The niche genre of zombie horror owes its very existence to director George A. Romero. A visionary filmmaker who was anti-corporation and very anti-establishment, Romero would break barriers with his work, plunging audiences into new levels of terror. His breakthrough picture, 1968's Night of the Living Dead, served as a blueprint for creating horrifying imagery, with Variety magazine exclaiming it as an "unrelieved orgy of sadism."  

 

Romero's zombie films served more than just blood-and-guts window dressing. With Night and later projects, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, Romero framed a subtextual critique on glaring social issues, particularly civil rights, consumerism, and institutional failure. A crop of zombie and zombie-adjacent films, comics, and other media swelled in the wake of Romero's input into the horror genre. 

 

This zeitgeist included the evolving world of video games. Resident Evil, the 1996 horror survival game created by Japanese company Capcom, also carried Romero's thumbprint. A success in the market, Resident Evil spurned a sequel, and the buzz about a live-action film was a compulsory next step. 

 

The journey of Resident Evil from PlayStation controller to the big screen occupies half of Brandon Salisbury's documentary George A. Romero's Resident Evil. The other half, and frankly more interesting section, details Romero's beginnings and his lasting impact. Salisbury's team interviews actors, filmmakers, game designers, and archivists to paint both broad strokes and granular detailed brushes about Romero's influence, ethics, and impact. 

 

The former section, highlighting the gameplay, scripting, graphics, and other nuts and bolts of creating the first two Resident Evil games, is inherently compelling but feels out of place when juxtaposed with honoring a legendary storyteller. Detailing the game nuances is understandable, given the tie-in with Romero's ultimately rejected movie script. Constantin Film, the at-the-time rights holders for a Resident Evil movie, sensibly approached Romero to craft a live-action adaptation. They eventually passed on Romero and gave Paul W. S. Anderson directorial duties. 

 

The frustrating part of this documentary is that it blossoms a conventional "creative difference" result, a common film industry occurrence, and pumps it into a melodramatic narrative. This documentary is nearly two hours long when a tight 80-minute edit would have provided the same information. 

 

Ultimately, Constantin Film's failure to retain George's services for a Resident Evil film is a footnote in an otherwise remarkable career. Romero's long shadow accounts for so much zombie media in the last half-century that focusing on one shelved project is hard to justify. Romero had many stories he never got to tell, but the brighter spots of Salisbury's documentary are all the stories artists and filmmakers share about George. 

​

Who George was, how he treated people, and how he ironically pumped life into the undead genre that has entertained generations of people is nothing short of celebratory. Those vignettes inside this documentary are the meat and potatoes; the rest is just garnish.