E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brain Dead A look back at Uwe Boll's House of the Dead BY MITCH KRPATA

Editor's note: To celebrate the release of Uwe Boll's latest cinematic triumph, Alone in the Dark, the Gaming Room is running this archival review of Boll's classic zombie film House of the Dead. This story was originally published on October 13, 2003, in the respected e-zine The Fortress of Solitude. Okay, it was in the author's LiveJournal.

When I like something, I tend to refer to it as "the best thing ever," and when I dislike something, I call it "the worst thing ever." Let me assure you, then, that I am entirely serious when I say House of the Dead was the worst movie I've ever seen. Hands down.

Sure, no one expected it to be good, at least not in any typical sense. I held out some hope that it might be bad in a really fun way, like Freddy vs. Jason. Boy, was I in for a shock.

My first inkling that all might not be well in B-movie land was during the opening credits, under which, while some really bad techno music plays, they show clips of the video game. Foolishly, I thought maybe this was just an homage to the movie's roots, and that would be the last of things.

The movie starts with a lone man sitting in the woods, looking pensive, or maybe sleepy. "It was a nightmare," he says, which is really the best way to describe this movie. With his voiceover continuing, we flash back to all of his friends – but not him – missing the boat to an island where the "party of the year" is happening. He describes them all in detail, which is weird because he wasn't there. This is the most blatant logical gap in moviemaking since Saving Private Ryan. (Remember? We fade from the old man's eyes to Tom Hanks' eyes on the LC, and then at the end of the movie we find out the old man is actually Private Ryan? He never landed on Omaha Beach!) But at least Saving Private Ryan had a few other things going for it, like a story and some acting.

The hero's friends charter a boat to the island. I won't bore you with the specifics, but I would like to note that one of the friends gets seasick and projectile vomits on a girl's cleavage.

Oh yeah, and either before, during, or after this, there's a scene on the island where the party is happening. For a party of the year, it's pretty limp. There are about three people dancing – two of them are topless women – and behind the DJ is a giant Sega sign. Following horror convention to a T, two drunk young people stumble down to the beach to go skinny-dipping. Only the girl ends up in the water, as the dude passes out first. Director Uwe Boll goes for some Jaws-style suspense at this point: mysterious bubbles rise from the depths beneath the thong-laden chick. Oh no! She's going to die! The zombies have scuba gear! Then she makes it back to shore, obliterating any sense of a payoff we might have had from that scene. But ... the dude is missing.

The girl wanders through the woods and discovers a large stone house in the middle of a cemetery. Yes, the door is closed, but obviously the guy is in there, right? Right? I don't expect to see a horror movie that doesn't include skinny-dipping and people meandering into abandoned buildings shouting somebody's name, but usually the script at least tries to convince me that the characters have reasonable motives. The effort is what's important.

Naturally, the girl is beset by zombies once inside the house, and that's okay. What's not okay are the zombies' glowing red eyes. Even worse, the eye effects look like they were added in post-production, and are just huge red discs hovering approximately in the region of the zombie faces. At this point, everyone in the theater knew the movie was far, far worse than we'd anticipated.

My feeling is, if you're the guy making a movie you know is totally shitty, at least go all the way with it. Make it as gory and gratuitous as you possibly can. Oh, no. Director Boll was so convinced he was sitting on an Alien–style triumph of creature design that, for the first 45 minutes or so of the movie, every time the zombies attack, he cuts away. Just a loud noise, movement in the shadows, and bang. New scene.

You know how some movies transition between scenes with fancy wipes or dissolves? In House of the Dead, they cut to shots of the video game. Yep. A conversation finishes, you see two or three pixellated zombies take one in the cranium, then there's the establishing shot of the new scene. I'm not making this up. Though how I wish I were.

Yeah, so anyway, the hero's friends have chartered Jurgen Prochnow's boat to take them to the island (Prochnow played a boat captain in another little film you might have seen, Das Boot. I can only imagine what incriminating pictures the producers of House of the Dead must have had of him). Romantic entanglements abound, according to the Narrator Who Wasn't There. In fact, our hero tells us that he and one of the girls had recently broken up, "so I could concentrate on my studies and she could practice fencing. I don't know what good that will ever do her."

Again, I want to stress that I am not making any of this up. Do I need to mention that when she ends up sword-fighting the lead zombie at the end of the movie, her "fencing" style involves swinging her blade wildly above her head with both hands?

"Fencing" is just one of many words in this script that nobody involved in the production bothered to look up. Another good one is in the name of the island: "Isla del Morte." " 'Morte' is Spanish for 'death,' " the characters helpfully explain to each other every few minutes. I refuse to believe that no one involved in this production, from the writers to the producers to the directors to the actors, didn't catch this. People who have never taken a Spanish class in their lives still know it's "muerte."