I saw House of the Dead a while after it was in theatres. I'd heard about his "brilliant" idea to splice in shots from the video game into action scenes and knew I had to see it. The film was exactly what I love about terrible sci. fi. The acting was atrocious, the plot was filled with holes. The premise alone is enough to get it nominated for a razzie. A bunch of kids go to a rave, on an abandoned island in the middle of the Caribean and are forced to battle their way through hordes of zombies, while ignoring multiple chances for escape. The ending highlight? The hero purposefully zombifies his dead girlfriend so that he doesn't have to lose her. That is wonderfully retarded.
I decided after seeing Rotten Tomatoes 0% rating that I had to see Alone in the Dark. It was so worth it. First of all, the plot only makes the vaguest sort of sense. A crazy historian unleashes demons upon the world, and for some never explained reason he is able to control them. He also has control over a group of grown up orphans with worms surgically implanted onto their spine to make them... um... more... controllable. These are apparently Uwe Boll's interpretation of the creatures who attack you in the video game. That is about the only tie into the classic game that I can figure out. Everything about this movie is terribly done. The soundtrack switches, seemingly randomly, from a nonoffensive simple mood sound that could fit in the background of an Enya song, to hard screaming rock. There is not a decent actor in the entire film. The love interest is supposed to be some 80's sexy librarion stereotype, but the actress only manages to pull off timid moron with glasses. Fortunatly she is a useful charecter. Without her no one would have been able to translate the menacing warning on the ancient cave's walls, "Once you make it down here alive, you're already dead." That is her only useful role in the entire film. The warning later turns out to be meaningless, because down the cave a little farther they find the abandoned laboratory where they put the control worm things into the orphans (unleashing demons on the world isn't evil enough, the bad guy needs to perform experiments on orphans as well). The attempts to be dramatic in this film tend to be far funnier then they are sad. I can say that this is the first film to make me laugh at a dead nun with slit wrists. Or how about the memorable moment when the commander learns that all his men have died for nothing. He shouts something to the effect of "My men have died for nothing." Flips a table, and is okay with it for the rest of the film. Apparently the flipped table made up for the loss of his men. Sorry, I'm rambling, there is just so much about this film. I was captivated from the first fight scene. It was wonderful how every time something broke the movie would go to slow motion. Crash through window? Slow down. Break table? Slow down. Knock over trash can? Slow down. 7 minutes into this film, and I already knew that this would be a winner.
-Brandon
