House of the Dead (2003)

It's only fair that hot on the heels of Resident Evil (2002) I cover another entry in zombie video game movie adaptations. And oh what an entry it is. When Everwake helped me put together my shortlist of video game adaptations to cover this month he said, "You have to cover at least one Uwe Boll film." My response: "Who's Uwe Boll?"

Together the "House of the Dead" and "Resident Evil" video games are highly regarded and credited with kicking off the 2000s zombie-revival. I wish we could say the same for the film adaptations. But instead we have Uwe Boll's first video game adaptation, the infamous: 

House of the Dead (2003)

 

I'll get right to the point. This is not a good film and it has a lot of problems. It was panned by critics and barely cleared its $12 million budget (it eked out $13.8 million total when you include the international receipts). But I still kind of liked it.

I need to give a brief credit here to Keith Pandolfi's "The Case for Bad Coffee" because I'm about to make my "Case for Bad Movies" (or, more specifically, my case for this bad movie and why it would be a perfect selection for a bad movie night). 

The movie starts with our narrator lamenting the events of the previous night ("So many dead...") then we flashback to the narrator introducing (to the audience) a cast of college kids - his friends - that are on their way to a RAVE!! We don't see (or hear from) our narrator again for so long that I start to wonder if I've misunderstood who the cast of characters are.

Throughout the movie seems like it can't decide if it wants to be a horror-action movie or a horror-action-comedy. Uwe Boll seems to lean into the campyness of it but doesn't fully commit. The script screams comedy to me. Blink and you'll miss the SEGA banner on the stage during the rave (are they sponsoring the rave? We never find out). We have Clint Howard as a spooky deckhand, we get a Jaws parody, and last but not least the fight scenes contain cut-ins from actual video game footage!! How is this not supposed to be a comedy?? The theme song is also a banger and is still stuck in my head.

It's that energy that makes it a fun watch for a bad movie night. It's fast-paced and has some laughs (some intentional and some unintentional). The actors are trying their best with the material (they commit even if Boll does not). I've seen FAR WORSE films created by far worse directors. In the actually-bad-movie-department Uwe Boll has nothing on Neil Breen. Still, I'd recommend going in with very low expectations.

My rating: 3.5/5 (a bad but entertaining film that I would watch again)

Does this work as a video game adaptation?

No way. I enjoyed the film for what it was, but it was not a successful adaptation of House of the Dead. This is a movie that the House of the Dead IP is Frankensteined into (and it has a criminal brain). It's the reverse of all those cash-grab LJN movie-adaptation video games. If you go in expecting even Typing of the Dead energy, I think you'll be disappointed. So maybe skip this entry in the franchise if it's one of your favorites.