Tag: House of the Dead

The Sequel Even Uwe Boll Would Not Touch: House of the Dead 2 Review

Hello again my dear island guest! Welcome back to my quest to review all video game movies!  When Uwe Boll makes a movie, Uwe Boll usually makes a sequel..or two! However even Uwe Boll jumped ship with his House of the Dead movie, so someone took over this video game adaption. A movie so bad that even Uwe Boll doesn’t want anything to do with it? Now that’s what I would call a horror movie!

In my attempt to see all video game movies, I have stumbled upon a new mood, something that holds a middle between stupefied and fascinated. I call it stupenated. It holds somewhere between NANI!!!! !and Hmmmmmm SOUKA!  So it might be called Hmmm NAKA!. This  sequel movie left me Stupenated a lot.

While somehow managing to make me aggressively bored at places as well. A rollercoaster of sub-par experiences that as a whole come out as a much more interesting experience as the sum of its parts, because by Arceus this movie is soooo badly written. However it is so culty and campy and stupid.. that it is quite a bit more enjoyable than Boll’s first outing. Terrible still but at least this felt like a movie. Biggest contributor for that is the movies story.. it actually has one! The first movie basically movie, whose review you can find here, basically had the story of..some (clearly not) teens go to an island to rave..but zombies live there and shit happens, luckily they hired a weapons smuggler so they have guns. Part 2 at least tries to do some world building…it fails… but it tries.

Dr Curien, the father of the main character of the first movie saw his son get killed by his girlfriend who had been given the immortality serum after she was killed by the Spanish priest bloke in the final bit of the first movie. Now he is killing school girls and trying to revive them, however he gets distracted and one of his test subjects he thought was just dead..gets away and kills him.. turning him into and the campus he worked on into a new batch of zombies.  The secret organisation AMS who are professional zombie hunters think this new outbreak might be connected to generation 0 or at least generation 1 zombies. (Those turned by the serum of movie 1 )  From which they hope to synthesise a vaccine. So general Carter sends in some military guys along with two AMS members to find this Gen 0 or Gen 1 blood sample. There even are some wavering allegiances, complicating this important mission. Unfortunately for AMS the military people are more brain dead than the zombies.

Now of course that last embellishment was not a part of the actual story but it is true! These military guys are SOOOO dumb that like half of them gets killed in the first few minutes for the most stupid reasons. One guy just starts punching on a zombie for no reason.. he has guns.. but he just starts fistfighting him and gets bitten. The second gets bitten by that guy after trying to restrain him by .. putting their hand his shoulders and pushing him down so he can get shot to death… of course he bites out of resistance and the next guy is toast as well. These experts in making things safe have to keep the scientist Nightingale and former Secret Service Agent Ellis safe from zombies.Which of course is harder than it might seem.

While Uwe Boll had little to do with this movie the director goes for for that typical Uwe Boll cinematic feel. For example it has that “porn” cheapness to camera images and a really harsh lighting. You half expect things to escalate when a girl walks out of a shower into a locker room full of men.

That means that means except for the “gross” crippled woman from part one.. you know the one whose legs were chopped off, bled out for hours and lay their in an exploding zombie infested house that now has become a leader in a top secret organisation that puts her in a military suit for some reason,  all women are introduced to you in a bikini. bathrobe or in a slutty schoolgirl outfit that gets cut of her body by a professor trying to reanimate her… for which of course.. she needed to be naked. This time however it is blurred out!  …At first.  IN the second half of the movie woman don’t strip as much but we do get a few “odd” moments. Almost as if the writer thinks zombie girls are hot?! I am not sure.. but I think we got a few naked zombies.. at least the zombies look like zombies though … sometimes.

The movie has this campy feel to it.. with woman being a bit stereotypical ..but stereotypical badasses. I think we get one gay woman..maybe two I am not sure, it’s implicit .. there is just this tension between two girls.. although I should not say there is..but I feel like there should be.. based on their dialogue and interaction. Between the bad acting and weird storyboarding it can go either way. There is this also a cool badass science chick with a deep back story and a campus hippie girl…who by far is the best actress in the movie that is like exposition incarnate. It feels like I am watching one of those Full Motion Video , video games. You know something like Night Trap, or those Tanya scenes from those Red Alert cutscenes. It has that same feeling as games like Phantasmagoria.. maybe even Wing Commander. It’s not like there is something wrong with that but they feel like their own thing. Like how a Soap Opera is filmed differently than normal series..FMV games had this “cheapness” to it.. which is very much shown in this movie. 

This is reflected by the amount of exposition in this movie.  “As you Know” is one of the stupidest lines a movie can use for plot revelations..because why would you tell someone something they know?! Well The whole story of AMS is done like that.. In a school that has been abandoned for weeks two people survive and they happen to know everything the doctor did including stealing corpses from the morgue and after the school told him to stop… he went to find other ways.. they tell them how he tried to splice genomes and details of his research and so much more! Why would they know the professor killed a student? There is no reason they would.. why would school allow a guy to keep working there after he stole corpses, why isn’t he in jail?! Why even if they covered this up.. would two hippies know it and have their fingerprint or Bio-signature tied to a cage that holds the first zombie?!  I was stupinated! Everything is acted, filmed and written so clunky you feel like every shot has a big B branded into it.

That is what saves this movie from being worse or as bad as it’s prequel. It is so far distanced form reality it can actually surprise you. In the scenes where it doesn’t it can be boring as heck..but boy when the stupid virus strikes again .. I had a blast.

There is something hilarious about a trained soldier seeing a guy sit in a zombie infested library and say “Oh a survivor” … while being questioned by his peers “Zombies do not read that is a survivor”  meanwhile the guy has a rotting face and is bleeding all over his book and the soldier doesn’t even notice.. while knowing there are zombies everywhere. He even scolds him for being rude… WHY would someone go read a book amidst a zombie infested school?! Why do you think that is feasible?!  Even if he did it to calm his nerves why would you get annoyed he has headphones on and ignores you.. why would you not think it’s a zombie. I was Stupinated how can you think this little about your chain of events it made the movie quite hilarious though.

Soon after a part of the squad hears noises coming from a dorm room which is clearly a news-anchor reading the news.. yet for some reason TRAINED MILITARY staff, ..three of them all fail to notice this and they all think there are survivors in this room! After which they ask people to open up.. kicking in the door 5 seconds after making the request. English is my( arguably)  third language yet I as a untrained civilian, non native English speaker can hear this is a radio or a tv… yet the army can’t ?  That is funny! These people deserve to die so much! One of them does.. because he got bitten by a zombie mosquito?!  Now that is funny! Well he doesn’t die right away but he is written off. He gets bitten by a random mosquito, and just because the girl in this room zombified without any traces of forced entry?! Huh!?! So that must have been the mosquito they say. I have a few problems with that theory. Mosquitoes will only sting those with the highest body temperature in the room, so how it ever would prick a zombie is beyond me already. Maybe these zombies still have warm blood?!

Second that mosquito was in the room for days..meaning the mosquito would have to be a zombie itself, but decay is accelerated so I am not sure it would last that long, it’s not clear if it was THAT mosquito that made the girl turn.. they just guess it was and it’s totally unclear if the disease can be transmitted beyond species.. since the last part took place on an island.. you’d figure they would know if the mosquitoes there transformed. It isn’t even brought up again until the very end, the moment you discover that bugs can spread the deadly disease you might want to inform your colleagues but they just decide to just knock out the guy and leave him to die…I get you would not want to take a risk but this is a colleague, he’s instantly written off, without even asking the zombie scientist, which they can contact on their Walkietalkie thing. Instead they just decide.. well you are dead now. It felt very throwaway and out of nowhere and into nowhere.. nothing is done with this concept. 

The most hilarious death takes place around the same time. A guy sees a weeping woman who beckons him into another room, separating him from his group. It turns out that this woman is misleading him..she is actually a zombie..who acts like a siren of sorts..again.. I’d imagine her rotten face would reveal her to be a zombie or her non response to questions would at least make the man on his guard ..but no .. he gets blindsided by her! He does manage to beat her and lock her into a locker as he tries to exit the room a big zombie is behind the door… while he is already pointing his gun at the big zombie it startles him so hard he just screams and gets eaten……Trained military men everybody! They are so skilled.

If we look at consistency this movie is a lot weaker than the original! The movie does not match up with the world building at all. The set-up for things is super flimsey and it feels a lot plot whole heavier.. then again part 1 did not have a plot so…..

Mosquito guy by the way ends up being the villain of the movie..which of course is not set up at all , why am I telling you this..well because the movie first does set him up as the bad guy! He loots corpses, takes selfies next to a dead half naked girl ..with her camera he “stole” , he tells people they are going to die and basically he is just SUCH a huge douchebag that he went on this mission to get the blood sample for himself and bring it back to the big pharmaceutical companies and sell it for millions. Which to be fair is a much more interesting villain plot than “I want to be immortal because I want to live forever”  from the last part. The problem however  he is “killed off”.  Even when he turns out to be alive.. why would he still try to sell the vaccine so only the rich can buy it…Would he not help get it back so the experts van make a vaccine fast enough to save him. Also upon depolyment he left in a squad of 10 or so who took their jobs seriously! How would he ever get away with that?! Still it had a lot of potential as both sides race for the cure..but no he is killed off only to be brought back again for a weird twist ending. Why make him such an asshole not use him?  I was stupenated!

House of the Dead 2 is nowhere near as bad as its predecessor because it’s possibly worse. Plot happens for no reason at all throughout the entirety of this movie and it can be funny as heck. For example at one point Ellis and Nightingale get trapped in a zombie cage that needs the hand-print to open up… for no reason at all and never explained the door suddenly opens up. The woman who could open the door just got killed by  zombies all the way across the room. While she was bitten by 20 zombies she could still find humanity to crawl all the way across and open the door? If she even did.. not sure just assuming here as it’s the only way to open the door,  while …here we go again.. a trained Military captain began transforming in a zombie within mer seconds of a single bite?!  Sometimes they even transform instantly.. sometimes characters can give entire epilogues.  There is no rhyme or reason to this and it is stupinating to see how often a situation just goes completely derpy!

While the biggest charm of this movie is how dumb it is.. for example a character that got swarmed by zombies and only had a knife.. survives a missile strike without any scratches  while all zombies die, there are actually a few good things about this movie.

First of all the soundtrack is way less stupid than the original and those stupid game flashes are not here anymore.  Characters do actually develop over the  course of this movie and zombies look like actual zombies.  So it looks and sounds a lot better with much less aggressive muzzle flares, a much more believable setting to be decked out in these weapons used and in general a better set of world building. Of course this is nullified by dumb decisions like randomly running around a campus filled with zombies without knowing the schools lay out. At one point one character suddenly knows that in the next building  there is a science lab and this is a good place to start searching for Zombie 0 …. This happens when there are only 3 out of 10 people left… If that is a great place to start… (and sure.. if someone is suspected of making zombies… I’d say the science lab is indeed a fair starting place) why would you NOT start there first then… Stupinated! 

 The acting revealed that the actors could not believe the characters as well because it feels atrociously bad,  think Birdemic Levels of bad.. which is worse than House of the Dead 1, but a whole lot more entertaining. The dialogue is super funny at times as well. For example when Hippie girl fires at the science team thinking they are zombies they flee behind a desk an yell “Ceasefire we are AMS we are here to help” .. the response is  ‘Hmmm .oh. okay..sorry” I had about five other  moments there where I like actively thought like..’they could not just have said that’? Those bad lines are always also almost inaudible.. like tiny easter eggs of weirdness almost as if people accidentally talk trough footage. So bad.. yet some magnificent. This movie might have shown me the least logical action/reaction movie I have watched since the room. It is so bad in every single way..but the fact that it actually has a story and it leans so hard into the bad.. makes this a view I actually enjoyed.. unlike Boll’s movie. So in this case.. the worse movie is the better movie!  That doesn’t make a lot of sense but neither does this movie so it fits as a conclusion.

The Verdict

The movie is still bad and I would not recommend it to any of you guys but I guess when Uwe Boll doesn’t direct a movie it does automatically get better. This movie kept me entertained….at some parts. I still had to take break and come back for it! This movie isn’t even recognised by Wikipedia among video game adaptations so that is saying something.
Did you see this one?! Do you know of any video game movies that do not make the IMDB movie list?! Let me know and I might review it! Among the 38 sh other movies I still have to watch! Next week we will look at the Mortal Kombat Sequel and after that..we take another dip in Boll.

This is Bollshit: House of the Dead (2003) Review

Hey my lovely island guests! For a while now I have been doing movie reviews on monday, and for the last two weeks I have been discussing video game movies! I thought it was a fun idea for me to go to EVERY video game movie made up till this day! You know since we are all geeks and that! Yet there is one man who makes this challenge turn from hard, into a herculean feat! One man whose movies are so bad that his IMDB entire oeuvre  average grade (for game movies at least)  is almost an entire grade lower  of the total score Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has! That man is Uwe Boll.. and my friends made me start with potentially his worst movie! Today I review House of The Dead.

Very few movies are so bad that the director is accused of money laundering. While this movie ‘only’ costs about 12 million dollars, people saw this movie looked so bad, it possibly can not have cost that much. Since 12 million is almost nothing for a film nowadays… that is saying something. Now having seen this movie.. I am pretty sure there was some money embezzled here and there because the zombies in this movie..do not look better than your overzealous halloweenist or what you might encounter in a haunted maze. In this movie we follow Rudy and his friends who go to a rave..of 12 people or so.. on an island known for it’s gun smuggling business and the rumors of a deadly curse that dates back to the golden age of Spanish trade. While Rudy is already on the island his friends miss the boat and they pay a smuggler 1000 dollars to take them to the island.  Before they get there to shit goes down as all 12 rave visitor get killed by zombies.. lead by the immortal Castillo Sermano.. whose big motivations are.. that he created immortality…because he wanted to live forever.

This is the best looking zombie in the movie is by far the main Villian

Yes that is actual dialogue from the movie “You created it all so you could become Immortal, Why?” To which the villain answers “To live forever” Now that’s some pretty hokey dialogue. Mind you.. this man is Spanish..he kills everyone on this island immediately and no one dares to set foot on it.. but he speaks English. Then again he might be the mastermind of the Sega sponsored rave so he could get some new body parts to look fresher.. but I am not sure. Anyway.. people get naked.. and people die..typical Uwe Boll stuff, there isn’t that much more to the movie. Of course since it is based on a light gun game.. there is also a lot of shooting as well. A near infinite supply of hand grenades spawns from a single crate as well. At least Uwe had the video game logic down. In fact.. a lot of times it even looks like a video game, and I don’t JUST mean fake!

Actual Screen-grab from Movie

House of the Dead is one of the classic arcade shooters and if you have ever been at a convention or at an arcade you’ll most likely have at least seen it maybe even played it. If you haven’t don’t worry Uwe has got your back.  I honestly think that game’s pixelated graphics has better looking zombies than this movie. Then again.. if you have your face painted in Mcdonald’s, 9 out of 10 times it will look better than this movie. People just get some white lenses and some blood is smeared on their somewhat whitened face .. and tadaa.. you are a zombie. Well that or you are rotten to absolute heck.. and kinda look like a Jawa without the cloak. I’d imagine. Bullets can leave holes in your torso the size of a soup bowl or not have any effect at all at totally random. Sometimes people lose arms at random or aim for something they clearly are not hitting. So somehow Uwe simulated how actual aged light guns work.. and translated that to a movie! At least that’s faithful. 

Kore we Zombie Desu Ka?! No seriously I am asking here!

To give you more immersion scenes are strung together with actual game footage  flashing throughout the entire movie at random intervals, since people are very bad at acting we do not get death scenes we instead get “game over screens” where the camera spins around a character in a more heroic moment before the screen turns red and fades away. I honestly have never seen a movie whose cinematography is so painfully bad as this one. People look so awkward with their guns yet somehow every one .. from cop, to model to random girl can wield these weapons with pinpoint accuracy..even while being eaten, underwater  and of course while insanely drunk. Sets are so obviously fake that it seems like something Vampirella would present on.. or whatever those horror hosts did. Even Ed Wood might say.. you might wanna adjust those lights.

This is at night by the way

Now sometimes a movie is so bad that it’s good. Not with this movie though! While what I might have said sounds like it is a hilariously bad movie like Birdemic and The Room, this does not have that charm.  Where in those movies.. and Who Killed Captain Alex too for that matter there is passion..this is a movie of paychecks and “let’s get it over with” acting.  People read their lines and that’s it. It feels like a ‘you get your diploma but barely’  graduation project from acting school. It isn’t always the actors fault though Jonathan Cherry who plays Rudy.. really can not carry any dramatic scene. Jürgen Prochnow who is better know for Das Boot and Dune  is passable at times but the character is poorly written. All the characters are poorly written. We have the dumb model, the crazy superstitious sailor, the straight shooting cop and the over sexed bimbo.  However.. our main cast is Random doctor student , random ex girlfriend.. and other random girl who is also a friend. They have no traits whatsoever except for being mean to the model guy. It’s hard to act if your character doesn’t have a personality so I get that. 

Captain Kirk and Captain America working together!

Well the doctor guy.. Rudy Curien  likes girls. That’s his trade.. but with girls named Liberty, Karma and Alicia.. you got a pretty good idea what Uwe Boll things a woman is. A stripper.
Alicia fights the final fight in some sort of leather skimpy corset. Liberty wears one of those 60’s american flag jump suits with some serious push up and there is a lot of boob in this movie. They are meant to look sexy and basadds, so most of the times girls wield Melee weapons.. just so the camera man can get away with some close up shots that follow the line of “hey my eyes are up here’. The cop named Carter (she is never given a first name in this movie)  and captain Kirk..(yes thats what he is called)  are the only two characters I remotely enjoyed. Unfortunately Kirk gets bitten and uses dynamite to blow himself up.. because dynamite is a weapon.. like shotguns and all .. it’s really not but they have tons of it in a weapons crate in this movie.  

Carter gets her legs chopped off by a axe wielding zombie..who throws the axe away and loses it prior to chopping her legs of with it. (Also he gets killed before) So I am pretty sure Uwe Boll pays tribute to the respawning video game enemies.  Carter of course dies from this and in a very well acted Rudy moment *cough*  he says goodbye to her and we see her die.
Afterwards the house her corpse is in gets blown up. Zombies still roam the area and later a special force team clears the area of anything remotely suspicious.  So obviously she’s the star of the sequel… (That’s no joke..despite getting her legs chopped off, laying there for almost an entire night bleeding, getting blown up by a huge gunpowder explosion.. she is the star of the sequel.. that takes place AFTER these events). Oh right and I almost forgot you to tell about the acid spit zombie.. of which there is exactly one! The model whose face is slowly dissolving acts out his pain with so much zeal… who am I kidding.. his acting is on the level of an early 90’s video game voice acting person.  So again! Point for Uwe for faithfulness.

Clearly this woman can survive and entire night of bleeding out and being blown up! Look at how healthy she looks!

Never really get annoyed by a movies soundtrack but in case of this movie.. it literally does everything wrong! We get very odd music choices that do not match their situation at all. A despair fight they are losing gets high octane metal music as if we are playing doom, while someone dying on the table gets a slightly whimsical melody.. a creepy crypt is more generic rock/metal and the rave itself doesn’t really have rave music at all. Then again no one going to this rave is your usual raver either. I found some music choices so painful.. and out of place I just wonder where they got the track.. are they in the video game? If so that game has a really bad soundtrack.. but still I bet it utilizes it more wisely.. this feels like the sound editor just wanted to be cool! And just picked some edgelord music pieces and strung them together. The best comparison I can make is that this movie sounds like one of those strip clubs that serves free chicken wings.. just to get some guests in their place.. you know the place where strippers look more like actual zombies than the zombies in this movie. 

I like that red guy in the back right in front of those zombies without make up near the flame!

To be honest I’d rather go to the stripclub though.. I mean .. free Chicken Wings. Nothing against strippers by the way, I have sex worker friends and as long as you have fun what your doing it’s all good.. I just mean.. some can look a bit .. washed up. Scarier than the zombies in this movie. Anyway I was talking about the sound. Of course this movie constantly has weird camera moments where like a video game the camera spins around a character to show a critical hit or something.. this is accompanied by weird swooshing noises, epic close ups that have bullets whistling and super stock sounding explosions and gun effects.. as if the files have been ripped straight out of a video game. …

The unlockable secret outfits come already unlocked as well 10/10

As far as video game movies go.. it’s about the equivalent of someone taping their let’s play of House of the Dead and selling it as a movie.. except it has more annoying characters, more poorly timed music, worst hit detection and zero gameplay. Less satisfying gore a worse story, worse camera angles and less interesting set pieces. It’s not enjoyable to watch yet has this magnetism to it.. you can’t help but to keep watching.  While I haven’t been positive nor is there much to be positive at all, I do gotta say.. weirdly..I do feel this is a video game movie.. more so than say Assassins Creed. It is as if Uwe Boll does really care about this game and has put so many elements of the game in.. to make it feel like he was playing the game again while shooting this movie. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t treat women right, it doesn’t care about being a good movie.. but there somewhere is some understanding of the source material. I think.. or he somehow managed to make a movie that is so awful that it feels like the game .. in the wrong places by sheer coincidence. 

I saw something.. like a little spark of a connection.. like our inner gamers clicked just for a tiny moment. It’s buried too  much under trying to turn this movie into his persona edgy strip club! Where the chicken wings are free but so oily and greasy..that they look more like zombies.. than the zombies in this actual movie.

While some movies are so bad they are good, this one is just plane bad! A point can be made for it having heart.. but a point can also be made that this movie was made for the reason to embezzle some of the 12 million this movie costs and to turn a movie into your private stripclub! Sorry this definitely deserves my lowest score:

Review System Update coming soon!

PS:

Dear Mister Boll, if you ever read this review…somehow.. or one of my other dips into your Video Game movies, which at least according to IMDB aren’t much better, please do not invite me to a boxing match to beat me up, like you did to other critics. I might die from that! So IF you have to take your revenge on me..please make a movie about my absolute favorite games in the world, making a movie so bad it kills the games?! I would be so sad and you would have the intellectual victory! My favorite games are Fortnite and Call of Duty..possibly Fifa too! I accept that you might want revenge..so these are my tributes to you!….But please do not make these movies within the next year! I have to review all video game movies.. if you manage to make one within 40 weeks.. i’d have to review that too and a Fortnite movie by Uwe Boll sounds like absolute dogshit! Thank you for understanding!