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House Of The Dead

So Bad It’s… Just Really Bad

2003

Director: Uwe Boll

Starring: A bunch of idiots, and Jurgen Prochnow

To the point of unconsciousness.

THE SETUP:

A bunch of rich, moronic kids go to an island for a rave, but find that it is infested by zombies, at which point the morons suddenly become sharpshooting ninjas and kick zombie ass.

DISCUSSION:

Having seen and thoroughly enjoyed auteur Mr. Boll’s marvelously execrable Alone In The Dark [in fact, it was while sitting through that film that the inspiration for this website was born], I thought I’d check out some of his catalog. This proved to be a mistake.

This movie was a total knee-slapper with its flat-out idiotic dialogue, inane characters, ridiculous situations… really every single thing about it. The problem is, at only about 20 minutes in I felt like I had already sat through an entire movie. The charm wore off, and the stupid things became just really, really stupid. And the fast-forwarding began. And continued.

This film has a concept, and that concept is to truly adapt the video game experience. By that I mean long sequences of just blowing away zombie after zombie as they jump out. Okay, so it’s a concept, you have to give them that. But you also have to give them demerits for not realizing that a movie is NOT a video game, and watching someone else blow away endless zombies, with no pacing, no variation of the threat or intensity level, is just really tedious. I mean, a character or intriguing plot would have been nice as well, but that is obviously outside the realm of possibility here, so we’ll just stick to what these people could have achieved on their limited means.

The other thing that stood out is the absolute contempt the film has for its characters. They are all flat-out idiots who just want to paaaaaaar-tay! They apparently find this one rave to be worth spending $1000 to get to… well dude, what could possibly be so great about it? They are snide and disrespectful from the get-go to their boat captain and his mate, they are ignorant about sailing and the area they’re in… it was just quite odd. It’s one thing to have characters who are amoral and in the film you watch them get their comeuppance at the point of a cleaver, or get smart and survive. It’s another to have all of them be utterly despicable human beings to begin with. It’s curious.

This film also goes out of its way to be nasty to its female characters. The narrator at the beginning clearly states that two of the three women are just flat-out bimbos, though the third [the “smart” one] does know archery. A skill that she never gets to demonstrate, though it could be in the part I fast-forwarded through. Anyway, the film finds a way for the women to bare their tits, of course, but also finds an excuse for one of the guys to puke on one of them, and for another to get a black corpse tongue in her ear. Throughout, they alternate between being sex-crazed vixens and expert marks… people. Even the older female cop gets her hair loosened first, and her cleavage gradually becomes more exposed as the film progresses. The guys of course just wear baggy T shirts and jeans.

Now a bunch of random ridiculous notes from the movie:

• Like Alone In the Dark, which famously began with its seemingly interminable expository crawl, this one’s credits are ENDLESS. I guess this is an Uwe Boll trademark.
• The skies are remarkably clear as the moronic teens are sailing to the island, and then suddenly—THE MANDATORY STORM!
• Perhaps my favorite aspect is how the teens arrive at the island, where they are expecting to find a huge rave [consisting of one tiny stage, one tent, one bar, and one port-a-john], and find the entire place eerily deserted. But that doesn’t bother them, because they can have all the beer to themselves!
• One couple are happy to have time alone to screw. Uh… so why did you HAVE to get to this island rave to do something you could have done at home for free? Anyway, the guy is desperately horny and madly after the girl… until finally he gets her on the bed, at which point he suddenly has to piss, turns around and leaves.
• Throughout [and I mean ALL throughout] there are flashes of the zombies advancing on our protagonists through the woods. These handily serve to remove all tension and menace the film MIGHT have generated if they weren’t there, and also start to raise the question… “Well, if the zombies are running that fast, and they started like three hours ago, shouldn’t they have reached the dumb teens by now?”
• The captain of the ship goes out into the pouring rainstorm… and decides “what better time to enjoy a cigar?”

Later the teens are armed, and wouldn’t you know, after just a short lesson in which end of the gun the bullets come out of, they’re all expert shots with mad ninja skills. That’s another strange feature of these kinds of movies… idiotic teens who have never studied one thing in their life, know absolutely nothing, and yet are innate martial arts masters. I think this is pandering to the [perceived] audience, who want to believe that it doesn’t matter if they ever read a book, because in the event of a zombie apocalypse they would kick some righteous ass!

[This is closely related to another favorite horror/sci-fi cliché of mine: the kid who can translate the ancient Sumerian markings on the scroll/temple walls/sacred texts, because he had a unit on ancient Sumerian in sixth grade!]

There is NO WAY I was going to sit through the bonus materials on the DVD, but I did watch the one about making the zombies, and it is notable for the filmmaker’s absolute obliviousness to the fact that this movies is a hideous atrocity and is, in fact, embarrassing to them and their viewers. Two highlights include someone saying “based on the success of this film…” I’m sorry, what success was that? Another is when this guy, after already mentioning 28 Days Later, says that some in the audience may not be ready for the groundbreaking changes this film makes, such as having fast-moving zombies, and the radical concept that older zombies would be more decomposed than more recently deceased. Oh dear.

Ugh. There’s just too many individually hilarious/moronic aspects of this film, so many that they just all become flat and not even amusing anymore. There’s really just no reason to inflict this on yourself.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Only with benefit of copious mind-altering substances and at least one friend. And even then, have an alternate on hand.

RELATED MOVIES:

ALONE IN THE DARK is another film by the same director, which I found less tedious and more amusing, but truth be told I was hella crunk throughout.

BLOODRAYNE is his latest movie, which wasn't quite as laughably bad, but was wholly excruciating.