House of the Dead



House of the Dead (2003) is based on the video game of the same name, though it's a little tough to imagine why the filmmakers wasted the money on the rights. People looking for a zombie film are not going to care about name recognition, and the movie is only tangentially related to the game.


If I were the crass type, I'd be making a PMS joke right here.

The story is about a group of young people (unconvincingly played by actors in their late twenties or early thirties) who want to get to a certain remote island in the Caribbean (unconvincingly played by an island off British Columbia) to attend "the rave of the year." By the time our heroes get there the rave has already been broken up by zombies. The young kids have team up with a naval officer and a grizzled ship captain (played by Jurgen Pronchnow -- the first time he appears someone says "Geez, who's the U-Boat commander?") to shoot and blow up zombies in interminable scene after interminable scene.

I imagine it's completely by accident, but House of the Dead manages to capture the spirit of crappy 1980s Italian zombie films. The movie is badly edited, the make-up for the zombies is woefully inadequate, there are completely random scenes of women topless, and the dialogue is awful to the point of being funny. My favorite example of bad dialogue is from late in the film:

Good Guy: The blood we found, it ties all the creatures. You created it all so you could be immortal. Why?
Bad Guy: To live forever.


Hey, when did this zombie flick turn into Zorro?

The only thing in the movie that kept me from enjoying it completely was an odd throwaway comment that the main female character makes about another girl of Asian descent.

"Let me just give you a tip, I don't think she's a natural red, white and blue"

Perhaps the girl's hair was supposed to be dyed red, white and blue, but it wasn't in the final production. As it was, the line played as some really unwarranted racism.

Posted: Mon - April 5, 2004 at      

©