Set some time after Part 2, the T-Virus has spread, despite the destruction of Racoon City, and has decimated the worlds population. What's left of the Umbrella corporation are
holed up in secret underground facilities, working on ways to try and get the dead to stay dead.
But with food, medical supplies and ammunition running desperately low and the hoards of undead massing outside, their chief scientist, Dr Isaac's (Iain Glen reprising his role from the previous film), thinks he's found a way of domesticating the dead and thereby preventing them from wanting to attack the living (hang on, why does that sound familiar???).
Meanwhile Alice (Milla Jovovich) and a group of survivors, including LJ (Mike Epps) and Carlos (Oded Fehr) from the last film, have learned to stay alive by taking to the desert highway. But when Dr Isaac's experiments in domestication fail, producing a new super violent breed of zombie, the survivors find themselves forced into a confrontation, when the remnants of the Umbrella corps decide they need to recapture Alice as they think her blood may hold the key to stopping the undead.
Now if you thought the basic plot sounds suspiciously similar to one of George Romero's zombie films you'd be absolutely correct, and the blatant plagiarism of "Day of the Dead" is not handled subtley either. Hell, there's even a scene where Dr Isaac's gives a "domesticated" zombie a phone and tells it to make a phone call, which was ripped directly from the scene between Dr Logan and Bub the zombie in that film.
If that wasn't enough, Alice and her desert survivors look like refugees from a Mad Max film, complete with armoured tanker. The scene with infected birds looks like it was ripped from a Hitchcock film, then inside the Umbrella corps bunker we find 100's of cloned Alice's, clearly a reference to "Alien 4 : Resurrection", and the new hybrid zombie bad guy, that Alice has to battle at the end, looks suspiciously similar to the Dr Channard cenobite from "Hellraiser 2".
As you can probably gather, I found this to be a somewhat disappointing third entry into the series, and it seems that writer Paul Anderson was either running out of ideas, or was pushed for time when he penned this, so decided to plundercideas from other films. Horror actress Ali Larter and singer Ashanti make appearances, and while it was good to see Mike Epps, Oded Feher and Iain Glen reprising their roles, strangely there is no mention of Sienna Guillory's character Jill Valentine.
Worth a watch, but a very poor follow up compared to the previous film.
