re:mote voices

Title: The House Of The Dead

Cast: Jonathan Cherry, Tyron Leitso, Ona Grauer, Enuka Okuma, Clint Howard

Director: Uwe Boll

The House Of The Dead is based on a computer game, a fact that should be entirely evident to most people seeing this film. Even if it weren’t for the fact that it is interspersed with clips lifted directly from the game and then there is the prominent placement of the company name. Having not seen the game, one can’t really comment on the adherence to original material – though particularly as the film hits it’s highest level of carnage one can easily see this as a game.

The base plot of The House Of The Dead revolves around a group arriving on the “isle of the dead”, expecting to find the biggest rave of the year. Instead they find a handful of survivors fighting off a zombie assault. Cue legend about ancient human experiments and the last stand from a ramshackle house.

On the whole The House Of The Dead is an incredibly stupid film… and it knows it. As a result The House is filled with running, leaping and swimming zombies for the first half of the film, culminating in extremely stylised carnage – ranging from slow motion bullet time shots to high speed jump cuts and blasting techno music. All interspersed with gratuitous nudity, watch for the sea sickness scene which forces one of the girls to remove her top – the fact that half the cast look as though their only previous experience is in porn doesn’t help. However, perhaps it is surprising with all that, that there are a number of nice little gags – each of which being a reference to another film – the most obvious is the boat’s captain being called Kirk, but watch for the others which are decent visual gags.

The House Of The Dead is utterly brilliantly stupid and worth a laugh if nothing else.