I’ve been reading a few reviews of this movie online, and the general consensus seems to be that it’s so shockingly bad it could set the genre back ten years.
Certainly from the TV ads it looks pathetically lame. Anyone care to disagree?
I bet… it would make a nice video game!!
I’m not sure it will be possible to disagree. It’s like putting forward the argument that placing puppies in microwaves until they explode is bad and then asking someone to disagree.
This movie is going to blow, I’m not sure about the genre it’s setting back ten years… seems like the movies-based-off-video-games genre is so bad to begin with.
So in the end, I agree 100% with the original poster that this looks lame and I’ll add that it’s going to tank badly, make a marginal profit off international and DVD sales, and that will have the Hollywood execs that greenlight this crap pat each other on the back in a disturbing positive feedback loop that shouldn’t exist.
When’s it start?
It comes out this Friday. A friend who works in the industry saw a cut of this several months ago and said it was the worst movie he’s seen in a while, and he loves zombie flicks.
If you watch in the trailer, you’ll see the zombies actually running and jumping out of trees. What kind of damned zombie is that? Ugh
Kind of like the mummies in the “Mummy Returns” outrunning a bus? Running along walls like Spider Man? Practically morphing?
There’s a million reasons why I despise that movie. That was just but one of them, but it was an annoying one.
They climed on walls in the Mummy as well. How come you don’t hate that?
Me personally I really like The Mummy. I only semi-like The Mummy Returns, mostly because Rachel Weisz is about a million times hotter looking than in The Mummy.
— Alan
There’s a warning on the SA forums by Blair Erickson about how he might have been involved with this project at one point in time.
(GOD DAMN these fucked url tags. Unless it starts with www, it won’t recognize a URL!)
Uwe Boll, director of “House of the Dead” is one of the worst living filmmakers. Perhaps even the worst director since Ed Wood.
Last year, I worked with a fellow co-writer (also a goon) from the videogame industry on the first draft of Uwe Boll’s new film “Alone in the Dark.” We had secured the license from Infogrames and pitched him a few story ideas and he had us write him a story for the film. At that point we hadn’t seen any footage from “House of the Dead” yet, but heard it “wasn’t going well.”
After writing what we thought was a fairly interesting story for him, Uwe sent us a few of his films on VHS for us to watch.
If you’ve ever seen one of Uwe Boll’s “movies,” I’m sure you will believe me when I say that we sat through some of the most incompetent and retarded films known to man. “House of the Dead” which at first we kept hoping was just a single director’s terrible error.
We couldn’t get over the fact that the movie was a horribly edited mess that made no fucking sense. There was no house, no story, no acting. The worst was watching him on behind the scenes reels compare the movie to “Saving Private Ryan” in terms of intense “action.”
He had others too. This movie called “Blackwoods” in which he ripped off every stupid late-night psychological thriller to make a dopey movie about rednecks. His newest magnum opus, a cheap Columbine exploitation school shooting movie called “Homeroom: Heart of America” had a naseauting scene in which he showed a retarded girl being raped and repeatedly features softcore tit shots… AHHHH!!!
It was a mess and we knew we had written a script that was only going to confuse this guy. He hated it. Couldn’t understand why we had dialogue or as he put it “I don’t like the so much talking.” He kept asking us why the character from “Alone in the Dark” Edward Carnby didn’t have any special magic powers to battle zombies. We explained that the game was about real-life suspense and a determined detective. He kept demanding that we add in more violence and “a big battle on an island where Edward kills tons of monsters.” Eventually he was flat out telling us he simply wanted to rip-off the story and tone of the film “Blade 2” but change the name and license to “Alone in the Dark.”
At this point we realized that this guy was a world class fuck up and was only going to ruin anything we wrote. Despite being desperate first time screenwriters, we walked away from the project and refused to give him the rights to our script. It was one of the most painful experiences in my entire (and short)career. I’d worked in the game industry and the film industry and hoped to get a big opportunity but the guy was simply unprofessional and incompetent.
I have no idea if our script was good or bad but there was no way it was going to work with this guy directing. I love the film business, and one day I hope to able to work in it in a real way. Hell, I don’t even mind selling out… but this was just too much and too terrible for even someone who needed a first break.
Sadly, this fucker did manage to con several more million dollars from German investors to make “Alone in the Dark” with Christian Slater, Tara Reid, oh and strangely enough on of Blade’s cast members… Stephen Dorff. I’m hoping… praying that he did not use any scenes from our script. We told him after he asked that we did not grant him any rights to it, but we had shown it to him without a written contract.
Ugh. Yes I know some of you were probably fans of that series and I apologize for my role in allowing him to unleash his horribleness on that franchise. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.
Poor fucker. What’s amazing is how a talentless hack like Boll can continue to find work. Here’s hoping that HOTD (and I predict AOTD) will crucify his career for a good long while.
I can’t believe that House of the Dead is showing a the UA Coronet here in SF. That’s what they ought to name the theater for the duration of the movie’s run.
Anyone want to make a box-office prediction? I’m going for $4.5m.