A truly astonishing film. Having been critically mauled across the board it really should not be surprising that this film stinks yet it still somehow manages to shock you with its seemingly wilful intent to be a festering pile of shit.

There is nothing right about this movie at all. The best thing that can be said about it is that it is not incoherent, most of the time. Other than for this not very redeeming quality however it is as though the film has been written and directed by children.

House of the Dead is based on the video game of the same name though bafflingly has almost nothing to do with the game. Yes, there are zombies in it and yes people shoot guns at them in it but the characters are different and the locations are different ,other than a little shack thing, there aren’t even any houses in it! There is one connection to the game though. Quite a big one too. Uwe Boll actually uses footage of the arcade game being played as a transition between and part of nearly every sequence in the whole pitiful movie. The effect is terrible and should never be used in anything again. Ever.

 Amazingly the awfulness doesn’t stop there. There are also woeful action sequences whose embarrassing attempts to emulate the bullet-time effect are so amateurly executed as to be actually laugh-out-loud funny. There is zero logic employed with characters suddenly being capable of handling heavy firearms or being able to fight like martial arts experts. One female character even manages to become a skilled broadsword combatant overnight (in fairness, there is reference made to her fencing skills at the start of the movie though just what fencing discipline utilises bloody big two-handed broadswords is a mystery). The zombie’s abilities are similarly inconsistent (as is their very nature!) with some of them shuffling around like traditional Romero style ghouls while others find that death has loosened gravity’s hold over them and leap around like spring-heeled lunatics. It just looks silly.

The script is similarly inept with no character ever doing anything remotely logical. At one point the gang of survivors decide that rather than escape on their boat which they have just cleared of zombies they will head back into the undead-infested forest and hide in the eerie shack there. The main bad guy is also completely motiveless. His sole reason for all of the death and destruction is to be immortal and when asked why he replies, “so that I can live for ever!” There are no plot holes here, there are plot chasms.

This pathetic attempt at a film is an insult to fans of the game and a kick in the teeth to fans of the genre. This sort of half-assed lazy filmmaking is inexcusable. It brings the genre down and reduces the chances of funding being given to much better films and much better filmmakers. There is nothing wrong with mindless entertainment, especially in the horror arena, but House of the Dead is mindless, soulless, conscienceless excrement.

Rating: 3/10

Review By Matt Compton