Last Friday, "Resident Evil 5" was released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Yes, this is still a movie blog.

Readying myself to follow the latest adventure in the video game survival horror saga meant tracking down the movie "Resident Evil: Degeneration." This straight-to-video feature bridges together the relatively standalone story of "Resident Evil 4" with that of "5." Animated entirely in CG, it bears no relation to the "Resident Evil" film trilogy starring Milla Jovovich.

"Degeneration" provides a glimpse at the power vacuum that follows the collapse of Umbrella, the pharmaceutical company behind the zombie breakouts of the first four games. New giants like WilPharma and Tricell now stalk the bioweapon field. As "Degeneration" unfolds, longtime "Resident Evil" heroes Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy learn that these companies' continuing work on Umbrella's zombie-spawning viruses is fetching high prices from terrorist groups on the black market.

But this blog isn't about the artistic merits of the "Resident Evil" mythos. The movie went straight to video for a reason.

The more compelling point of "Degeneration" is its testimony to the current state of CG animation. In Blu-ray, the photography's depth of detail is stunning. Viewers can see the individual pores on characters' skin in close-ups, and the drippy cellular degeneration of the zombie hordes is as terrifying as the dead characters of any Romero film.

But where CG has improved at a much slower pace is its capacity for animating human faces in service of emotion. The cheeks and eyebrows of "Degeneration's" characters appear mostly wooden and provide little visual weight to the anger or sadness audible in the film's competent voice acting.

Putting all those technological resources behind photorealism, and none behind pure drama, is indeed evil.