House of the Dead begins with this horrible title sequence. It’s footage of the video game (for those living in a hole, House of the Dead is an adaptation of a video game) but the footage is all traced over with a lazer. I felt like we were transported to House of the Dead Lazerium!
Then the movie begins. 6 college students are going to “the rave of the year” on the Isle de Muerte. No, not the place with Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. It’s some small island off the coast of the state of Washington. But the girls being girls, they’re running late so the kids miss the boat. They have to barter passage to the island with a hard nosed captain and his first mate (played by Clint Howard. Yeah, that Clint Howard. That’s how bad this movie is.)
Now, I thought HOAD was rated PG-13, but it’s actually rated R. In the first 20 min. 3 girls get topless. Only problem is, none are all that attractive and the acting and plot are so bad even boobies can’t make this film watchable. Here’s my favorite screen shot:
Now, they get to the island, all the other ravers are deadish and zombies start attacking our heroes.
But here’s the problem. None of it is interesting. The actors are all so bad and their characters so 2-dimensional that you don’t care about whether they live or die. Now, usually I’d start rooting for the zombies. But even the zombies in this movie are uninteresting! When they bite people, no one turns into a zombie. In fact, the film never really explains where all these zombies came from. It had something to do with some Spanish priest, but it’s never really explained.
Even the sets are boring! The production designers name is Tink. As in short for Tinkerbell. Well, Tink, everything in this film looks like shit. So you better start doing better flix before you go off and get a pretentious name like Tink!
Also, the kids need guns to battle the zombies. So the writers threw in that the captain of the ship is smuggling cigars and guns throughout the Northwest. WHAT?! I didn’t know Vancouver and Seattle were big smuggling ports. Come on, you can come up with a better plot device than that!
Furthermore, all the kids are somehow experts in arms, hand-to-hand combat and sword fighting. Are you kidding me? These are cracker-ass, spoiled white kids! No way Blain (or whatever his name is) knows one thing about a sub-machine gun and zombie killing.
Finally, the filmmakers decided it was a good idea to incorporate game footage into the film. I’m not kidding. In the middle of a action sequence, all of a sudden cheesy graphics from the original game appears. Are you kidding me? That’s the worst idea since Joel Schumacher decided to be a filmmaker! What the fuck?!
On the DVD:
A horrible skit of the actresses in the film shooting zombies with paint ball guns. It’s called “Getting ready for Zom-bat”. Get it? Combat with a “z”, like Zombie. Get it? Please kill me.
Deleted scenes. That’s funny, this whole movie shoulda been fuckin’ deleted.
Not one, but two terrible commentaries. It amazes me that these fucks have enough good stuff to say about this film to allow for two commentaries.
Final analysis:
This movie should be screened by no one. Not even the mom of zombie number 15 should see this piece of shit. The acting is atrocious! The action is boring! The sets are crappy! The plot is laughable! And the addition of game footage is insulting to all audience members. Fuck these ass holes. Don’t see this! Don’t rent it! Don’t even look at the box! BURN THIS MOVIE!
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