Dr Uwe Boll achieved instant notoriety with this video game adaptation, which if nothing else has a shot at being the best bad movie of the last 20 years. When theyre not drinking beer or wandering around naked, a group of teenagers recruit a sailor named Captain Kirk and his hook-handed assistant to take them to Isla Del Morte (thats Death Island in case you dont speak Mexican), little realizing that it's overrun by zombies. This leads to randomly inserted video game footage, cheesy bullet time effects ripped off from The Matrix and voiceover intended to plug gaps in the narrative, all of which suggests a straight-to-video movie that lucked out with a theatrical release. If you forget the plot and just enjoy it for the stupid situations and dumb dialogue (You created it all so you could be immortal why? To live forever!), then House Of The Dead is by far Bolls most entertaining film. In a perfect world, all bad movies would be this much fun.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
