{"id":40799,"date":"2023-10-13T13:45:39","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T17:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=40799"},"modified":"2023-10-22T22:29:42","modified_gmt":"2023-10-23T02:29:42","slug":"hysterics-of-the-dead-in-2003-with-uwe-boll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/13\/hysterics-of-the-dead-in-2003-with-uwe-boll\/","title":{"rendered":"Hysterics of the Dead in 2003 with Uwe Boll"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re an avid movie goer and movie lover, most of the time you can tell when a movie is going to stink five minute in to it. Sometimes it\u2019s from the first moment, but sometimes it takes at least five minutes. When I trekked to Manhattan to see \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d a week before Halloween, it hit like a gut punch within the opening credits that I was not going to see the next zombie movie masterpiece. Granted, this was 2003, and I hadn\u2019t heard of Uwe Boll. Hell, I barely had any knowledge of what \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d was as a whole. I just know that the ads for it on MTV looked pretty damn cool.<\/p>\n

I was at a weird mind set in 2003. I\u2019d just come out from open heart surgery in July, and I\u2019d spent the entire summer suffering, especially after the historic black out that took out power from most of America for twenty four hours.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My brother decided to go out for the night with his friends and he\u2019d begged me to come along, mainly as a means of getting me out for the night and help me get more acclimated to my physical condition. I\u2019d gone along without hesitation and eager for some fun, especially considering it was the tail end of October. so my brother and his friend who\u2019d been given free passes for AMC movies took us to Manhattan to go see \u201cHouse of the Dead.\u201d We were originally going to see \u201cKill Bill,\u201d but opted instead for the former. Boy did we luck out, he said lowering his head in embarrassment. And hey, I was in the mood for a fun zombie movie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Suffice to say, \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d is the antithesis of fun.<\/p>\n

So in case you\u2019ve never seen it, \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d follows a group of twenty something college kids, all of whom are attending a rave (Sponsored by Sega, no less!) on a remote island. Because, of course. Characters Simon (Tyron Leitso) and Greg (Will Sanderson) set out with the group to the rave and ride to the island with eccentric sailors Jurgen Prochnow and Clint Howard. They arrive to find the island deserted and discover that all of the partygoers (all thirteen) have been killed by zombies. Said zombies emerged from the jungle hours earlier to enact a horrible rampage on the partygoers. Stuck on the island, the group ventures in to the jungle, avoiding the zombies at every turn and trying to find a way back to Prochnow\u2019s ship, which is also overrun by zombies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not uncommon for a video game movie to have callbacks to their original source material. In fact I think it\u2019s a standard for pretty much all video game movies. But director Uwe Boll, while also paying homage to the video games \u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d thought it would be a great idea to feature clips of the video game peppered throughout the movie. Imagine going in to the AMC movie theaters, and as you sit down to the movie starting, the opening credits are nothing but clips to the video with pixelated zombies rampaging toward the screen. It felt like I was watching an advertisement more than a movie. It was about this time where I took a deep soft groan and realized that I was in for a bumpy ride.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cHouse of the Dead\u201d is still to this day a movie that just seems to lean in on things not to do when making a competent movie. I\u2019ve seen indie short zombie films that are scarier, more accomplished, and entertaining than Uwe Boll\u2019s adaptation ever manages to be. I\u2019m all for movies where our heroes die horrible or heroic deaths by the claws and teeth of zombies, but Boll actually enlist kill screens! Every character that dies in the movie has their own kill screen. With a very bad movie (or Uwe Boll movie), you kind of go through the five stages of grief.<\/p>\n

First it\u2019s \u201cNah this can\u2019t be that bad.\u201d Then it\u2019s \u201cOh fuck, this is awful.\u201d Then it\u2019s \u201cMaybe if I lighten up, I could enjoy it.\u201d Then it\u2019s \u201cDamnit this sucks. I wasted my time, here.\u201d Finally, there\u2019s \u201cYeah this sucks. I\u2019ll just see it through the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot to be said about the movie going experience because there\u2019s such a community experience that occurs. I think the audience all collectively went through the five stages of grief together, and I didn\u2019t realize it until the final stretch of \u201cHouse of the Dead.\u201d By the time the villain is explaining his back story and his plans for his potions, the audience in my theater had just about devolved in to nothing raucous, incredulous laughter, and loud mocking of the movie. Normally that\u2019d be a source of anger for me, but we were suffering through the movie so much that we didn\u2019t mind the outright lampooning of what we were seeing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Inevitably I would look back behind me whenever something incredibly stupid happened and laugh aloud at one or two of the crowd members just reacting in disbelief. At one point one of the audience members stands up pointing to the awful staging of the hanging of the villain Castillo, prompting the entire audience to erupt in raucous laughter. We just couldn\u2019t believe what we were watching, and years later, I still can\u2019t believe Uwe Boll brought this to film for a theatrical release. There are so many indie filmmakers I know that would kill for a limited theatrical distribution, but Boll somehow got his!<\/p>\n

I know it\u2019s become so old hat to knock on Uwe Boll since 2003, but sometimes when you willingly indulge in a Uwe Boll horror movie, it\u2019s okay to sometimes look back in awe and mild horror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Streaming on Amazon Prime Video. If you\u2019re an avid movie goer and movie lover, most of the time you can tell when a movie is going to stink five minute in to it. Sometimes it\u2019s from the first moment, but sometimes it takes at least five minutes. When I trekked to Manhattan to see \u201cHouse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[58,64,477,737,1144,1221],"class_list":["post-40799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-pcthugs","tag-action","tag-adaptation","tag-horror","tag-nostalgia","tag-uwe-boll","tag-zombies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40799"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41473,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40799\/revisions\/41473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}