I loved…LOVED…playing the video game House of the Dead at the local arcade. I mean you can’t go wrong with a game that just lets you shoot the undead and various monsters. It was fun, entertaining, and a quarter waster. It had a story, I think, about some detectives looking for a girl or something. Whatever it was a shoot ‘em up arcade game and damn fun. This Uwe Boll movie, yeah I am covering one of his movies, is nothing even remotely close to what the game was. Shit I would have rather watched two video game inept people try and play the game for two hours instead of watching this movie.
Adapted from the popular Sega arcade video game of the same name, director Uwe Boll’s action horror effort finds a group of partying teens stranded on an island and doing battle with a new breed of unusually mobile zombies. Looking for a place to party away spring break, college students Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa), Greg (Will Sanderson), and Karma (Enuka Okuma) hear rumors of a rave on a remote island in the Seattle area. Rushing to catch the party boat, the teens pick up friends Simon (Tyron Leitso) and Alicia (Ona Grauer), but discover upon arrival at the dock that the boat has set sail without them. Offering a few dollars to a local captain to hitch a ride to the island, the teens reach their destination only to find it eerily silent with no party in sight. Things go from bad to worse when the group is attacked by a mysterious creature, and they are forced to seek refuge in an old dark house on the island shore. Subsequently running into a few familiar faces and learning to their horror that the rave had been overrun by a horde of terrifying zombies, the group must now make one final bid for survival over the course of a long, blood-soaked night. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
The sad thing here is that the synopsis that I had to pull is probably going to be longer than what I will write about this movie…it might be longer. What a fucking pile of shit this movie is. First, how the fuck do you not even use the storyline from the game. IT’S ABOUT TWO DETECTIVES WHO SEARCH FOR A GIRL AND KILLS THE UNDEAD! That’s it! That is all the story line for the video game. Not some story about douche teens looking for some killer party on an island that not even Jurgen Prochnow wouldn’t step foot on and he commanded Das Boot. I mean, what the hell! How could a simple story become this utterly convoluted and bloated story that I didn’t even bother to remember. All I saw was kids going to a creepy island for some bitching kegger and yeah, they fight the undead or whatever.
The trade hallmark of the game is the action and it doesn’t even start until about halfway through the movie. So I had to sit and watch shitty acting and line delivery with unimpressive boobs shots in order to get to the part where I can watch all these idiotic teens get whats coming to them. Yeah, I root for the villains in these movies. But when the time comes for the action, everything is thrown out the window. By everything, I mean all logic and resemblance of trying to make a movie. The kids all of a sudden turn from stumbling undead fodder to these karate kicking, gun toting badasses at the drop of a hat. They are dual wielding guns and experts in hand to hand combat. It makes no sense.
On top of the 180 the movie takes towards being an action movie, the big shootout sequence is one of the most asinine and confusing things I have ever seen, both from a shooting standpoint and also just from the sheer terribleness. First, the undead, a first year cosmetology student could come up with a better look for the undead. It just looks like pantyhose with mud and blood on it, then placed over the head of the stunt guy. It is laughable to the degree that it becomes offensive.
Next, the directing in the scene. I give Michael Bay a lot of crap for his Parkinson’s directing, but this takes the cake. It is basically every shooting style gimmick possible, crammed into a 5 minute shootout scene. You got rack shots, 360 static pan around views of the shooter, slow motion that would make 300 seem less excessive. It is every trick in the bag that makes this movie just awful to look at.
Lastly, I have to finish off this review of the crowning achievement of this movie. During the shootout itself, while everything is happening and splices of the video game is mixed into the combat (yeah I know) one of the guys who I don’t care about, stops during this 5 minutes action scene and has a flashback of the action scene that he just stopped to do have flashback. You literally witness the same action sequence, just sped up and with an obnoxious techno music play out in 5x times the normal speed. Why? Why? Why?
You know what, I am done. I think these clips will be helpful to you. Don’t ever watch this movie.
