House Of The Dead

House of the Dead (2003)

Runtime: 90 minutes

Directed by: The Infamous Uwe Boll

Starring: A bunch of random people, plus Clint Howard, Ellie Cornell, and poor Jurchen Prochnow

From: A bunch of random companies

This was not my first time seeing this infamous movie. Me, I say it's not as bad as its reputation would suggest; Dr. Boll has done worse, believe me. I explain why below:

Oh, Dr. Uwe Boll... I know people don't really care about him anymore like they used to; sure, he's still online and still getting mad at people for various reasons but it's not like how it was in the early 'aughts, where many film fans despised him for making atrocious films and paying money for using videogame licenses but the films using those licenses had little to do with the games. Sure, I can say he's made some atrocities deserving of a ½ star rating (if I can track those down, I'll be a masochist and watch those again) but while I haven't watched most of his output from the past decade, I've seen a thing or two that I can say is average and from people I know, he's actually made a thing or two that's good, believe it or not. I'll have to do reviews or re-reviews to prove that saying Boll isn't all bad is not Boll Crap.

Unfortunately, this movie is Boll Crap. That's how most people were introduced to the good Doctor, and “thanks” to Amazon Prime I could watch this for free. I actually had watched this before, but that was at least 10 years ago so I had just remembered it was pretty bad. I imagine everyone knows by now that this is about some young punks arriving late to a rave held on an island in the middle of nowhere, and it's zombies all over the place. I imagine it as an even worse version of the Fyre Festival.

This movie is pretty bad, but as I stated before he's made some appallingly bad stinkers and this wasn't one of them. At least I still thought this was watchable, the cast hams it up, and it helps having some people I recognized, such as Clint Howard, Rachel from the 4th and 5th Halloween movies (Ellie Cornell), and poor old Jurgen Prochnow, who I hope received a nice paycheck for appearing in this schlock. He's a captain of a sailing vessel and his last name is... Kirk. Yes, that being his name is the joke; I should feel lucky then that there were some lines which legit did elicit a chuckle. At least there was an (overlong) scene where people stand around and shoot hordes of zombies, which is just like the few times I played a House of the Dead arcade game way back when.

But, the movie looks cheap as hell (like a softcore flick, to steal a line), the pacing is daft and it does the wonderful thing of at the very beginning explaining who lives and who dies... there goes any suspense. I did remember random videogame footage being spliced in occasionally; however, BULLET TIME being used was something I had zero memory of. What a movie of its time this was; it's great in a camp classic sort of way.