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.