Following horror franchises is a lot like following Seattle sports teams.

The screen is filled with shambling, uncoordinated monsters. You're overcome by the deep-seated dread of the terror to come. Is anyone going to make it out of there alive? Not likely. In fact, there's about an 85% chance Franklin Gutierrez will be sliced in half and he'll look down at himself and be all "Oh no" as his torso slides gooily away from his hips.

But mostly, you end up questioning your priorities. Yes, there was that one great movie or season a while back, but haven't the last two or three sucked like a vacuum (in case that's over your head, vacuums are proverbial for sucking)? The Resident Evil series hasn't quite gone that way — while the second one wasn't too shabby, none of them are franchise-supporting classics — but after Resident Evil: Afterlife, you can at least say it's consistent.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Milla Jovovich and her psychic clone army are continuing their assault against the Umbrella Corporation, whose killer T-virus has reduced humanity to slavering zombies. In the attack, Umbrella operative Shawn Roberts injects Jovovich with a serum that strips her of her superpowers.

Newly human, she flies in search of Arcadia, a city of survivors. After a false lead, she ends up stranded with a handful of survivors in an LA prison — and thousands of zombies stand between them and escape.

Though I have a certain fondness for the first two entries in the Resident Evil franchise, the last entry, Extinction, made me wish it were an autobiographical account from the writer and director. It raised numerous questions, among them "How does a virus let you shoot mind bullets?" or "Just how much magic is Jovovich capable of?" And ultimately, "Could this possibly get sillier without dressing all the zombies in party hats?"

So it's a nice dodge to just throw all that nonsense out the window and get back to basics: oh damn, zombies everywhere. Of course, it also renders the last movie even more pointless. But if you've got two babies and no baby food and one of the babies only has one eye, well, you know who's ending up in whose spoon.

Back to basics for Afterlife, then: Matrix-like visuals (only, you know, not The Matrix), half-baked internal mythology, and thin character development. Yet writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson (who wrote the entire series and directed the first, in case any of you nerds have strong opinions on which is the best) handles the action well and tells a cohesive story along with it.

Admittedly, hailing a movie for the titanic accomplishment of "making sense" may be such faint praise you can't hear it over the neighbors arguing over who has to bail their daughter out this time. And you know what, now that I think about it, you're right.

Afterlife is fun enough in the moment, but there's a constant sense it's missing a dimension. Wentworth Miller shows up as an inmate who may or may not be a Hannibal Lecter-esque killer, then...nothing. It's as dramatic as a nap. Likewise with its unfocused jabs at Hollywood; most of the survivors are industry types, but through Afterlife's diamond-edged insight, that just means the producer-guy is not to be trusted and the chick has a real big rack. And what's with that guy with the hammer??

Points for trying. Points for being better than Extinction. And super-extra bonus points for Jovovich's sweet blunderbuss. Afterlife is a good-looking film with no obnoxiousness to it, it's just never anything more than a run-of-the-mill zombie flick.

Grade: C