi-tech combination of Night Of The Living Dead and Aliens.

And if the horror doesn't grab you there's always Jovovich fighting off the undead in a red cocktail frock to get teenage hormones racing.

Tim Evans