Flak Magazine: Review of House of the Dead, 10-xx-03

Earlier this year, 28 Days Later rode a zombie storyline to critical and commercial success. Now, director Uwe Boll and writers Mark Altman and Dave Parker attempt to match that feat with the video-game-based House of the Dead. Boll's movie doesn't deserve to make money and, like 28 Days Later, it illustrates common pitfalls of trying to update the zombie genre. 28 Days Later took itself very seriously and attempted to follow George Romero's approach of using the zombie as a vehicle for social commentary. Yet while Romero's films — most famously Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead — offered witty critiques of commercialism, militarism and racism, 28 Days Later witlessly kept repeating the too-obvious claim that we're zombies and zombies are us. House of the Dead draws more on the European zombie movies of the '70s and '80s, gory flicks whose only message was that it's scary and fun to watch dead people eat live people. The Euro-zombie subgenre was certainly uneven in quality, and House of the Dead ranks among the worst of those films, shorn as it is of all the elements that make zombies effective screen monsters.

The film starts with posh, pretty frat boys and sorority girls going to a rave on an island rumored to be haunted by a Spanish outlaw who died there centuries earlier. After some scenes of topless women and some meanderings by the annoying characters, the mayhem starts. One character describes the first wave of the undead attack as "like a fuckin' Romero movie," but with its island setting, conquistador zombies and underwater undead scenes, it's really much closer to Lucio Fulci's 1979 Zombie. There's also a skinny-dipping scene that parodies the opening of Jaws, right down to the striking resemblence between the actresses, but that tired gag is not even new to zombie films: Eurociné's feeble Zombie Lake pulled the same stunt more than two decades ago.

Once the undead army is on the march, the film turns into a repetitive video-game sequence, with characters freezing in the air while slow-motion camerawork traces the path of their bullets and shotgun blasts. Lest anyone find the encounters scary, Boll cuts footage from the actual Sega game into the action sequences, so that the audience sees many kills twice: once with live actors and once with game characters. But even the game footage is less cartoonish than the attempts at character development. During the fighting, one of the young hunks, Simon (Tyron Leitso), suffers a wound on his face. While the group awaits the next attack, he mopes that he looks ugly and would rather be dead. Luckily, one of the girls likes him anyway and the two of them break into a general make-out session. That must be a joke, but if it is, the flat, straight acting takes the force out of it.

Of course, it's the zombies that are supposed to be the main attraction, but they're extremely disappointing. Unlike the undead of earlier films (and like those in 28 Days Later), these can sprint, a feature that makes them less frightening than the classic screen zombies whose slow, inexorable movements added tension and terror. The residents of House of the Dead look largely the same, don't show their faces much and mainly serve as cannon fodder. The best zombie films on both sides of the Atlantic tapped into deep-seated fears of death, cannibalism and dehumanization. House of the Dead just makes you watch someone else play a video game.

— Chris Pepus (cp_339@hotmail.com)