House of the Dead (2003)
Posted in Movies by Harley
This, without doubt, is the crappiest zombie-movie made by a non-cinematically challenged film-crew. The cover of the DVD was very promising, with cheesy phrases like ‘The dead walk, you run’ and ‘how do you kill something that’s already dead?’ but the actual movie was just a George Romero/Sam Raimi patented plotline wrecked by Hollywood commercialism.
The plot was simply “bunch of people trapped on an island with zombies running around eating humans with the forces of evil behind it all, buggers that they are”.
Mostly the movie consisted of a few soft-core porny scenes and a lot of shooting zombies in the head. The movie, being based on a video-game, had flashes of the original game, which was not a totally bad idea. However the constant matrix-ripoff, slow-motion scenes and panning the camera around the characters was just poo.
All the characters were pretty much there just to be zombie-fodder or a hand to use a gun (which played the lead part in the movie btw.) for not a single character seemed to have any depth. The worst disappointment however was the complete lack of any indie or camp-spirit. The movie featured hardly any gore, sick humour or even a single tool, harnessed for the noble art of mutilating walking gore-driven corpses. How could anyone even consider a zombie-film without a chainsaw (or lawnmower)? Creepy. Also the film featured some of the crappiest dialogue written…
Guy: You did all this to become immortal. Why?
Evil: To live forever!
This cracked me up but it alone should still ensure that at least some of the movie-makers will be lined up and shot when the revolution begins :D
The soundtrack also consisted of very mainstream and not very exciting songs. Especially in gory zombie-films it would be interesting to hear some grindcore or deathmetal which would fit the genre better and be inspired by the same kind of vision as the movie-makers.
This movie proves that underground zombie-movies don’t work with Hollywood-commercialism and that Americans love their guns.
On the “gore-meter”, House of the Dead gets a “bitch-slap”.
Links
»Official site