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4 Sep 2005 House of the Dead movie review

[Review] There has been many many movies that have been based on successful video games. Movies like Resident Evil, Street Fighter (with Van-Damn), and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. These movies sucked so much! To even mention their name is to call forth a choir of verbal abuse to the film and to yourself for mentioning the name. The House of the Dead movie falls into this category of badness.

The storyline goes something along the lines of 4 college buddies goes to a mysterious island for a rave, it's mysteriously empty, they find zombies, they run away, they find more survivors, they each die one by one, they kill off many zombies, try to survive, yadda yadda yadda. The cast include a few college guys, three or four college girls (with token black girl and token Chinese girl who knows martial arts. Hey all Chinese people automatically know martial arts, fact), a salty sailor, a captain of a boat/smuggler, a female cop, and zombies. There is more to the storyline, but it's not important.

So where does this movie go wrong? Let me count the ways...

The first that happened when I slapped the DVD into my computer was that I was greeted by the "The House of the Dead" sound bite from the original HOTD video game. Wha? Where did that come from?? And when you press play and throughout the entire film you are shown clips from the HOTD2 video game. What the hell's going on? Is it so badly lacking decent material that they felt that had to pad it out with game footage? I think that when the original producers/director begged SEGA to do this movie the people at SEGA said "Fine, we'll let you make this, but you have to put in clips of the game. Sales of HOTD2 on the Dreamcast have been slow. Oh and you have to put on our corporate logo at the start of the movie". But that's not the worst of it.

The acting is appalling. It's like all the actors went to the "Resident Evil School of Bad Acting™" and failed it they're so bad! One of the characters, the female cop, doesn't even act! She talked all her lines, showing no emotions in her tone or in her face. Where the hell did they picked this woman from?? I bet this was a typical scene that the directors had difficulties with. The only character that I did like was the salty sea sailor who's name sounded like Sally. He knew that this film was going to be shit so he thought "Ah what the hell I'll be cheesy and crap. I'm still getting paid by those fools". All the zombies move about like broadway dancers, jazz hands and all, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm all for the performing arts being used more and more in the world of media. Everyone should know the joys of dance.

But as for all the characters, talk about stupid! All the characters are a bunch of stupid fucks, with death wishes. A prime example is when the Scooby gang return to the deserted rave scene. Suddenly the black girl turns off screen and said "Guys, what is that?", the camera turns to what she sees.... And it's a port-a-loo. A God damn port-a-loo! I even screamed at her saying "It's a port-a-loo you dumb fuck!" Another moment of suicide stupidity is when they're trying to get back to the boat that is infested with zombies and the gang can see this, but STILL one of the guys run to the boat like a lemming! Idiot! They all pointlessly act as bait. This strip sums up exactly what I'm talking about.

Now the tagline that goes with this film is "The Matrix meets Dawn of the Dead" (another sign that it's going to be a bad film). The only reason for this is one scene. Halfway through the film the Scooby gang need to get back into a house but it's completely overrun by zombies. Luckily the captain of the boat just so happened to have a big box of guns for everyone to play with. Full lock and loaded they storm in and start shooting everything that moves. This is where the producers blew a lot of their budget. What follows is a series of people walking slowly shooting at an endless stream of zombies, with the camera panning around them 360 style, with the odd "bullet time effect" throw in for good measure, to some random gansta rap soundtrack, for about 4 minutes! Man it's so dull. I kept looking at my watch going "Is it over yet?"

I felt so cheated at the end of the movie. I didn't rent this movie and I still wanted my money back. I went to my friend whom I borrowed the film off, I told him "I want my money back bitch!" and punched him in the nuts! Well I didn't punch him to be fair, but I did demand a refund.

Avoid this film. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

GRAX RATING: 0/5

At least there are a lot of naked boobies in the film, although they were not very big. They can't even get that right!

Posted at: 23:08 PM

Your Thoughts

SaltyChinaEye said on Monday 5th of September 2005 at 12:39:18 PM

Gravatar rofl ... man that review has made me want to see it :D ... hmm in the films defence no one likes to see a white dude perform martial arts. Perhaps that's not quite a PC attitude but hey take Chuck Norris, everyone hates Chuck Norris. /shrug.

RAZII JINX said on Tuesday 6th of September 2005 at 07:09:50 PM

Gravatar omg. I hopped to this movie with some friends and boy were we so glad we hadn't paid money to see it. I thought it was fscking hilarious, unless they were going for scary... If they were, then that's just sad. XD

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