“House of the Dead” (2003)

May 23rd, 2004 | By Mugwug | Category: Movies

House of the Dead (2003) directed by Uwe Boll
Starring Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Clint Howard and Jurgen Prochnow.
Zombie Film Rating:1 skullno skullno skullno skullno skull

A rave on a remote island...sounds like a good ideaSummary: A group of teens arrive late to attend a rave held on a remote island (Isle de Muerto), they charter a fishing boat (The Lazarus) owned by Captain Kirk (Prochnow) and when they arrive they find all the other party goers have disappeared. They naturally split up to search the island, and one of their party is attacked by zombies.

A coast guard (or police or something) member enters stage left, it seems she is after Captain Kirk for smuggling, and she escorts the party back to the harbour where Kirk dropped them off.

During this time Kirk and Salish (his first mate) have come under attack, and at the arrival of the party Kirks whereabouts are My kinda box...unknown. A shootout with the zombies takes place, and Kirk makes his reappearance. More importantly he reveals that he has been smuggling guns, and arms the entire party.

The party, now heavily armed, makes their way to the only structure on the island (Um, the house of the dead), and in a dazzling use of the same special effect over and over and over again, they reach the relative safety of the house.

More zombie shenanigans ensues, and eventually the only survivor is rescued. Of course we knew he was the only survivor as he told us this in the first 2 minutes of the film.

Critique: Holy crap…where to start. I first saw this movie when it came out in theatres (I believe I am personally responsible for 15% of this films revenue based on that one attendance), the gimme a breaktheatre had one person other than my GF and me in it.

This movie is bad. Not good bad, but bad bad.

Filmed in Vancouver (this was a little difficult to extract from the directors commentary, as they spend 5-10 minutes discussing starbucks coffee), the movie is barely a zombie film. While it does feature the mandatory gratuitous nudity in the initial stages, there is no suspense and the characters are beyond plastic (latex?).

Clips from the video game are randomly thrown in, as some sort of homage to the inspiration to the film, but beyond possible causing some sort of epileptic seizure in the audience, they serve no purpose.

Worse, the main character (generic tough hombre cum sensitive male number one) tells the audience in the openning scene that EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, which kinda takes away from any suspense we may feel as they die during the film.

Yep…this movie is a stinker…

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