I always love to get care packages in the mail:
little boxes of joy that contain DVDs or toys
or whatever. Today, one turned up and one of the
things that was in it was the non Uwe Boll directed
House of the Dead 2. A movie
based on one of my FAVOURITE arcade games of all
time, House of the Dead, a game made by SEGA,
where the player is armed with a handgun, and
is facing off against a mall-load of the undead.
This was to be a grand sequel that isn't
directed by dodgy director yet apparent nice guy,
Uwe Boll, who was directing another video game
property, Bloodrayne. This was
to be a new, fresh zombie movie, where highly
trained soldiers battle the undead in a gore-fest
for all ages…well all ages over the age
of 18 or accompanied by an adult anyway. Now,
here I sit, 95 odd minutes later, awash with disappointment,
not just in the fact that the movie was substandard,
but also in the fact that I have to watch it again
with the director's commentary on.
The tale of House of the Dead 2
goes like this: during a collegiate hazing, a
young girl falls afoul of the villainous Professor
Curien (Sid Haig), who is trying to bring the
dead back to life, until one of his experiments
escapes, causing a virus to be released on a campus,
infecting the students. 29 days later, two experts
in the field of zombie hunting, Alex (Emmanuelle
Vaugier) and Ellis (Ed Quinn) accompany a crack
team of soldiers onto the campus to collect blood
from the source of the virus, the original zombie,
so they can create a vaccine to protect the world
against the spreading menace. Unfortunately, even
though the Special Forces team is made up of experts
in the field of war, a campus overrun by zombies
isn't their field, and things fall apart…
Let's start off with one aspect of this
film that was also a problem with the first one:
where is the freaking house? The movie is called
House of the Dead, the game on
which this film is based featured a damned BIG
house, so where is the house? The first film had
a house whose exterior was so small it should
have been called "Shed of the Dead',
and this one takes place on an 'isolated
college campus' (who isolates a college,
wouldn't it be smarter to put it in a town
so the local community would benefit from the
kids as a part of their social and financial infrastructure?),
so shouldn't it be called 'Isolated
College Campus of the Dead'? Continuity
faults abound in this film, so much so that it
becomes annoyingly ridiculous. Almost every character
gets covered in a blood splatters which move around
from shot to shot, that is not just sloppy editing,
it is plain out bad filmmaking. The solders in
this film are described as 'Special Forces',
I think they mean 'special' as in
'retarded' as these soldiers were
such a bunch of badly organized clowns, they wouldn't
have even gotten a job at a school fete. Don't
get me wrong, I don't expect a film about
zombies to be 'realistic' or the situations
to be 'sensible', but for Uwe's
sake, I expect the soldiers to at least act like
soldiers. I am no military expert, but these guys
weren't even following basic HUMAN instinct,
let alone those of a highly trained soldier. Funnily
enough, the first House of the Dead
was criticized for having college kids acting
like army trained professionals, and this one
has army trained professional who act like college
kids. AT some points the movie tries to be deadly
serious, but the acting isn't the greatest,
so it comes off as forced, and some of the horror
homage's (one character refers to being
left 'Alone in the Dark', and most
of the action takes place '29 Days Later'
after the prologue) are so obviously placed, that
I kept expecting someone to elbow me and say 'Geddit?
Geddit?'. The zombie fan will find a hell
of a lot of the set pieces in this film reminiscent
of other zombie genre pics.
I don't normally like to be this critical
of a film, but while watching it, I felt like
I was having my intelligence insulted: attention
moviemakers, just because we like horror movies,
that doesn't mean we are idiots. No, if
you want to pander to the idiots, make romantic
comedies instead. Another thing I found a bit
dumb about this film is in the liner notes, which
is a four page booklet…ok, it is a piece
of glossy paper folded in half, writer/ producer
Mark A. Altman hangs a bit of well deserved rubbish
on the first movie (which HE wrote as well) and
on the 'teen horror' genre as well,
while praising this film, which he describes as
'The Wrath of Khan of zombie movie'…Mark,
this isn't even the 'Spock's
Brain' of zombie movies
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