#56 House of the Dead (Wes)

House of the Dead

So it was Tuesday night again, and I found myself watching a bunch of hugely unpleasant looking monsters, foaming at their mouths and trying to scare anyone watching with the unintelligible noises coming from their mouths. It was at this point I noticed the time and had to turn off the UKIP conference footage and put on our latest movie, House of the Dead. Now regular readers of this blog will know by now about my general dislike of movies based on videogames. I’ve covered this all before as we’ve now watched several movies based on them, Streetfighter, Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, and most recently Alone in the Dark. Whilst the first two were bad, but had their fun moments, Alone in the Dark was truly awful with nothing to recommend it. I put the blame on that firmly on the shoulders of the director Uwe Boll, which made the next movie on our list particualry torturous. That’s right, another video game adaption, by Uwe Boll and suddenly knew the true meaning of terror (again)…

 Five college kids are desperate to get to a rave being held on an island when they miss their boat. So they charter Captain Kirk’s (Jurgen Prochnow) boat to take them. When they arrive on the island, they find everything deserted and in a mess, so naturally they decide to go and look for everyone, instead of getting back on the boat and going deep sea fishing instead. Some of them find a house which has some survivors of the rave hiding inside, who tell them that the rave was attacked by zombies. By this point some of their other friends have already been killed (including Kirk’s first mate Salish (Clint Howard), who I was convinced was called Salad due to Kirk’s German accent), and the boat is now full of zombies for some reason. So Kirk goes and finds a stash of guns that he conveniently has buried and they decide to head back to the house. Some more people are killed, they blow up the house and find some tunnels and  finally there’s a Spaniard called Castillo (David Palffy) who is the first zombie (end of game boss), who fights them with a sword, and I just really give up at this point. But it’s ok, because it seems that the embodiment of Errol bloody Flynn has survived, so we now get to see some swashbuckling in exactly the same style as the gunplay we watched earlier. Meanwhile my will to carry on with this list is slowly buckling too.

Starting off with a voiceover that made this movie sound like the worst Halloween special of The Wonder Years you’ve ever seen, you knew this movie would have the sort of script that would make your average porn movie sound like it was written by Ernest Hemingway, and I wasn’t proven wrong. It contains such classic lines as “You created it all to be immortal. Why?” “To live forever!”.

The zombies (I’ll use that word even though they’re not created by black magic, as it’s the easiest way to describe them) in this movie really are amongst the worst I’ve ever seen. Some of the make up/costuming is actually ok, on the more ancient zombies anyway, the freshly dead look abysmal. What really makes them bad is that Boll just doesn’t understand what makes a zombie movie work well.

The main problem is he uses fast zombies. Now whilst this may be fashionable in movies nowadays, I don’t think it works as well as the traditional slow zombies. Zombies on their own are dangerous, but easy enough to avoid, in groups however they suddenly become a massive threat. This has always been what makes them scary in movies. Fast zombies really don’t have that same feel about them and only seem to be there to appease a generation of idiots who want everything immediately (three exceptions here. The Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later and ·Rec, although the last two weren’t technically zombie movies).

To make matters worse, the zombies may be fast, but they also hang around in the background not attacking. You can’t blame the extra’s for this, as they would only be doing as they’re told, so once again Uwe just proves that he has no idea how these monsters should be acting. In any zombie film you watch, no matter how low the budget, or inexperienced the director, there is one thing that they have in common. The zombies relentless pursuit of food, and the fact that they will always try to grab it whenever they can.

  

It doesn’t stop there though. There are points in this movie where the zombies show rudimentary intelligence (like those in the George Romero movies they use basic tools), and also acts of strength. One uses an axe to hack through on characters legs in a matter of seconds as she’s trying to escape through a window, but then seemingly can’t use the same strength to break down the flimsy piece of wood, propped up by a small twig that one of the other characters uses to barricade the hole (I keep saying characters, as by this point I’d lost all interest in them and only remembered the Captains name).

But having inconsistent zombies isn’t the only thing that can break a movie, and that’s where Uwe’s absolute lack of talent truly comes into play. He tries desperately to give the movie a sense of style with ridiculous camera shots that may work in a video game, but just look totally pointless in a movie. Not only does Uwe use the predictable slow motion guns firing, at one point, whilst the heroes are involved in a mass shoot out with the zombies, each person individually gets a shot of them firing their guns whilst the camera pans around them for 360 degrees. It just looks like Uwe wants you to choose which character to play and just looks completely out of place in a movie. This is made worse by the same angles being used in the final sword fight too, where it looks even more out of place and as poorly conceived as The Matrix: Revolutions.

  

Can it get worse? Of course it can. Uwe also decided to put in loads of clips from the original game, which is just a distracting and terrible idea. If I’m watching some people fight off zombies against overwhelming odds, I really would like to see a bit of gore and exploding heads, this is a zombie movie after all. What I really don’t want to see is a clip from the game of a similar zombie getting shot. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if the game was released on a console with the graphics capabilities that are available now, but the original game was released in 1996, so whilst the graphics were good, they were still very cartoonish, and just look completely out of place.

I think that Uwe Boll truly must have thought that he was The Matrix of the zombie genre. He really tries to make this movie look flashy and stylish, but he’s trying to pull off Gucci on a Primark budget. He doesn’t have the talent or knowledge to make a successful horror movie, and I honestly can’t fathom why people keep giving him money to make these awful films. When the most positive thing you can say about a movie is that it stars Clint Howard (who’s weird face always makes things a little brighter), then you know it’s a bad movie. This movie stinks more than the walking dead it portrays and like all Uwe Boll films, it should be buried face down at a crossroads at midnight, so it’s shambling corpse has no chance of ruining your evening.