Someone really should write an informal study of the aesthetic dialectic between Japanese survival horror video games and early-twenty-first century American action movies written and directed by Paul Anderson.

Resident Evil was one of the first truly bad games of the PlayStation era, an inexplicably overrated hit that would’ve been a movie back in 1998…if the effort to get George Romero to write and direct it hadn’t miserably failed. “Differences over the script.” So what did they do? Hire the director of Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon and Soldier.

With a filmography like that, Anderson really should go down as either one of the last truly Bad directors of twentieth century Hollywood, or one of the first of the twenty-first. Not just your garden variety hack, this one: I’m talking “Bad” in the Woodian sense of an artist whose ambitions far exceed his talents, resulting in muddled, half-crazy films that nevertheless bowl you over with their over-the-top ineptness. {More}