House of the Dead (2003)

“Brains? No. Budget? Nope. Just Boll.”

Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailers

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A Quick Note on Uwe Boll

Before diving into this “film,” we need to talk about the man who cursed it into existence: Uwe Boll. This guy has the reputation of being the Ed Wood of video game movies—but without the charm. He’s the mind behind infamous flops like BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark, and In the Name of the King. Studios somehow kept handing him game licenses, despite the fact that every adaptation he touched turned into cinematic roadkill. The question still lingers: why was he ever trusted with these IPs in the first place?


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Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

The film pretends to be based on The House of the Dead arcade game, but let’s be clear—this is not a faithful adaptation. Instead of survivors trapped in a creepy house fighting hordes of undead, the story follows a group of random 20-somethings trying to party at an island rave. Things go sideways when they stumble upon an island crawling with zombies, created by some centuries-old mad scientist who looks like he wandered in from another script. There’s no house. Barely any of the game’s DNA. Just a half-baked slasher flick with zombies.


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Character Rundown

Rudy (Jonathan Cherry) – our limp, wannabe protagonist. He narrates like he’s in a noir but plays it like he’s reading the script for the first time.

Liberty (Enuka Okuma) – token tough girl, except the script gives her nothing to do except die stylishly.

Simon (Tyron Leitso) – romantic interest, I guess? He exists.

Alicia (Ona Grauer) – Rudy’s ex, included to force awkward “will they/won’t they” drama.

Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow) – a shady smuggler captain who looks like he’s counting the minutes until payday.

Castillo (Clint Howard) – the weird sidekick. Yes, Clint Howard was dragged into this mess.


None of them feel like actual people. They’re basically cardboard cutouts waiting to be eaten.


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Pacing / Flow

Disjointed doesn’t even begin to describe it. The film starts with a music video-style rave, takes a sharp turn into zombie territory, then slows down with endless dialogue scenes where nobody says anything worth listening to. Every time you think the film is building tension, it stops dead for a clumsy slow-motion sequence or—worse—footage from the actual video game spliced in randomly. Yes, Boll thought it’d be “cool” to cut away from his movie to 1996 arcade graphics mid-action.


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Pros

Some unintentional comedy. Watching actors deliver dialogue this badly is almost fun in a “so-bad-it’s-good” way.

The makeup effects are fine at times. That’s literally the nicest thing I can say.



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Cons

No house. Barely any dead. It betrays the source material entirely.

Awful dialogue. The script reads like it was written in a single afternoon.

Horrendous editing, with game footage popping up like a student film project.

Uwe Boll’s trademark shaky-cam action scenes that make it impossible to see what’s going on.

Characters so flat you forget their names before they die.

Zero atmosphere. The arcade game oozed campy horror vibes; this just feels cheap.



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Final Thoughts

This isn’t just a bad video game adaptation—it’s one of the worst horror films of the early 2000s. The sheer disrespect to the source material is staggering, and the filmmaking is amateur hour at best. The only reason it’s not a 1/10 is because technically it has zombies, a camera, and some makeup. But that’s it.

Rating: 2/10


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Spoiler Warning 🚨


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Spoilers

So here’s the “plot”: our group of horny twenty-somethings miss the boat to an island rave. They pay a shady smuggler, Captain Kirk (yes, they actually named him Kirk), to ferry them over. When they arrive, the rave is already trashed, with blood splattered everywhere and zombies wandering the beach.

The group arms themselves and starts fighting back, which leads to some of the worst action ever put on screen. During gunfights, the movie actually freezes the frame, spins the camera around the character like The Matrix, then resumes. Oh, and in the middle of these action scenes, Boll throws in literal gameplay clips from the House of the Dead arcade machine. Imagine watching a fight and suddenly seeing a Sega zombie sprite flash on screen. That’s the movie.

Eventually, they find out the zombies come from a 500-year-old Spanish priest/scientist named Castillo, who discovered a way to achieve immortality by reanimating corpses. His lair is underground, filled with bad lighting and dollar-store props. Our survivors get picked off one by one until Rudy, Alicia, and one other make it to the final showdown.

The villain monologues, gets blown up, and then—because Uwe Boll hates us—the film ends with Rudy saying the government “saved” them, and oh by the way, his last name is Curien, a lazy nod to the villain from the game. It’s a slap in the face to fans who wanted anything remotely faithful.