Review of House of the Dead (2003) by John M — 06 Apr 2010

Dr. Uwe strikes again. I knew this was based on a video game, but I couldn't recall the actual game. I thought it might have been that first-person shooter in the arcade where you just shoot zombies in a haunted house, but that couldn't be it, right? That's barely a premise for a video game, never mind a movie, RIGHT? Well, that's what it is, and in case you forgot what it is, they continually splice (and I am not making this up) actual action from the video game into the movie.

.. Yeah. What the hell were they thinking? So the rave of the year (thrown by Sega, of all companies) is being thrown on this island that attracts this annoying band of twenty-somethings. The island is soon overrun by zombies, but not any zombies.

We are talking jumping, acrobatic zombies that could easily compete in a triathlon. The survivors try to escape the island. It's a movie that does everything wrong. As a zombie movie, it just makes up rules as it pleases, with zombie bites sometimes changing the victims into the undead, and sometimes just leaving the victim with a bite mark.

There are a number of noticeable continuity errors, and it blatantly rips off a number of different movies, like The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings. The acting is amazingly bad and the dialogue is filled with "are you fucking kidding me?" You can find more likable characters in a Friday the 13th movie, and pretty much the only thing this movie has going for it is that it has some pretty cool music that sounds like a Prodigy knockoff band.

There's this hilarious part in the movie where they take literal breaks in the action to give every single character a freeze frame 360 shot. It's impressively bad, but there's a reason why Uwe Boll is so infamous.