House of the Dead

Rating:
Summary: They shoot Zombies, don't They?
Review: There are things in our world that were never meant for human eyes to behold nor human mind to fathom:

---the tentacled, slumbering horror that is Mighty Cthulhu, imprisoned dreaming beneath the sunken city of R'lyeh, sending nightmares of horror, madness and death to mortal men!

---the fearsome mutilations carried out by the Yeti-men of Yuzulak in the frozen reaches of Siberia!

---the gigantic, slobbering, galactically brilliant and monumentally psychotic denizens of the Martian canals, eternally crafting their tripod death machines and bent on ruling Earth!

---anything filmed by Teutonic Madman Herr Doktor Uwe Boll, who gave the world "House of the Dead", cinema's answer to Pol Pot!

First off, you've got to know something about the fiendish Herr Doktor Boll, so you can appreciate what you're in for. In a saner, God-fearing age, Uwe Boll would be quickly hauled before an Inquisitorial Tribunal, convicted of being a tool of the Evil One, and burned at the stake. In 21st century America, producers throw money at him to make movies like "House of the Dead" (and now "Alone in the Dark").

Smuggled out of Nazi Germany during the last days of the Third Reich, shipped to Argentina with a directive to obliterate Allied filmmaking as we know it, bankrolled by a trove of secret Nazi gold, Uwe Boll owns rights to every single videogame ever made ("Far Cry", "Hunter: the Reckoning", "Bloodrayne"---everything, kids, I'm sorry---Boll owns the rights to all of `em), and intends to make a movie out of every last one of them. A bad movie. A godawful movie that will make God in his Heaven cry, that may, in fact, even rip open a gate to Hell. A Legion of bad movies that look, sound, smell and taste like a**.

First understand this: "House of the Dead" (hereafter referred to as HoTD) is a cinematic cat turd, tossed in a blender, pureed, stuck in a microwave, and served to you, Gentle Viewer, piping hot, straight from Chef Boll's kitchen! Bon appetit!

HoTD dumps the following into the cauldron: a boatload of stupid (but nubile) teens; a super-secret island rave; a raving 19th century pirate, mad scientist, and flesh-eating liche big into gene-splicing; a horde of running and hopping flesh eating zombies; and a big Undead Tuff Shed. Seriously, the "House" is a shed. Only the greediest, most feverishly optimistic real estate agent would describe it as a House.

No matter. Teens get a ride to the island rave by way paying a wad of cash to Captain Victor Kirk (Captain Kirk---get it? get it?---played stoically to the end by Jurgen Prochnow) and his sidekick Salish (played horrifically by the Ice Cream Man himself, Clint Howard).

From there it's by the numbers: 1) Teens find rave deserted, 2)Teens split up, 3)Teens meet Zombies, 4) Teens get eaten and pooped out; 5) Surviving Teens turn into wire-fu machine-gun toting killing Machines.

The acting is uniformly awful, and comes in two flavors: 1) Good Sport 2)Bad Sport. Good Sport:The raver kids (Ona Grauer and Jon Cherry come to mind, since most of the raver kid actors just blend together) do what they have to do: spew projectile vomit that passes as HoTD's "dialogue", smooch while hordes of flesh-rending zombies close in---one kid worries about his good looks even as the zombies tear through the walls hankering for flesh.

Jurgen Prochnow is HoTD's Uber-Good Sport: he takes those zombies down with extreme prejudice and cigar-chomping dedication, courtesy of his laser-sighted assault rifle, spits out terse little quips, and smokes Cuban cigars furiously, all while tending to his zombie ravaged leg. Like Val Kilmer in the equally horrific "Island of Dr. Moreau", Jurgen, it seems, has had an epiphany---there's no way outta this thing, so might as well enjoy myself. And hey---the check cleared.

On the Bad Sport side, we had the two 'veteran' actors: Howard and Elie Cornell, who phone their performances in. Howard is so bad you're thrilled to see him die, but Cornell eventually grew on me, brutal death and all.

It takes true wicked genius, a strain of deranged brilliance, to make a movie as genuinely, astonishingly, consistently awful as HoTD. Boll doesn't just hobble his flick with incompetent acting, a brain-damaged script, and incoherent editing---oh no. At the very height of his action sequences, just when the movie is attempting to get some traction and draw the audience in, the rare seconds when HoTD actually works, Boll grafts in screen shots from the "House of the Dead" videogame.

No---really. Better still, pixellated screenshots. At the height of the action sequences.

Now, understand this: I *bought* the DVD for House of the Dead, having seen it---under the influence of much firewater---in the movie theater. Why? Because it takes iron nads to make a flick that s*cks this bad. Because in the nasty, brutal, merciless Desert of the Real, I don't get many laughs---and I hooted like a fool while watching HoTD. Because we don't have enough funny, and HoTD---whether Herr Doktor Boll intended it to be or not---is funny. No, really---it stinks so bad, so hard, so monstrously, that it's divinely hysterical.

Is it a nasty 100-car-pileup of a bad flick? Absolutely. Rubberneckers enjoy.

JSG



Rating:
Summary: 1 star becuase it is the lowest that can be given.
Review: This has got to be the absolute worst zombie movie ever made. When a movie has to rely on cut scenes from the video game it was based on in order to add action to the scene you know it is bad. The game this piece of garbage is based on is a good game, this movie is utter trash in comparason.

I rented this movie for free and still felt ripped off. We have Uwe Boll to thank for this. He also just made Alone in the Dark, which looks to be another movie that is based on a video game that will be absolutely dreadful. The game is good, but from the commercials for Alone in the Dark it seems that yet again a movie steals a video games name for name recognizition only.

Ignore House of the Dead. If you ignore this warning and watch it, you will 90 minutes of your life that you can never have back.

Rating:
Summary: ?????
Review: this is a really bad movie bad acting.it doesnt make eny sence the only good part is erica durance from smallviles nude scene

Rating:
Summary: Worst Movie Ever!
Review: Urgh! this movie was so horrible that halfway through it I was about to rip out my eyeballs so I didn't have to see anymore. It's movies like this which make you think 'Who could make such a horrible piece of junk!?'
The movie's basically about a bunch of idiotic teens who are going to some Party of The Year(for the biggest party of the year it was pretty small) but our so called 'heros' are soon attacked by a group of would-be flesh-eating zombies. The movie just gets worse and worse. If you're sitting there thinking 'A movie can't be this bad...' Think again, it's been given two stars from 238+ reviews. That's just how bad it is.
I'd probably give it zero stars. The acting wasn't too bad, but there was absoulutey no drama. It's like one woman says 'I'm sorry, your best friend is dead' and they just stand there looking bored and staring into space, not one tiny morsel of sadness in thier bodies. If you've been thinking about buying this, think again. If you're tempted, turn off your computer and run, run away as far as you possibly can. This movie isn't even worth renting. If you're looking for a great zombie or horror movie, buy The Evil Dead trilogy (brilliant!) The Return of the Living Dead, Return of the Living Dead 3, A Nightmare on Elm Street 1,3 and 4. All those movies are very good movies. Just stay away from this piece of trash. To think, they're making a 'House of the Dead 2.' That's Hollywood for ya'.

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time!
Review: What are you looking at! Why are you still reading this?
I 've already made the mistake and wasted my time on this rubbish.
You expect me to write a real review for this junk?
Go watch Dawn of the Dead or Shaun of the Dead.