It's early yet, but I think we have a winner. This is the worst movie I have seen in the theater so far, and I can't imagine that I will actively seek out anything worse, so I think it will remain the worst. That is an achievement, coming so early in the year. I just needed to see something bad that I could laugh at, and I got what I wanted.

I wonder at the futility of attempting a plot synopsis. I was confused as to what was actually going on anywhere in the film, except immediate things like "Oh no, there's another zombie!" "Hey, this door won't open!" "The room is filling with water!" Wouldn't you know it, but those parts of the dialog were right on the money. Any time the characters said something like that, it was true. As to the over-arching plot, I can only guess. Apparently, the Umbrella Corporation has been testing a virus that turns people into zombies deep in their underground laboratory system known as "The Hive." Things go wrong—you're never sure exactly how or why—and the Red Queen (she's the computer with an imagination and sense of humor that runs the entire thingamabob... I lost my train of thought. The movie's plot makes me lose track of the clauses in my sentences. I think I need a closing parenthesis here...) Anyway, a crack team of some kind are sent in to The Hive to... I guess to find out what happened, although that should be pretty apparent. What good is a supercomputer with a cool name if it can't tell you what happened? They take Milla Jovovich, who wears a really sexy dress and yells a lot and has amnesia because of some nerve gas that she was given by... I don't know who did it or why. Anyway, they go down into The Hive, and all of the former workers are zombies now. The characters have never seen a zombie movie before (doesn't Night of the Living Dead exist in their world?), so it takes them a while to figure out how to deal with them. I would say that chaos ensues, but it started the minute the opening credits started to roll, so "ensuing" is not very helpful. Chaos reigns.

I hate this kind of horror film. I hesitate to call it horror, because there's no suspense involved. They telegraph the "scary" parts about thirty seconds early by using this annoying, slowly growing blast of music, then whatever it is pops up and there's a crashing sound (this might be the loudest movie I have ever seen). Last time I checked, if someone taps you on the shoulder, there is no crashing sound or music. Oh, but that's to tell the audience that we should be frightened—here! Be Frightened! And it does make you jump, but it's not really fair. If Mother Theresa knocked on a window behind you, you would jump. The "shocks" in this film are the equivalent of someone following you around with a balloon and a stickpin, threatening to pop it. You know it's coming, but of course you'll jump when it happens. So the characters stand around, or run, and the zombies crash into doors and scare them, and there are these terribly bad computer-generated monsters who look like proto-Gumby... ahh, you get the point.

It's sad that the best part of the movie was stolen blatantly from a far better suspense film. There's a scene where a bunch of the crack team of soldiers are in a hallway. This cool blue laser thingy comes flying through, cuts one of them into ribbons, then comes back at another level, then changes direction. One guy survives, the guy who had been serving as the narrator (any time a character seemed to know too much about what was going on, they would buy the farm in the next room). Then a grid of lasers cuts him into julienne carrots. This scene was stolen from 1998's Cube, a far better film with a tenth of the budget of this. But of course this movie will make a lot of money, and of course there will be a sequel. I think I'll skip that one. (In case you are wondering, I gave it a half goat for a couple of great scenes involving Milla Jovovich that had little to do with zombies and a lot to do with my inner 13-year-old boy.)