Until this week, I’d never seen an installment in the sprawling “Resident Evil” movie series, most of them directed and at least co-written by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring his wife, Milla Jovovich.

I don’t feel too bad about that, though, as the same is true of acclaimed filmmaker Zach Cregger, director and co-writer of a highly entertaining new entry, the simply titled “Resident Evil,” slamming into theaters this week.

I’ve also had almost no experience with the video game franchise on which the movies are based, the exception being the briefest of dalliances with 2017’s “Resident Evil 7: Biohazard” for PlayStation 4. (It was scary. I stopped playing rather quickly.)

Cregger, on the other hand, is a huge fan of the survival horror games, which involve a man-made pathogen leading to the world being taken over by humans-turned-monsters.

The choice to helm “Resident Evil” is a fascinating turn for the filmmaker, a founding member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, who in recent years has wowed movie fans and critics with his work behind the camera on the largely terrifying “Barbarian” (2022) and the thought-provoking “Weapons” (2025).

It’s clear his “Resident Evil” is a love letter to the games, not a straight adaptation.

Says Cregger in the film’s production notes: “I’m celebrating everything I love about them by telling a story that could exist on the edges of one of the games.”

He does so with a tale set at the beginning of the outbreak, following a medical courier, Bryan (Austin Abrams), on what becomes a night chock-full of horrors.

When we meet Bryan, his biggest problem is that his heard-but-never-seen girlfriend has gotten a positive result on a pregnancy test. As he’s trying to finish a delivery to a hospital, he’s not telling her what she wants to hear.

And instead of going home on this snowy night, he accepts another job. His car isn’t equipped to take the slippery mountain roads up to Raccoon City General Hospital, but this high-priority delivery — the cooler he’s given surely contains a heart or a liver, he figures — pays double, so he doesn’t want to pass on it.

Cut to his car sliding all over the road as his cellular connection — like his girlfriend’s mood — grows increasingly worse. Then, a woman suddenly emerges from the woods, and he hits her. Finding her not dead but in an unquestionably strange condition, he straps her in his car, planning to take her with him to the hospital, Bryan making the first of several questionable decisions on this ill-fated evening.

Soon, he encounters a police officer, obtains the first of what will be a trio of guns and makes enemies with a ferocious dog that, well, has its own issues.

“That wasn’t real,” Bryan tells himself after dealing with the vicious pooch. “That wasn’t real.”

Deeper into the story, after Bryan’s night has become absolutely wild, he encounters a couple of employees from the franchise’s problematic Umbrella Corporation, the fierce, gun-wielding Maxine (Kali Reis, a standout in “True Detective: Night Country”) and a largely useless lab tech, Paul (a funny-as-usual Paul Walter Hauser, “Cruella”), who want his help.

Even later, at the hospital — after an elevator ride from hell — he runs into more Umbrella lab techs (including one portrayed by Zach Cherry of “Severance”), who make even worse decisions than he has throughout the gory and, at times, goofy proceedings.

For the most part, Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten (“Ballerina,” “Army of the Dead”) mix in just the right amount of humor with the terror, although they go a bit overboard during the climactic sequence in the laboratory. It’s a horror movie, so characters acting recklessly is all but obligatory, but these are a bit much.

More importantly, Cregger crushes the horror elements. Some shots are effectively claustrophobic, others expansive but tension-filled all the same. The jump-scares work perfectly, as do moments too gross to be genuinely frightening.

While visual effects supervisor Alessandro Ongaro, editor Joe Murphy and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski do heavy lifting, the person most key to the film’s success — alongside Cregger — is Abrams. After shining in a supporting role in “Weapons,” the actor is front and center for the director here and excels as this everyman in an extraordinary situation.

“Resident Evil” is at its best when it’s just Abrams’ Bryan, dealing with this, that or the other, any of which could have been too much for him to overcome.

Some of Bryan’s questionable pauses to watch something grotesque happening before getting as far away from it as he can aside, I related so much to so many of his reactions and voiced thoughts. This is a young man who makes clear that his only experience with guns has been of the virtual variety — within the safety of video games. Just as within a game, he grows more proficient with weaponry as he progresses through the story, leading to a nice payoff moment.

“Video games!” he exclaims. “Yeah!”

I think it’s fair to assume he’s speaking for Cregger, who’s turned in quite an homage to that medium.

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‘RESIDENT EVIL’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout)

Running time: 1:30

How to watch: In theaters Sept. 18

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