Have you ever seen MAD MAX: BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME? For decades this has been considered (at least by me) the worst final installment of a trilogy, and perhaps one of the worst dystopian sci-fi movies ever, and I can honestly say that I thought it would remain indefinitely locked at the top of the annals of film flops. But now I think there is a new contender in the stakes. Resident Evil: Extinction is out soon, and I suggest you avoid it like the plague.

In this latest outing of the Resident Evil Franchise, we rejoin Alice at a bleak time in the future. In fact, it’s the end of the world. In case you don’t remember or haven’t seen the original, or the sequel ‘Apocalypse’, they introduced Alice - a lone survivor in a zombified world. She is thrown into the melee to dismember, disembowel and generally destroy zombies before they take over the world. The only other continuity with earlier films is the return of fellow survivors Carlos and L.J. and the almost complete lack of resemblance between the films and their orginal computer game storylines barring the appearance of Wesker, the evil head of Umbrella Corp, albeit in a slightly modified role. In fact the plot of Resident Evil: Extinction bases itself largely on the provision of a back story for Alice, again played by Milla Jovovich, and intertwines her fate far more closely with the nefarious plans of Umbrella Corp.

Having seen BLACK SHEEP already this week, I was prepared to accept Resident Evil: Extinction as either an action horror, or another cheesy zombie flic, but it failed miserably in both stakes. The plot dragged up a new dimension to Alice which was desperately overdone, and all of the supplementary characters hauled into the fray seemed utterly pointless, adding little of the extra dimensions needed to flesh out the already meagre storyline. The film deployed every cliche in the action horror arsenal to entertain, but it just came off as tired and lacklustre: once you’ve jumped a couple of times as a zombie leaps into frame, or seen a couple of characters gain hope before being eaten, it is quite easy to lose interest in the events unfolding in front of you. Even the gore seemed pretty uninspired, consisting as it did of the usual shots of heads exploding and torsos being sliced; and the CGI, with the exception of a couple of fancy explosions, wasn’t quite up to scratch on the eye-candy stakes either.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the film was that it should have been a lot better. Sound surprising? Well, despite the undeniable fact that movies based on video games are often appalling (just look at Uwe Boll’s efforts), when a trilogy has the same writer throughout you’d expect that it would have, or at least look for, a real sense of continuity, of evolution of character, but there was little in the way of that here. And in terms of the cinematography, I expected far more of Russell Mulcahy - director of the retro sci-fi/fantasy classic HIGHLANDER. Perhaps I would even have accepted some cheesy absurdity in the vein of BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME, after all even ridiculously wild plots can occasionally be endearing. But alas, Resident Evil: Extinction posseses none of these qualities and I cannot think of a single reason to recommend this film. Let us please just put this down as another unfortunate contribution to a year of disappointing three-quels.