HOUSE OF THE DEAD

A group of young people want to have sex and get drunk, and the perfect place to do this is at an all-weekend-long rave being held on a remote island. When they get to the island they find that nearly everyone who was already at the rave is dead, killed by zombies created by an immortal madman. Arming themselves with lots of guns, the live folk blast the zombies to hell but still their numbers dwindle. That's it. You really don't need to know anything else except that there's some shots of topless actresses in the movie. Essentially, that's Uwe Boll's HOUSE OF THE DEAD.

Call me strange, but I need more from my horror movies than nudity and lots of guns. When HOUSE had its theatrical release last October it took a critical pummeling from horror fans and movie critics, and rightly so. There's very little work done setting up the backstory for the good-looking protagonists or the villain. Instead, director Boll focuses his attention of delivering what is probably the most faithful adaptation of a video game to date. This is not a good thing with HOUSE OF THE DEAD because the game in question is a first person shooter, and thus there really is not that much story to it. Players pick up a gun and blow the hell out of zombies until they get munched and yeah, pretty much the same thing happens in the movie.

The thing of it is, HOUSE could have been a lot better. In the formative stages of its development, Mark Altman and Dave Parker's script had character development, fun jokes that worked within the context of the story and some backstory as to why the boss zombie was the way he was. It read like what would happen if you took the characters from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, with their pop culture quips and smart alec attitudes, and deposited them inside a George A. Romero movie. Imagine watching a two-hour R-rated episode of BUFFY where Xander cracks a joke and then gets savagely eaten alive by a ghoul, his intestines falling out onto the floor and splattering Willow's sneakers with blood. That kind of movie experience isn't here; instead you're left with a live-action video game movie that has all the depth of the screen its projected on. Unfortunately, Boll should have paid more attention to the first rule of moviemaking: if you don't have a solid story, you'll have a lame movie.

Weak story aside, there's some glaring errors in this flick that should have been caught along the way. Take for example the continuity errors (rain that mysteriously vanishes and re-appears, depending on which camera footage the editor used); noticeable goofs (air ramps for leaping zombies visible in scenes); zombie actors that don't seem to move like dead folk, or my favorite bad moment, watching what's supposed to a cool slo-mo establishing shot of the heroes advancing on the zombie horde, fighting for their lives to get into the House of the Dead...and then you actually see the dolly track of the camera appear from bottom of the frame. Oh. My. God. Tell me that I just didn't see that?

OK, so nobody's perfect, you might say, you can pick apart any film for errors, but what it all boils down to is that Uwe Boll didn't make a zombie movie that has one single scary moment in it (well that's not completely fair: there's a moment when a creature looks out from inside a blood-filled tank that kind of works. But that shouldn't be the only one!) Sure, there's fighting and gunfire and some explosions and running and chasing and screaming all well and good for an action movie with monsters but where are the scares? Where's the emotional pay off when you see a character fall to the monsters? Breasts and blood on their own aren't enough, Uwe!

But even if the movie itself is a clunker, there are technical details that elevate HOUSE from receiving a grade at the bottom of the chart. For starters, the picture looks great. The colors, the darks and the sound on the DVD are all first-rate, and Artisan did a great job of the transfer to DVD. The reason why such a lame zombie look looks so good has to do with Boll's crew; for a director that may not care about the motivation of his characters, he's got some talented people working for him. Maybe you've heard about how having a good director of photography can make a movie with a miniscule budget look like it had a lot more dough to spend? Here, Mathias Neumann's camerawork makes HOUSE OF THE DEAD look like it had four times its budget; give this guy an UNDERWORLD-sized budget and let's see what he cooks up then. The production design (done by a fellow simply credited as "Tink") is also outstanding; the sets look spooky and they're lit nicely whether they're outdoors or inside. Unfortunately, it's a crime that more of Bill Terezakis' fantastic zombie makeup work didn't get the chance to be in the spotlight as the film's actors. Terezakis created different six or seven different types of zombies for the film, some that required actors to be in full prosthetic suits, and each one looks different in appearance from the others. There's some great water zombies and moss zombies that you don't get to see in close-up detail and they deserved it. Check out FREDDY VS. JASON for more of this fellow's first-rate work and keep an eye out for his name in the future.

Some of Terezakis and Tink's blood and sweat are given a chance to shine in the disc's bonus materials. "Behind the House" looks at the zombies in close-up, and here you'll see Terezakis working on the creatures along with a variety of zombie designs, from centuries-old corpses to recently deceased ravers. "Stacked for Zom-bat" is the shorter of the two featurettes, and it's an excuse to watch four of the HOUSE actresses play the SEGA video game and then don tank tops to play paintball with zombie extras. Three deleted scenes are included on the disc, which don't really add that much to the film. The film's trailer, a photo gallery and a trailer for the upcoming SEGA video game NIGHTSHADE are also along for the ride.

There are two audio commentaries on the DVD. The first track with director Boll, producer Shawn Williamson, supervisor Jonathan Shore and actor Will Sanderson is the weaker one of the pair; the quartet of men kind of float around discussing the movie, sounding more like they're hanging out and passing the time. The other track, by executive producer/co-writer Mark Altman, is more packed with info. Maybe it's because Altman was the only one in the room recording on his track, but he just keeps coming with observations and anecdotes. He's critical of the film's weaknesses but also dispenses his own merits and salutations for things he felt worked.

HOUSE OF THE DEAD isn't going to be in any horror fan's top ten list OK, maybe not even in their top 50. The movie has its share of serious problems and it fails to stand on its own as a scary movie experience. What it doesn't deliver in frights it does do in terms of action, and as long as you're aware of its faults you may wind up liking parts of it. My advice would be to watch it as the first movie of five or six at your next Halloween party, and if you're of legal age, maybe incorporate some kind of drinking game to go along with it. How does 'For every MATRIX shot, take a shot yourself' sound to you?