Loud, anticipated by millions and featuring a shambling, mutated corpse wearing headgear and sporting a big stick. No, I’m not talking about the Pope’s visit to the UK, but Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth preposterous movie in this incomprehensibly successful series. I was surprised that they got the go-ahead to make two of the buggers, let alone four, because I can’t conceive of a world in which there are enough idiots like me who actually enjoy something that is this actively dead-pan in its awfulness. I had just the loveliest time watching this movie, and I’ll now fail to justify why that was in the following paragraphs.

Slender extraterrestrial lookalike Mila Jovovich, who has already announced that a fifth RE movie will make it to cinemas, returns as Alice, the genetically enhanced lass who’s on a mission to take down the Umbrella Corporation. This was the group responsible for the outbreak of the zombie-creating T Virus a few years back and it is somehow surviving with vast numbers of generic henchmen at its disposal, despite the fact that everyone else is very much dead or dead hungry for flesh. After a suitably ridiculous underground assault against its Japanese headquarters during the opening sequence, Alice almost succeeds in destroying the evil Umbrella chairman Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), but not before he’s taken away all her powers or whatever.

Alice then makes her way to Alaska by plane in search of Arcadia, a settlement that promises freedom from infection but turns out to be a myth. She manages to meet back up with Jill Valentine (Ali Larter) who is suffering from amnesia after being drugged by those multi-purpose bastards at Umbrella. The pair travel south to LA where they land on a prison that has survivors inside and is besieged by the hoards of the living dead. Then it’s time to escape with as many body parts as possible.*

Resident Evil: Afterlife is all about the action set pieces, and there are probably about ten pages of dialogue in the whole thing, which is a true blessing if you have no fondness for the source material. This film is in 3D at selected cinemas, and for perhaps the first time ever I’d recommend going to see it in this format, because director Paul W.S. Anderson and the special effects team have actually bothered to make use of it, even if it acts as a flashy show of technical mastery rather than as something useful to the narrative. I know I’ve criticised rather than praised other films for precisely the same thing, but I’m fickle, and it works here in a film where the plot could easily be described by a list of onomatopoeic words like ‘bang’, ‘squelch’ and ‘pewpewpew’.

So Resident Evil: Afterlife was fun. It retreads the classic zombie movie ground, but has action sequences that steal ideas from The Matrix trilogy whilst adding a few unique touches, and its relentless pace will leave you with little time to worry about how ultimately samey it is. It’s definitely objectively bad, but I can’t hide my subjective enjoyment.

*Their own, not just random arms and legs etc.