House of the Dead

Bro, check it out - Seriously huge rave on Zombie Island tonight! Seriously! A bunch of us are going over there. Why do they call it "Zombie Island?" Dunno. Think we should ask? Directed by the cult classic, Uwe Boll.

There's a big rave on an island off Seattle. Captain Kirk calls it "La Isla De Muerte"...lol, wasn't that used in Lost World? The movie features a lot of zombie ass-kicking in true video game style. When some of the characters die, their screen even goes red just like in the game. At first, there's an entire mob of people presumably killed at the rave. Then the movie picks up following a small batch of survivors (Rudy, Liberty, Hugh) along with a group of late-comers (Greg, Simon, Alicia, Cynthia, Karma). Plus there's a captain, skipper and a zombie-hunting police officer and we have ourselves a cast. Let the games begin!

Ding, Ding, Round 1!

Ravers Matt & Johanna (plus dozens of others) die in the opening 20 minutes. Matt and Johanna wander off to the lake to go skinny dipping. As Matt bashfully decides not to get naked, a zombie offs him off-screen. Johanna turns around and goes looking for Matt and ultimately gets killed too off-screen. We then see another anonymous couple having sex in the woods right before getting attacked and killed off-screen.

Skipper Salish is wandering around alone in the woods when he gets attacked and killed off-screen.

Off-screen zombie killings: 5++


Ding, Ding, Round 2!

The late comers have arrived to the island via boat, only to find the rave has been ravished. But that doesn't stop Greg and his girlfriend Cynthia from initiating sex. While Greg runs off to pee first, Cynthia is swarmed by zombies and bitten.

The other late comers bump into the last survivors of the rave and then find Greg trapped in the porta-john. When out of nowhere, Zombie Cynthia springs from the woods, and snaps Hugh's neck before being shot by Casper. We hardly knew anything about Hugh except that he had a video camera.

Round 3. The survivors flee to the coast to escape, but find that Captain Kirk's boat is already overtaken by zombies. Kirk, himself, is safe on land when everyone is attacked. Kirk gets bitten and Simon gets burned in the cheek by zombie spit. Later, Casper decides to go elsewhere for help and she takes Greg along with her. Greg doesn't survive the journey.

Round 4. The zombie battle of all zombie battles. This round is just relentless with shotguns, karate kicks and plenty of Matrix slo-mos. During the attack, Liberty, the red, white and blue little Asian chick, succumbs to zombie bites. And Casper gets her legs ripped off as they finally enter an actual house in this movie. Hopefully it's the house of dead.

Round 5. They've made it into the house. Captain Kirk takes a 2nd bite and decides to sacrifice himself with a stick of dynamite. The remaining four survivors wander through the labyrinth where they are attacked by pirates, oh wait, I mean zombies. Simon decides to be a hero and sacrifice himself so the others may escape.

The final three escape down more dark hallways when more zombies try to eat...or bite them. The writers decide that yet another character should sacrifice themselves so Karma screams for the others to GO as her futile attempts at fighting get her killed.

Final round. Rudy and Alicia (ex-lovers) have escape the house that they escaped into earlier. Then I think there's a sword fight (?) between Alicia and a zombie and the zombie impales Alicia right through the center of her chest. She should be dead at this point, but test audiences must have wanted a female to survive the movie so in the voice over we here a vague remark that she might not be dead.

Rudy is basically the sole survivor. He actually tells us this at the beginning of the film, that everyone but him died.

In a Survivor movie it's a big no-no to reveal who survives at the beginning, regardless of how predictable it is otherwise. So for that I give House of Dead just 2 torches.