House of the Dead (2003)

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Curiously enough, it took me almost eighteen years to watch House of the Dead — it’s certainly not an essential movie, but it felt weird having written so much about writer-director Uwe Boll without mentioning his best-known (and perhaps highest-budgeted) film. House of the Dead in infamous in movie circles as a terrible film, one that showed Boll’s limitations as a director, announced the rest of his career and established his lack of care in delivering a movie. It’s adapted from a videogame, and Boll won’t you let you forget it: the opening credits are set against distortions of footage from the original 1996 game, and scene transitions throughout the film are awkwardly spliced with more game footage — it’s as visually repellent as you can imagine. Not that this is the worst of the film’s problems, given its characters going to a rave held on an ominously-named island and somehow not freaking out when nobody is there upon their arrival. This means zombies, of course, and House of the Dead briefly becomes enjoyable once the protagonists gear up for undead-shooting action: the techno music pumps up along the number of cuts per minute, and the bullet-time camera rig gets a workout as every character gets a spinning hero action shot. (It’s a low-budget bullet-time rig, though: the one pointing up rather than the horizontal-facing one that requires a studio greenscreen and CGI to hide the other cameras.)  As overlong and in-your-face as that sequence is, it’s probably the strongest claim to cinematic style that Boll can make, and it’s ever-so-briefly enjoyable… especially for those with a nostalgic kick for early-2000s techno music. The rest of the film is not good at all: terrible dialogue that makes you doubt the sanity of the screenwriters, awkward staging, nonsensical narrative, exploitative costumes and low-budget production values all make House of the Dead a bad movie. Perhaps not as bad as many would like—there’s a difference between theatrical-bad and streaming-bad, and 2003 critics were grading against the theatrical curve—but still not good. Oh, there are a few fun things — aside from the graveyard war sequence, sharp-eyed viewers who know what to look for will spot Canadian rock singer Bif Naked as the rave DJ. But an absence of excruciating pain is not exactly a strong compliment, and so House of the Dead generally lives up to its reputation as the film that announced that Uwe Boll was up to no good. Of course, the joke would be on reviewers, since Boll then proved that he could do much, much worse than House of the Dead.