House Of The Dead: Critic Reviews

To properly convey the jaw-dropping shoddiness of this videogame-based 'horror' 'movie,' one must approach what scientists call Absolute Stupid.

Cutting around frantically in a vain attempt to stir up some energy, the director, Uwe Boll, drops in occasional images from the video game itself, as if he were subliminally trying to remind ticket buyers why they showed up in the first place.

Even connoisseurs of bad movies will find little to enjoy in this one.

Here is yet another video game transferred to film with little enhancement or development.

Don't come looking for a story -- this is a hunt.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a duller, more incompetent -- and less scary -- flick with cheesier effects in a remainder bin crammed with direct-to-video horrors.

Idiotically written, badly acted and directed, with Boll underlining the film's gory video game plot by intercutting video game effects into the slaughter, it's a staggering failure on pretty much every level.

Early hopes that this might qualify for so-bad- its-good status -- the sea salt played by Clint Howard is a hoot -- vanish under a volley of idiotic plotting and bad acting.

Unpretentiously dumb.

Misbegotten horror movie adaptation of the best-selling video games.

There's scarcely a whiff of originality in the zombie horror picture House of the Dead, but Uwe Boll has directed it with enough energy and style that it adds up to passably mindless if grisly fun.

So willfully opposed to everything that decades of refinement have established as cinematic grammar that I am unable to decide if Boll is a genius or just evil.

This is the first live-action horror movie based on a video game that I've ever seen in which the game's animation is actually used as a repeated special effect. This is not a good thing.

How do films like these get made for video, let alone the wide theatrical run?

This is one of those rare films that truly manages to get by on unintentional laughs, but otherwise dreadful.

There is an extended sequence in which every individual character goes bullet-time, and [Uwe] Boll must think it's so cool just because they're in bullet-time.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Exhibit A in the evidence that no more video games, under any conditions, should be made into movies.

One of the most astonishingly idiotic pieces of entertainment I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through.

It's so bad it could well go down in history as one of the worst zombie movies ever made.

Resides amid half-remembered fragments of Cinemax soft-core, Turkish remakes of The Exorcist, and third-string Troma releases such as Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid.

Sad to say that after its unpromising opening minutes, the film defies the odds by getting progressively worse.

Boll directs the film as indiscriminately as his characters fire their weapons.

A derivative shock-horror exercise desperately in need of an IV.

While not as technically brilliant as some zombie fare, HotD more than makes up for this lack in terms of sheer heart. Sure, it's a low-budget venture, but it doesn't feel forced or contrived, but rather revels in its low-budget restraints.

At first, I was riveted by its awfulness. Then, about 20 minutes later, I just wanted to go home.