The next movie on our list is based on a video game. This is nothing new for us as we’ve already had the bullet-fest style over substance, Ecks vs Sever; the camp but fun Street Fighter; and the not very scary, Alone In The Dark, which, was directed by a chap called Uwe Boll. Unfortunately our next movie is also directed by Uwe Boll.
After Alone in the Dark, it is fair to say I’m not a Boll-iever. He took a video game, stripped the scary stuff out, removed the suspense and deleted the excitement. It was poorly cast, badly written and was a massive disappointment. Surely lightening could not strike twice? Unfortunately, our next movie, ‘House of the Dead’, was made 2 years before ‘Alone in the Dark’, so I was not filled with much optimism…..
It’s fair to say, I don’t remember to much about the Sega game, ‘House of the Dead’, but I do remember seeing it in arcades and 'thinking that’s pretty cool'. It had light guns, which made it stand out from the other arcades and it also had zombies, lots of them and the aim? Kill as many as you can!
It didn’t have the complex story line and emotion found in modern games such as ‘The Last of Us’, which leads me to a problem. I can imagine a movie based on ‘The Last of Us’ as it basically is a movie with an awesome game thrown in for free. But making a movie based on just shooting a lot of stuff? Could that really work?
We start the movie by meeting wave after wave of uninteresting characters, who we basically know are all going to be zombie fodder. Nevertheless, we meet college bods Simon (Tyron Leitso), Greg (Will Sanderson), Alicia (Ona Grauer), Karma (Enuka Okuma) and Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa) who all want to shag each other and are all making their way to a rave which is being held on a remote island.
Unfortunately they miss their boat and are unable to go, so they head back home and save us the pain of this movie. Off course not, they bump into smuggler Victor Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow) and his lackey Salish (Clint Howard) and he offers them a lift in his boat. When they get to the island the rave looks deader than Piers Morgan’s CNN leaving do.
With nothing much happening, Greg and Cynthia realise that we are 20 minutes into a teen horror movie and no one has been killed whilst making out yet. They decide to put that right and whilst waiting for Greg to give her some sweet lurve, Cynthia gets killed by a bunch of zombies.
The rest of the team find a house and meet some more zombie ready-meals, Rudy (Jonathan Cherry), Liberty (Kira Clavell) and Hugh (Michael Eklund). These characters are just as dull as the original 5 and you just want the zombies to hurry up and find them already. Unfortunately, they don’t just yet, but they do find Salish and are over generous with the love bites.
The group of no-bodies, (soon to become no-internal organs as well), find Greg who is debating whether or not the now zombiefied Cynthia was still going to put out. Cynthia then decides to have a quick snack before getting giggy with Greg and kills one of the dull characters. Another dull character arrives and kills Cynthia and at this point I have completely lost track of who is who, what is what, and why oh why I’m still watching this crap.
The hapless group decide to get back to Kirk’s boat and to make like a tree, (leaf), but this is foiled when they discover that the boat is now full of brain-dead zombies, (a bit like the boat was when they travelled to the island). Kirk suddenly remembers he has a small arsenal hidden away in the woods and so they make their way there. En route some are killed, some are not and some make it to small arms factory; they then go back to the house and en route some are killed, some are not and some make it to the house, (I realise this is getting technical, but bear with me).
When Kirk learns that Salish is a zombie, he decides to blow himself up. The rest of the group, unfortunately, do not. We are now down to a handful of morons and I can sort off remember who these are. Alicia and Rudy find a tunnel and decide to scarper, Simon finds a barrel full of gun powder and decides to blow himself up. This kills a few zombies as well and destroys the house.
Oh, I forgot, Karma also got killed. In my defence, for me, she is easy to forget as she is not a very nice character and I really did not like her. Karma is a bitch.
I think we are now left with Alicia and Rudy who escape only to be captured by Castillo, (David Palffy), a Spanish chap from long ago whose fault this whole movie is. You see he discovered an immortality serum and from this knocked up the first zombie many years ago, (I mean created the first zombie, not made the first zombie pregnant. That would be weird but at least would have spiced up this lame movie).
A very slow sword fight breaks out between Castillo and Alicia. Castillo wins by stabbing Alicia through the heart. This pisses off Rudy and he promptly chops off Castillo’s head, but the head is still alive, (oh yeah, the immortality thing). The day is saved though when a mortally wounded Alicia finally kills Castillo by stamping on his decapitated head. Rudy then gives Alicia the immortality serum so they can all live happily ever after.
This is normally the part of the blog in which I try to dissect the movie and offer an opinion on it. However, with this movie it is really difficult as nothing happens at all throughout.
As I mentioned before, the original game was just about picking up a gun and shooting things and in many ways this movie is exactly like that. A bunch of people we know nothing about, who we care very little for, pick up a lot of guns and start shooting zombies. Now whilst this may sound fun, unless you pick up the gun yourself and start shooting, this is in actual fact very dull.
I've never enjoyed watching other people play games and it amazes me how popular YouTube channels are in which you just watch some pasty faced geek playing Minecraft for hours on end. I hate it because I want to be that geek and I would much rather fire up my XBox than watch someone else playing theirs.
Normally I would rant about how different the movie is from the original video game, but this time my issue is that Boll has made a movie which is very similar to the game. And that’s the issue, there is not enough depth in the original game to pad out a movie and so the movie feels like a dull video game.
The characters for example, are virtually all the same, but with different clothes and hair. It does remind me old arcade games and Alicia or Rudy could have been called ‘Player 1’or ‘Player 2’. They are shallow, we do not know their backgrounds and there is nothing of interest that makes us worry if they survive or not. Who lives? Who dies? Who fucking cares?
In terms of acting, all the ‘actors’ had to do was scream, run and make sure the guns had the hollow bits facing the zombies. The script was non-existent so they didn’t really have to learn any lines, but what little they did have was clichéd nonsense which was cut and pasted from the script of any 80’s horror movie. Therefore I can not judge as there is nothing really to judge. Let’s just say the Royal Shakespeare Company won’t be scrambling for their ‘talent’.
But the thing that really grates me about this movie is the constant editing of the original video game into the movie. For some reason, Boll keeps throwing in 1-2 second clips of the original game at regular intervals throughout the movie. It’s weird, it does not belong and it just makes me want to switch of this movie and dig out my old light gun and play the original video game!
Boll may think he is being clever, but it just interrupts the flow of the movie. Nothing ever gets established or going as there are this constant flashback to the arcade game. It feels like you are watching the movie on VHS and some sod had taped over parts of it with his home video of game playing.
So yes, lightening did strike twice and this movie has confirmed my fear that Boll can not take a video game and make a good movie based on it. He failed with Alone in the Dark and his earlier effort House of the Dead is just as bad, if not worse.
Overall the movie feels like a fan tribute to the game ‘House of the Dead’ on YouTube. The only issue? There are probably a million YouTubers who could have done a better job.
House of the Dead? House of the Dead Bored more like.
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