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This movie is based on a highly popular video game. The plot at its simplest is that some college students go to a mysterious island for a rave. They soon discover that the island is overrun with zombies…
This movie is notorious among zombie movie fans as being one of the worst zombie movies ever made. Keeping that in mind, I spent days struggling with what positive things I could say about House of the Dead. One lone bright point could be the makeup. Some of the zombies actually do look cool, but the makeup effects aren’t consistent. Take, for example, Cynthia when gets turned into a zombie. Other than some blood on her face, there’s no zombie makeup effects used on her. For those of you who can’t remember who Cynthia is, she was the blond girl we get to see topless on the boat.
The plot of House of the Dead would actually have worked well in a video game. The problem is that this is a movie, so the plot ends up being laughable at best. When the audience gets to shoot zombies in the video game, they usually don’t care why. In a movie, however, all people have is the plot and special effects to entertain them, so a weak plot is always a huge hurdle to overcome. I seriously believe that this movie would have been better if the zombies were given no origins and most of the movie was just people shooting zombies while trying to get off the island. I know that a movie that involves reanimated corpses requires some suspension of belief, but the origin story about some mad scientist zombie guy from the past is just too nonsensical to go unnoticed.
The biggest insult I can give this movie is that it reminds me of something my friends and I would have made when we were in junior high playing around with the 3D movie maker on the computer. To say this movie is terrible is an insult to every terrible movie ever made. Other than some cool looking zombies, I found nothing else redeeming about this movie. First off, there’s the poor costume design. This is something I usually never comment on, but it’s so noticeable bad in House of the Dead that something has to be said. Poor Clint Howard plays a sailor, but he looks more like a school crossing guard on a rainy day. Howard could have been very creepy here, but he looks so goofy that it’s hard to take anything he says seriously. Then there’s the sailor in the flashback who looks like Captain Crunch. I mean it was dumb enough to try and tell the audience that someone back then came up with a formula for zombies, but it’s even dumber when you have the mad scientist zombie guy murdering Captain Crunch. May be that beloved breakfast cereal holds the secret to stopping the zombie menace one and for all… Here are some questions I bet the director, Uwe Boll, never thought about. Why can the lead zombie talk? I know he’s the scientist that created the zombie formula, but why is he able to stay so intelligent? As well, how is he controlling the zombies? I can’t help but wonder too, why the rave on the island is sponsored by Sega? I wish I could find a picture of this, but if you watch this movie you’ll notice a big Sega sign at the rave. Is the lead zombie the head of Sega Incorporated? Is this perhaps some sort of social commentary someone snuck into the film? Or is it that Boll thought it would be a cool inside joke because Sega produced the House of the Dead games? Of course, I use the word “joke” loosely in that last question. For some reason Boll loved using the same shot of a zombie hand clutching to a tree trunk. I really don’t understand that at all. It doesn’t help either that clips from the video game are randomly inserted throughout the entire movie. Did they know that the movie was so bad that they put clips from the game in it just to try and fool people into thinking they were watching something good? Then there’s the weird camera angles/shots that I think are taken from the games. They add nothing to the movie and I would assume that these shots would just confuse the hell out of any viewers not familiar with the video games. The worst of it is that they’re not even consistent. Some characters get death scenes that are reminiscence of deaths in the video games while others don’t. It’s like they wanted this movie to be just like the video game without realizing that a movie is fundamentally different from a video game. The characterization is terrible as well. All the characters are forgettable and most of them are unappealing. It has to be the best example of shallowness I’ve ever seen when we see Rudy worrying about his ex-girlfriend being at the rave with someone else while trapped on an island with an army of zombies. There’s one scene that is just the characters shooing zombies for ten minutes or more. This scene isn’t too bad, but it does start to get boring as the endless supply of zombies starts to seem goofy. I mean if the mad scientist zombie guy has this many zombies, why does he stay on that island? Wouldn’t it be easier for him to raid a boat and take over a nearby town/city and slowly take over the world?
It doesn’t help that the house in this movie is just there because it’s in the title of the video game. I mean where did the house come from? Did the mad scientist zombie guy build it? Actually a better question would be: where does he get his supplies to keep making the zombie formula? Thinking about these plot holes is starting to make my head hurt…
I’ve heard that there are actually worse zombie movies out there than this one. The notion of such things scares me more than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. I don’t just recommend avoiding this movie. I suggest buying it when you see it, so you can destroy it and save potential viewers from wasting their time watching it. House of the Dead is so bad that I’ve come up with a new rating system just for it. I don’t think I need to explain this system other than to say that the more Uwe Boll’s a movie gets, the more copies of it that should be burned.
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