It’s hard to believe that Sega spent $12 million on this torturous adaptation of its top-selling video game, “House of the Dead.” Unless you dig on cinematic sadomasochism, stay away from this film.
The journey into this necrophobic bêtise begins with a monologue by our dribbling dork hero Rudy, played by Jonathon Cherry from “Final Destination 2” and “They.” He explains that he’s meeting his five friends at the “rave of the year,” a Sega-sponsored potlatch that looks suspiciously more like a small, outdoor bar mitzvah than a killer party.
Somehow he can inform us of his friends’ adventures snagging a ride with the gunrunning Captain Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow, “Das Boot”) and his bumbling and superstitious sidekick (played by B-movie all-star Clint Howard), although Rudy is already at the rave. But this is merely one of many blunders.
Upon finding the rave deserted, Rudy’s friends hardly raise a question before they start having sex and getting killed. When the remainder of the group finally meets up with Rudy, he’s accompanied by a gritty harbor cop, a patriotic raver chick who happens to fight like a professional kick boxer and a movie geek that squeaks out the obligatory Romero references.
Due to budget limitations all we see of the rave bloodbath are scattered fragments from the movie geek’s camera. The rest of “House of the Dead” lacks plot, skill and basic common sense on the part of everyone involved.
Clichés abound. From skinny-dipping hotties with mysteriously disappearing slacker-drunk boyfriends to zombie-bait 20-year olds wandering in the dark asking themselves “What is this?” and loudly calling out to their already-dead friends. Fundamental systems of continuity are abandoned as jump cuts chop up the action and guns mysteriously transform into different guns or disappear altogether. Extras in the background stare directly into the camera and dead bodies can easily be caught breathing.
But the most unsettling screw-ups result from German music-video veteran Uwe Boll’s unprofessional direction. Extraneous looped dialogue is slopped onto many shots as a result of poor coverage and the need to cram in plot exposition. And for some reason, captured shots from the actual video game are used to excess. At first we see them only as overt transitory synapses, but soon enough they flood the film, becoming jarringly bizarre distractions.
At times, real images of a zombies getting blown apart are substituted with video game clips of zombies getting blown apart. We even get a screen capture with a bright red “Reload,” while characters are scrambling to kill off hordes of attackers.
Boll also overuses “Matrix”-style bullet-time shots, elongating one boring and pointless fight sequence to nearly 12 minutes. Characters who have had no emotional build-up are killed off in dramatic slow-motion shots where the camera goes red. There is little gore apart from zombies being shot and the only scares that “House of the Dead” scores are cheap ones, relying on soft-to-loud sound dynamics as opposed to genuine shock or terror.
The scariest moment happens during the “Hiding-from-zombies-can’t-fight-urge-to-make-out” scene, when the “biggest underwear model in the world” scores sympathy points with another survivor for getting his face partially disintegrated by acidic zombie vomit.
Hopefully this lilt in weekly horror-movie releases will only serve to better contrast below-par garbage with the quality of next week’s re-imagining of Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Save your money until then.
Grade: C
