Review of "The House of the Dead" (2003)

"You won't last the night."

"House of the Dead"...horrible...atrocious...lame...classic. I went to the theater with four friends expecting a god-awful flick. However, that's what I wanted. We were the only ones present for the matinee so we gave it the Mystery Science Theater treatment. "House of the Dead" is the funniest movie I've watched in quite some time. It's of the so-bad-it's-good variety and I had an absolute blast watching this movie.

The humor is all unintentional of course. Let me explain: the movie takes place at the biggest rave in history, yet it looks like a cookout in my backyard. There are about twenty people present, maybe. I was rolling for about 10 minutes. And the storyline kills me as well. Who sent out the invitations to this rave? It's never explained. How are the walking dead suddenly Olympic swimmers? I didn't know the movie was going to be dealing with Matrix zombies. These deadheads run, jump, swim, and even use weapons.

How did some of this dialogue ever make it to the screen? Dave Parker's (The Dead Hate the Living) script is missing some ingredients, to say the least. This isn't word for word, but pretty damn close:

Rudy: "Why did you do all this so you could become immortal?"
Castillo: "So I could live forever."

Well, that's a tad bit redundant. He also drops Romero's name as well just to show the fans he knows his stuff. Also, there is one mention about the heroine being able to fence in the opening voice-over. So we're supposed to remember that one throw-away line at the very end of the film when she has an "epic" sword fight with the villain. Nice. I'm used to better work from Mr. Parker. Oh, and there's bullet time sword play as well.

Speaking of bullet time, let me talk about the director Uwe Boll. Boll has intercut actual video game footage into the film and makes good use of the 80's swipe. There is a ten minute music video in the middle of the movie. The song is about the "House of the Dead" and we're shown numerous bullet time slo-mo shots and each character gets their own gun play scene. Let me try to explain these: the character is shown shooting away at the oncoming zombies, then the camera completely revolves around them in slow motion. This was done at least seven times and it didn't even look that good. I'm telling you we were all on the floor laughing. Then, our hero has a flashback montage of everything that's just happened. We get to see all of this again while the song is still playing. And that is just hinting at no-no's in the film.

The cast camps it up as well, especially Clint Howard ("The Wraith"). It was nice to see Clint on the big screen, but man, he just screams "camp." His performance oozes cheese, and he's not the only one. Jurgen Prochnow, cigar in mouth, knows he's not in "Das Boot" (even though they refer to him as a U-boat captain). Ellie Cornell ("Halloween" 4 and 5) tries her best but I'm not really buying it. The real winner in the cast is Jonathan Cherry ("Final Destination 2"). This guy plays his role straight and that takes the movie to a whole new level of hilarity. I like this kid since this is his third genre movie. He has a Bruce Campbell quality about him and I hope to see more of him in the future. One more odd thing is the character names: Captain Kirk, Casper, and McGyvers. So, yes, there's numerous star trek jokes.

So, why am I going to buy this movie when it hits DVD? Because it entertained me. Sometimes a very bad movie can be just as much fun as a hit comedy. I predict "House of the Dead" will be a cult classic within a few years.