House of the Dead

Folks, if you're a lover of bad movies then we're about to get an early Christmas present. Even people who have worked with director Uwe Boll call the guy a "hack & a half." Check out this review from Creature Corner (minor spoilers):

HOUSE OF THE DEAD

By The Inspector

Starring Jonathon ('Final Destination 2') Cherry, Clint ('Ice Cream Man') Howard, Ona ('Hard Target') Grauer

Directed By Uwe Boll

"House of the Dead," as many of you know, is the $12 million film adaptation of the popular Sega p.o.v. shooting game, noteworthy for it's over-the-top zombie action and plentiful "jump" scares. I'm not as up on the "mythology" of the game to report on how consistent the film is, so I can get that out of the way up front.

I do feel a certain familiarity with the game having seen the film, seeing as how there are multiple clips from the game jarringly integrated into the film itself incessantly. Now, I've seen video games that incorporated movie clips into them, but films incorporating game clips? Chalk this idea up to the "inanities that should've been shot down in the planning stages" category.

I lay the utter and stupefying failure of this film on the shoulders of the apparent originator of the previously mentioned idea, director Uwe Boll. This has to be one of the most poorly directed and sadly misguided films I've seen in years. Inept with a capitol I.

The film is told in flashback, with voiceover provided by Jonathan Cherry, the stoner from "Final Destination 2." He's already at some secluded island rave awaiting the arrival of his friends, which he provides ample commentary for. Since he was never there, I don't know how he knows what's going on, but this element gets worse later.

It's during this exposition heavy sequence, involving these five other characters attempting to charter a boat to get them to the "island de la muerte" that we are told (again, through an absent characters' voiceover) that Alicia, one of the hotter, obviously thirty-year-old college girls in the group has been working on her fencing. This point is not brought up for the remaining eighty minutes, but rest assured, when a certain villain grabs a sword, this chick'll be a master swordsmen, if for no other reason than that the voiceover told us so.

Faster than you can say "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things," the group convinces Captain "Kirk" (Jurgen Prochnow, identified early by one of the characters as "the f**king U-boat captain") and his first mate (an abysmal Clint Howard) to take them to the "island de la muerte." The "outrageous" rave taking place there looks more like a very tame company picnic, though the film does deliver early on with the hot bodies and nudity, albeit from girls that look about 5 to 10 years too old to be playing these parts.

There are significant hints of zombie activity, with rotted arms and faces briefly glimpsed as loud sound effects cause you to jump. No honest scares are earned anywhere in the movie.

The group arrives at the island to find the rave abandoned and no one to be found. They eventually find a creepy house (that seems to have a lot more levels to it as the movie progresses), the narrator and a few of his friends and some very athletic zombies who had a feast at the rave hours earlier. We only see shaky video footage from the movie geek ("We're dealing with zombies, like in a Romero movie." "A what?" "A Romero movie, you know, the holy trilogy, 'Night', 'Dawn' and 'Day.'") and not a whole lot of chomping. Chomping might jeopardize that R rating.

I should mention at this point that all the while, video game footage has loudly and abruptly been spliced in to the film to sometimes provide transitions between scenes and other times for no reason at all. I got the impression that the director was trying to say, "You see, it's like the game!" What other value it had, I don't know. It was odd, jarring, cheesy and severe.

The zombie's themselves are inconsistent in both appearance and rules. Some are heavily rotted, others pretty fresh. Some die from being shot in the head, others don't. Some drop over from shots to the torso, others keep on coming. We see them start to bite people but any real "nastiness" is relegated to offscreen activity. The one thing they don't act like consistently ARE ZOMBIES. These guys swim, run, jump (wire work, like everything these days) about the only thing they don't do is talk, well, at least until the end.

The action quotient would be something to talk about if all of it weren't handled so badly. Excessive amounts of bullet-time shots are used, gratuitously, especially in what is supposed to be the stand-out action sequence of the film, in which the fisherman, rave partiers and a harbor patrol cop (played by "Halloween 4's" Ellie Cornell, again, terribly) become an elite fighting force for no other reason that they've been given firepower. As blaring techno music pounds on the soundtrack, (the characters came for a rave and they get one, I GET IT...) we are treated to bullet-time shots of each individual character, swirling around them in slow motion as they fire their weapons and we then see them kill a zombie or two. Not in any way spectacular or special, just typical ways but IN BULLET-TIME.

Weirder still, another pretentious and eye-brow raising stylistic tactic of the director would be the "death stills": the action stops as a character is killed and we are treated to a too-long swirling camera shot of the person looking sad, with a red filter over the lens, signifying their death. I got it, just like everything else Mr. Boll was trying to say, it's just so on-the-nose that it's laughable. (If you haven't figured it out, as jokey and tongue in cheek as the script is, Boll seems intent on playing everything very straight, making the entire affair a silly mess.) Film school, anyone? I mean, what the hell were all those montages about? The movie stops dead for one-characters' music video-style recall of the events of the entire night. This happens in the middle of an action sequence. If you're like me, you'll be asking yourself, "What the hell am I watching here?"

Sepia tone flashbacks to a clipper ship carrying the main villain elicited huge amounts of unintentional laughter from the audience I saw it with, especially when a bearded fat man, dressed like Captain Crunch, filled the door frame of the brig, glaring at the villain with all the subtly of Benny Hill. This is where we learn that the bad guy developed some sort of reanimation technique he intended to use to live forever. It obviously worked because we see, in close-up, a stitched together, half-rotted version of this guy in a hood, watching over the action from behind leaves and branches, gritting his teeth and vamping it up like a soap opera star. If he had a moustache, he'd twirl it. This happens a lot and eventually began generating fits of laughter as well.

The usual "let's make-out while we're hiding from the zombies" rule is enforced, not once but twice, consecutively. We're treated to a more literal video game sequence in a tunnel (in which individuals points of view are seemingly expressed as video game footage, again, with no narrative explanation given), the one truly hot girl (Alicia, played by Ona Grauer, who doesn't take off her top and looks like Lara Croft through the entire second half of the movie) gets to do her sword-fighting thing (in bullet time) and we're given a voiceover epilogue in which we are asked, "Is this the beginning or the end" at which point a frustrated audience member shouted back at the screen, "IT'S THE END" which elicited far more applause than the movie itself was ever going to get.

The gore is clearly of the R variety, a lot of spurting blood but not a whole lot of grue. I guess those looking for hot chicks, gratuitous and not-so-hot nudity and excessive amounts of poorly executed bullet-time gunplay might be satisfied.

The actors aren't doing anything to help, whether it's jumping away from explosions in slow motion (there's a lot of that) or trying to look badass with a gun or delivering what could be clever dialogue or trying to look sad at the death of a friend, we won't be seeing many of these folks again any time soon.

Huge amounts of looped dialogue and voiceover are used to cover up a lot of plot holes and probably lack of coverage. Continuity is all over the map, especially in regards to weapons. The score is off and on serviceably traditional, in an almost 50s monster movie way with common-denominator "song" usage filling out the rest of the soundtrack (there's a loud rap song which underscores a particular "maximum carnage" gun scene that kind of sums up the whole mentality at work here). Make-up effects are so-so.

The screening I attended was a test screening, meaning audience reaction was gauged and cards handed out. I can't imagine what could be done to help this movie, other than maybe burning it, especially since the film appeared to be quite locked and complete, closing credits, video game clips and all.

Let me sum it up this way: I was actually entertained by last years "Resident Evil." A lot of folks weren't. I've always been able to understand viewers' problems with "Resident Evil," but I was simply entertained by much of it in a "fun zombie movie" kind of way. "House of the Dead" provides no such pleasure. I can only say that if "Resident Evil" bothered you, "House of the Dead" will physically hurt you.