Review by Ian Keogh

Resident Evil has been running for so long in various forms now that it’s built its own cast of favourite people from different incarnations. Death Island adapts the 2023 animation in which Rebecca Chambers, Ingrid Hunnigan, Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield, Claire Redfield and Jill Valentine feature. In practice, though, it makes little difference as they’re either interchangeable medical researchers or interchangeable soldiers, all drop dead gorgeous and utterly fit.

They’re dispatched to Alcatraz island off the San Francisco coast, once a forbidding prison, now a tourist attraction. Several people infected with T-virus have died, and the connection between them is that all had visited Alcatraz. No sooner do the investigation team arrive than they encounter zombies. Most disturbingly, they’re all recently transformed, people who accompanied the team on the boat over.

Past attempts to transfer Resident Evil to comics, primarily The Marhawa Desire, have been very good, so the bar is set high for creator Zino’s adaptation of Makoto Fukami’s animation script, but they really come through. Yes they’re adapting, so there is the template of the movie to work from, but there’s a skill involved in breaking it down efficiently for comics, and Zino’s art is incredible. The monsters are well defined and suitably creepy, the action is wild and thrilling, and the people are realistically scruffy.

There is a subplot about one of the cast maybe having a death wish after being previously possessed, but no-one’s going to care about that amid everything else that’s going on. Death Island is a riotous action thriller from start to finish.