Synopsis
The film opens to a man tossing a glass tube containing a blue substance inside a lab. Minutes later the automated security system kills everyone in the facility through various means ranging from drowning scientists in a sealed lab, to suffocating trapped employees with halon gas to dropping an elevator full of people and beheading a woman using elevator doors.
A woman, Alice, later awakens in a shower inside a mansion with no recollection of her identity. As she explores the mansion she is captured by a man and the two are immediately seized by a group of commandos. The man grabbing Alice turns out to be a police-officer, Matt Adison. The commandos open a mirror-door to an underground train-station. On the train they discover another unconscious victim suffering amnesia, a man named Spence. The woman recognises this man from a wedding photograph in the mansion. Looking at her wedding ring the inside of it reads: Property of the Umbrella Corporation.
The protagonists hurry to get to the other end of the underground railway before its other end shuts as programmed to do so to prevent the virus from escaping the facility. However, the Licker is on the train and kills Kaplan after scratching Matt in the arm. Alice manages to impale the licker's tongue in the grating on the floor, leaving it stuck over a trap-door. She yells to Matt to open the door and he is forced to kill Rain, who in spite of being given the antidote turns into a zombie (possibly because she received so many various bites and scratches the Antidote was useless). As her corpse hits the release-button the trapdoors open and the Licker is killed by being dragged along the railway, catching fire.
Matt and Alice escape at the last second when the doors close. Matt begins to suffer a mutation from the Licker's scratch and the two are seized by Umbrella scientists (who mention sending Matt to the "Nemesis Program", an allusion to the next movie). As the struggle fades to black, the words of one of the head scientists are heard, "I'm reopening the Hive--I want to know what really went on down there." Sometime later Alice wakes up at the Raccoon City Hospital, having gone through extensive testing, and breaks out only to find the city in chaos and abandoned. She picks a shotgun from a nearby police car and prepares to face the coming apocalypse and the terrors that lie ahead.