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I guess I just like liking things

“House of the Dead” glories in a whole 2 stars out of a possible 10 over at IMDB, so I can already tell I’m in for a fun time. It’s yet another horror movie here at Zwolanerd as I’m reliably informed that tomorrow is Halloween. Being Australian means I am aware of  Halloween in the same way I am aware of Thanksgiving – it’s a thing that happens to other people. Although we’re doing our darndest to catch up with carving pumpkins and plastic spiders available at major supermarket chains. I live in the sticks, also, so it would be a determined child indeed who hikes all the way out here in the hopes of a fun size Mars Bar. It’s kind of a shame because it all looks like a lot of fun and I adore the spooky in general. On the other hand, we have kangaroos so on balance it’s probably a draw. This is quite a long introduction, you may be able to tell I am in no rush to press play. This is a movie based on a video game. I can’t even articulate how much I am avoiding starting it.

Either emotions, or a vague sense of having left the iron on.

Either emotions, or a vague sense of having left the iron on.

Alright, alright, fine. Let’s do this. A concerned looking guy is sitting on a set of stairs out in the woods. A voice over murmurs “So many dead bodies, so many victims. It all started when we came out here for a rave and now all that remains is the rotten smell of  death.” This line is delivered much like a 14 year old being asked to read to the class. Not quite the worst reader in the class, but not the best by a long shot.

The scene fades in a haze of animation and rave music. The animations have been run through the “emboss” filter, which is totally ravy. I thought they were random, but as the scenes get longer I realise it’s gameplay footage from the game this movie was based on. The music and animation stop suddenly and we cut to a couple of bros throwing rocks at wine bottles. The voice over is back, telling us this is Greg and Simon. Greg is a good guy, but Simon is apparently an actual idiot despite his good looks. This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of Slow Talking Narrator Trying To Put Too Much Emotion Into His Voice.

Another flashback, this time a blonde is leaping at Greg. Her name, according to Too Many Emotions Guy is Cynthia and she is Greg’s girlfriend. If I know my poor quality horror movies – and I like to think I do – these two are prime for some being murdered horribly.  She’s “pure eye candy” so that’s nice for her, it would certainly suck to have a lady pretending to be anything more than nice to look at. Narrator guy is annoying me so much I’m sad to know he apparently survives this movie.

The blonde has friends, a black girl named Karma who “thinks she’s Foxy Brown” because Foxy Brown is also black (I shouldn’t have to explain the link there for you, dumb down with me!) and Alicia who Simon is all lusty for, which is a shame for Karma because she’s all lusty for Simon. It’s a great idea having Mr Emotions telling us all this because it certainly saves time on trying to have the characters themselves saying lines to give this information. Alicia is also Mr Emotion’s ex girlfriend who is a fencer. Mr Emotion is sounding sleepy already, or perhaps he’s acting. Hard to be sure.

Now the group is hanging around on the docks and I suddenly understand why they haven’t been allowed to speak yet. Eye-Candy Cynthia is a Valley Girl type and a high pitched voice and an obnoxious giggle. I’m almost certain this won’t get annoying at all. It turns out there’s supposed to be a boat to the rave but they missed it. The voice over is back, Mr Emotions telling us “if only they’d decided to stay back in Seattle, they’d all be alive today.” Well thanks for the spoiler warning, jerk.

The rave is in full swing, with lots of people bouncing around in ridiculous clothes and playing volleyball. The DJ is spinning some sweet beats (I’m sorry) underneath a giant “Sega” sign. Subtle. A girl ignores her boyfriend kissing her elbow in order to talk to a friend on her cell phone. The connection is bad, establishing that reception on the island is poor. That could be a shame later, right? Right.

The camera zooms in on a couple of guys, one of whom is filming close ups of dancing women. The other guy is the confused guy from the first scene and also the owner of the terribly emotional voice that keeps yammering on. He’s currently whining about being single and something about his subconscious having nothing in the way of it. Can’t think why he can’t get a date.

The others are wandering around the dock, looking for a boat to take them to the island. Simon climbs on to a boat and discovers a creepy guy in a sou’wester and oh joy of joys – a hook for a hand. This is Salish and the actor is Clint Howard. What are you doing in this terrible movie, Clint Howard? You’re better than this! Simon asks to charter the boat and Salish says no because this boat is for fish not people. Turns out Salish doesn’t own the boat, and the owner of the boat is only too happy to take some money to shuttle these fine people out to an important party. Simon hands the guy a map to the island and Salish tells them they crazy. The captain explains that the locals call the island “Isla del Muerte.” Neither of the guys on the boat are happy about going out to such a place, but Simon says “I got me an island of cash right here” to pay for passage. He offers them $1000 to take them out to the island, and the earlier comment from Mr. Emotions about him being not so bright would appear to be true. It’s a party dude, it’s not worth $1000 and also you’re going to die, didn’t you hear Mr. Emotions say just that mere seconds ago? Honestly, some people.

The Captain of the boat has one of those flexible accents so I’m not sure where he’s supposed to be from. He started out German, wandered through the South of America and is now apparently Spanish. His name is Kirk, making him Captain Kirk. Don’t make a joke about that. Greg did and got shown a big knife. He decides to take them over to the island, and the girls remember they’re in this movie and wander up to the boat. As they climb in, Salish tells the captain he won’t go because of all the evil spirits. The Captain goes all multiaccented on him and orders him to come with.

As they’re all getting themselves onto the boat, the US Marine Guard appears and tells Captain Kirk he can’t depart because they have to search his boat. Simon is having none of this, and offers the Captain more money to ignore the order and zoom off. Simon must be quite well off and also overly excited about a fairly ordinary party. He’s carrying around more than $2000 in his pocket so he’s well prepared for bribery situations. The boat departs, leaving the Casper the Marine Guard shouting helplessly through her megaphone. Captain Kirk tells Simon he would have ditched the guard for free, because he hates that woman. Captain Kirk is now able to run his entire range of accents in a single line of dialogue.

The girl from earlier (the one who helpfully let us know the cell phone reception was bad) has wandered off from the party with her elbow kissing chap. They decide to go swimming and her boyfriend tells her she’s “crazy” for suggesting it. I can think of many crazy things to suggest, swimming at the beach is not one of them. Still, the guy is wearing a puka shell necklace so we should cut him some slack. As the lady takes off her clothes, there’s a wide shot of the beach and an animalistic noise. Could be a growl, could be a bear blowing its nose. Puka shell guy refuses to go in the water because it’s too cold and slumps on the beach with a beer.

On Kirk’s boat, Greg is vomiting over the side and the others are complaining about the cold. Simon offers Greg a beer to settle his stomach and Greg vomits all over Cynthia. This is a classy movie. Also the Marine Guard is in hot pursuit and their fancy boat is quite a bit slower than the clapped out fishing boat.

The Cell Phone lady is still splashing about in the water while her boyfriend watches. I will now surprise absolutely no one with the phrase “There’s something in the water.” Bubbles float up around the swimming lady and she gets all concerned. Instead of swimming back to shore, she treads water in a panicky way. Sadly Puka Shell Boyfriend has passed out from his half a beer and can be no help. The bubbles fade and a wide shot reveals Puka Shells is missing from the beach. Deciding at last that the smart thing to do is return to the beach, she swims to shore and then runs around topless for a bit looking for Puka Shells. All that remains of Puka Shells is a pair of trousers and half a bottle of beer.

On the fishing boat, Cynthia is also topless as she scrubs vomit out of her shirt. Salish wanders in to give her a crucifix for her protection on the island. She is completely unimpressed, telling him she doesn’t need protection because she’s on the pill and leaves the crucifix on the bench.

Swimming lady is now wandering the woods looking for Puka Shells. There’s a grimy hand resting on a tree as someone watches the lass wandering aimlessly through the woods. She stumbles upon a clearing with a decaying old house standing in the middle of it surrounded by graves. Thinking Puka Shells is hiding inside, she wanders in to look for him. The door slams behind her and the actress starts doing scared acting which isn’t that convincing. She finds Puka Shells standing in the middle of a doorway, bleeding from the mouth. As she watches, a creature creeps up behind him and shoves a blackened hand through his body. Swimming lady screams a lot as other creatures surround her and presumably kill her horribly.

Another couple have snuck away from the rave to canoodle in the bushes and they are attacked also. Captain Kirk directs the boat into an inlet.  Officer Casper says she knows where they’ve stopped and asks to be dropped off on the other side of the island. This is completely stupid as Kirk has traveled up a narrow inlet and couldn’t escape if the Marine Guard just pulled up at the mouth of the inlet. I’m not even nautical and I can tell you that.

Our happy band of soon to be dead party people have made it to the island and are in good spirits as they head inland. Kirk and Salish hang around a while in order to unload the contraband they’re carrying.  The gang follows a path which leads them to a misty bubbling pool of water with a narrow bridge over it.  The water smells bad, which everyone comments on in turn.

Night has fallen, and the gang has found the rave spot. There’s no one there and the tents have been half torn down. Cynthia is thrilled at having the entire place to herself to dance the night away, but Alicia isn’t so sure. Cynthia and Karma mock her for being all serious, but Alicia finds a shirt soaked in ketchup and says something bad must have happened. Hot dog explosion, probably. The boys find the beer tent and the beer keg is full. They pour themselves some beer and start to joke and laugh but Serious Alicia is angry that no one cares the place is empty.

Everyone is having a great time at the rave where there’s no people, music or food, but Alicia is troubled and decides to head off into the woods to see if she can find anyone else. Karma offers to come with her because Cynthia and Greg are being so smoochy. Simon decides to go too, leaving Cynthia and Greg smooching on the stage. They kept saying they wanted to dance all night but neither of them have done anything about turning the music back on.

Salish is in the dark woods, hiding the loot. Something is running around in the dark and we get an extreme close up of a rotting face as Salish screams. Back at the rave site, Greg and Cynthia are goofing around on he stage. Thunder rolls in the distance, so Greg picks Cynthia up and takes her to a tent. They’re about to start getting naked when they have a random argument and Greg leaves to go to the bathroom.

The other three are wandering in the dark. Simon is trying his little heart out to impress Alicia, but she snarks at him and makes him sadfaced. Something covered in blood is running around in the woods while Kirk starts shouting for Salish to come back to the boat. Picking up a gun, Kirk peers into the darkness.

Back at the “Rave,” Cynthia is in the tent waiting for Greg to come back. She’s shouting some stuff which is supposed to be sexy as she hears movement outside the tent. Oh no it’s the zombie monster things and not Greg at all. Oh well. They burst into the tent, Cynthia screams and we cut back to the other three in the woods. They’ve found the clearing with the old house in it. Formerly completely sensible Alicia decides to go inside, but the other try to talk her out of it. A sliced up face watches from the bushes as they approach the house.

The trio creeps inside. There’s a guy hiding behind the door clutching an axe and someone jumps on someone else while… I don’t even know. Stuff happens. Turns out the survivors of the Rave have been hanging out in the old house, and one of them is Mr. Emotions who is amazed to see Alicia. She completely fails to react to suddenly meeting her ex-boyfriend in a weird old house. There’s three survivors, one of whom happens to be the guy who was recording the rave earlier so helpfully has footage of the thing that happened. While he is trying to find the footage on his tape (which is otherwise mostly boobs), Mr. Emotions is explaining that everyone was drinkin’ and dancin’ and hangin’ out havin’ fun. On the video camera screen, a bunch of zombies are shambling through the rave while people scream half halfheartedly and run away slowly. Mr Emotions and the others ran for the boat, but it wasn’t there. I still don’t know what Mr Emotions is actually called. They’ve been hiding out in the house since the zombies arrived. The zombies that were inside the house before have popped out to the shops or something.

Zombies are swimming out to Kirk’s boat, where he’s still standing around with his gun and a cigar. For whatever reason, the deck of the boat is permanently misty and steamy. This is probably due to whatever they were smuggling, if what they were smuggling is dry ice.

The group are walking back to the rave site to pick up Greg and Cynthia before heading back to the boat. Alicia has decided to be jealous of the Asian girl in a stars and stripes body suit on the basis that Mr. Emotions might be dating her. I mention the fact she’s Asian only because of Alicia’s line “I don’t think she’s a natural red white and blue.” I don’t understand this line at all. Mr. Emotions has yet to break his voice out of a heartbroken monotone, but at least we find out Simon is the biggest underwear model in America. I was wondering. The middle of what appears to be a zombie attack feels like the ideal time to try and make the ex jealous, so Alicia goes and snuggles up to Simon. These people are so dull.

Maybe she's born with it...

Maybe she’s born with it…

At the rave area, Alicia starts calling out for Greg and Cindy (that’s not a typo, she apparently calls Cynthia Cindy because .. oh I don’t know. Stop asking me things. This movie is stupid). The guy with the camera freaks out and begs her to shut up, but Alicia is convinced it’s all just a ruse as part of the rave. A portapotty is laying on its side and Mr. Emotions marches over to it because he is a real man and fears no potty, porta or otherwise. The three guys roll it over and open the door to reveal Greg. And yes he’s covered in the contents of the tank. Everyone has a giggle at his expense except for Mr. Emotions who is brooding. Greg suddenly realises his lady is missing and the gang starts halfheartedly poking tents to look for her. She leaps out from behind one of the tents and breaks the Camera Guy’s neck with one pretty little hand. She turns and is about to leap at Greg when Casper the Marine Guard quite literally blows her away – the bullet picks up Cynthia and throws her violently into a tent which is exactly how guns don’t work in reality. Casper now pulls a hand gun and wanders over to Cynthia who is thrashing around in the remains of the tent. She shoots Cynthia in the face while Greg squawks behind her.

Casper calls up her partner, who is apparently named MacGuyvers, to ask him for an opinion on what’s happening on the island. Sadly the radio reception is as bad as the cell phone reception and so they are isolated and stuck. Casper doesn’t know what’s going on here, which means she just shot a girl that for all she knows was just in a bad mood. She’s going to get them all off the island. Mr. Emotions explains that the boat he came on has been destroyed, but the others mention Kirk. Casper promises not to arrest him and they make for the inlet.

The zombies that were approaching the boat before have finally arrived. Kirk shoots them one by one with even having to reload, he’s just that good. Some of them are shot twice which is either because zombies are hard to kill or because it was cheaper than hiring more extras.

Casper leads the group through the woods. Alicia is crying about Cynthia and Mr. Emotions gives her a cuddle. Something is running around in the woods and despite no one saying anything, Casper orders them to be quiet. They cross the bridge over the misty pond and a zombie bursts through the bridge and grabs Karma. She kicks it in the face, before Casper takes it out with her gun. Another one splashes out of the water and Casper gets that one too. Meanwhile, Mr. Emotions has impaled his hand on a nail. Karma has had enough and demands to go home even though that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. Being snotty doesn’t help anyone, Karma.

Now they’re running through the woods, being chased by a bunch of zombies. It’s the usual running and screaming, nothing new to see here folks. Despite having so much trouble finding their way from the boat to the rave, they are able to find their way back to the boat in the middle of the night while being chased without any trouble. The dinghy is gone and Alicia’s incredibly highly powered flashlight shows them that the boat is covered in zombies. Simon decides to swim for it, running down the dock while being chased and jumping into the water. The rest of the group are just standing around on the beach watching him which would seem like a good time for zombies to eat them. Simon spots the zombies on the boat and turns around while Casper shoots at them with her semi automatic.  Simon is dragged under and the girl in the stars and stripes jumpsuit runs in with a knife because she’s an idiot. There’s more shooting, this time from Kirk who is up the hill a little way. Mr. Emotions waves an axe around, Jumpsuit is attacked by a zombie and the same shot of a zombie being hit is used three times.

Jumpsuit is saved by Kirk who shoots the zombie in the head before being bitten by a zombie. He grabs it by the neck and shoots it in the forehead. The thing that he shoots is so clearly a dummy I had to rewind to see it again. Simon has a tantrum and kicks a dead zombie over and over again. In a white hot rage, he drops to he knees and rolls the zombie over to punch it. It’s not even dead, and vomits acidic puke all over Simon. Thankfully Casper is still armed to the teeth so she does some shooting while Simon screams and flails around. His face blisters and everyone stares at him as Kirk wanders over to show off his bite. Mr. Emotions is a pre-med student, so he’s treating the bite and oozing face blisters while Casper takes Greg off to find a radio on the patrol boat.

While the other two are off looking for a quick way to get their faces chewed off, Kirk fills the rest of the group in on the story of the island. It was pirates, hundreds of years ago. The Pirate captain was banished from Spain for doing crazy experiments. He was being held prisoner in a ship, and managed to murder the crew and now zombies. That’s pretty much it.

Casper has reloaded, and she and Greg are out in the woods. Behind them, something runs around from tree to tree. I bet it’s a zombie! Casper tells Greg to run, so he does because that is somehow safer than hanging around with Casper and her semi-automatic. Like the biggest moron ever born, Greg puts his flashlight down for no reason I can see. It’s alright though because the zombies are apparently running some high powered lighting in the area and the woods are pretty well lit. Greg manages to lose the zombies by hiding in a little gully, but once he climbs out he immediately steps on the loudest stick in the woods, bringing the zombies back to him.

The zombies have scattered catapult devices around the woods in order to help them jump really high. Either that or the production values are low enough that no one cares how clearly visible these things are as they launch zombies at Greg, but surely that can’t be true. Greg is finally eaten by about 6 zombies and the slashed up face guy in the trees is all happy about it.

The others decide to return to the house as soon as Greg and Casper are back. On cue, Casper comes back with a huge bag from somewhere. Her boat is destroyed and her first mate is missing. She tells the others Greg didn’t make it, and Simon gets all heroic and wants to go look for him. Kirk tells him off in what appears to be an Estonian accent, and the reveals what he’s been smuggling. It’s a machine gun. Casper opens her bag to reveal a huge shot gun. There’s also machetes, handguns, grenades, dynamite – basically anything you could want in a zombie attack except for a lick of sense.  It’s a good thing Kirk wasn’t smuggling cocaine, although that may have made for a more interesting movie. Everyone arms themselves in slow motion and then they set off to the house.

The house is surrounded by zombies, so Casper tells them to make a run for the door. While Casper is explaining why this is the best idea, a bunch of zombies run at them from behind. Everyone shoots at stuff willy nilly, screams a bit and then they form a line which walks through the cemetery around the house, shooting everything in front of them.  There’s a lot of Matrix style 360 camera work, and it’s taken them an incredibly long time to get from the edge of the clearing over to the house. Karma throws a grenade into the well, which explodes. One zombie appears to have died from this.

After about 7 minutes of exploding zombies, they make it to the house which they find to be locked. So they do some more shooting and blowing stuff up. Jumpsuit, being Asian, does a lot of kung fu kicking before overpowered by a bunch of zombies. Mr. Emotion watches her die and has a bit of a think about life and death and brooding eyebrows. The camera zooms in on his eyes and every zombie related moment is flashed through as though he’s remembering it. This is all in less than .5 of a second frames, speeding up to one frame at a time so it flashes horribly and now I have a headache.

MacGuyvers has turned up. Sadly he was unable to save himself with a paperclip and a rubber band, so Casper is forced to shoot him in the face. She’s sad about this and turns away to do it, leaving herself open for a zombie to jump on her. Mr. Emotions shoots the zombie splattering Casper with zombie brains. The others are screaming that they’re out of ammo. Maybe, just maybe, if they’d run directly to the house instead of pretending they were in the Matrix while splattering bullets left right and centre they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Mr. Emotion finds a boarded up window and climbs in, but Casper is too slow and her legs are axed off by the zombies. She bleeds lightly on the floor and then dies. For a movie that’s spent a lot of money on blood exploding from zombies, they could have splashed a bit more about from the severed legs. Also the legs are really neatly severed, both at the same spot. Those zombies have an eye for detail.

The ammo is gone. Mr. Emotions opens the door just in time, to drag the others in, but a zombie gets in too and gets shot. With the ammo that’s all been used up. Don’t think about this too deeply. Kirk has a big bite in his leg which is also not bleeding that much. Simon peels the bandage off his face to check the zombie splatter acid burn. He’s mostly sad that’s he not pretty anymore. Karma is still all swoony for him and they kiss. Mr. Emotion and Alicia peer out the window and the zombies who are removing the dead.

In the other room, they look down on the stumpy form of Casper who is now under a rug. Mr Emotions decides to use a slightly less whiny voice to tell Alicia it’s his fault she died. Alicia kisses him, so I guess they’re back together now. Karma interrupts the reunion to let them know Kirk is getting worse. Kirk tells the group to search the house for food, ammo and fortifications.

In a dusty forgotten room, they find a bunch of barrels and also I find out Mr. Emotions is actually named Rudy, but it’s too late for me now – he will forever be Mr. Emotions. There’s a locked door, which he kicks in. It’s an ancient lab from the experiments the Spanish Pirate did. Lots of jars with coloured liquids in them and a couple of dried out corpses as well as stitched heads and some other unconvincing and non-scary props. Alicia. and Mr Emotions find a microscope which is still able to be used as no dust has settled on the lenses – lucky! There’s things still living in the slide under the microscope. Pre-med student Mr. Emotions tells them it’s mutated human blood.

Kirk isn’t doing so well, but he hears whistling and calls for Salish who I guess was famed for his whistling. Kirk drags himself  across the floor toward the whistling, never losing his grip on his cigar. He opens the door, and he was right, there’s Salish who is a zombie now. Kirk shoots him in the head, and the sound of the gunshot draws Mr. Emotion to rush out and ask Kirk what he’s doing. “They’re gunna kill you!” says Mr. Emotion. “I’m dead already” says Kirk with an American accent. He lights a stick of dynamite with his cigar. The explosion blows out the windows and door so everyone rushes to the lab. Alicia discovers the barrels contain gunpowder, but Mr. Emotions says it’s useless because in order to blow it up someone would have to stand next to it. Laying a fuse or even just a line of powder is not something that occurs to him.

In one of the coloured water tanks in the lab, Alicia discovers a swimming something. It’s a fish with the face of a human. Alicia screams, Karma rushes in and shoots the tank. This spills all the red water on one of the dried out corpses and brings it to life. Mr. Emotions screams something about the tank being fill of blood which brings things back to life, but everyone else has screamed and run away already.

If a man can't model underwear, there's nothing left to live for

If a man can’t model underwear, there’s nothing left to live for

Shutting the newly reanimated zombies in the lab, they try to barricade the door. Karma finds a door to a cellar and she and Alicia run down stairs. Mr. Emotion screams for Simon to get away from the lab door, but Simon doesn’t seem to care about anything now he’s not pretty anymore. The zombies grab him through a hole in the door and he aims his gun at the powder barrels. The others flee into the cellar as the house explodes and yes they do the slow motion jump thing away from the boom. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. Karma, who was supposed to be all about Simon, is mildly vexed by his death. Very mildly.

Alicia has found her flashlight at some point between the upstairs and the cellar, which is handy because now they’re in a series of catacombs. Mr. Emotions delivers a line about the tunnels probably leading to the beach, and he does so as though he cannot remember the line and has to make one up on the spot. If you were wondering, yes the tunnels are full of zombies. Mr. Emotions runs out of ammo so Karma takes the lead with her two hand guns. Everything goes quiet for a bit, but then the walls start to twitch. Yep, there’s zombies in the walls. Karma offers to take care of them and gets killed for her troubles.

Another zombie approaches the remaining two, but he is stabbed from behind by a figure in a cloak who has  a sword. It’s Greg, and he leads them to another musty old room. This one is full of old medical equipment and hanging bodies. Mr. Emotions looks at one of the bodies and it opens its eyes. Another two appear to grab Mr. Emotions and Greg peels his face off to reveal the sliced up face that’s been watching people from the bushes. I guess this guy is the end boss.

A couple of zombies chain Mr. Emotions to a table, while the End Boss drools over his body parts. I don’t mean like that, do get your mind out of the gutter. I mean for self repair and/or making more zombies. Mr. Emotions says some stuff, but he’s got his teeth clenched so I have no idea what. The Boss helpfully fills in the back story – he’s the Spanish Pirate and he did all his experiments in order to live forever by harvesting the body parts of others. Don’t be judging him, everyone needs a hobby.

There’s a flashback where a mob appears to be hanging the Pirate, but as he dangles from the rope he glares at them and tells them he will never die. I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to speak at all while hanging from a noose, but I guess if you’re immortal you can do what you like. Especially if you’re an actor who is standing on the floor and wobbling about a bit at the end of a slack rope.

Now he’s taken a shine to Alicia’s skin, and Mr. Emotion isn’t having that so he manages to fight off the zombies holding him down and rushes to Alicia’s aid. She’s alright though, she found a sword and did some stabbing. Remember, she’s a fencer and broke up with Mr. Emotions in order to concentrate on her training. She needs to, this woman has never picked up a sword in her life. As they escape the underground lair, Mr. Emotions finds a grenade hanging on one of the bodies, so he pulls the pin and throws it. The pair flee from a rickety door out into the daylight of the woods. All that hiking through the tunnels has brought them out in the graveyard. Yes the one that was next to the house. Yes that’s about 20 feet.

Spanish Pirate is indeed immortal as it turns out, because he emerges from the exploded lair without so much as a spot of ash on him. He has a sword, Alicia has a sword and Mr. Emotions has an axe which he is unable to hit anything with. There’s more 360 camera Matrix stuff and both Alicia the Fencer and Spanish Pirate guy are terrible at sword fighting. Mr. Emotions is knocked out, but comes to just in time to see Alicia stabbed in the cleavage. In a fit of rage he grabs the axe and decapitates the Pirate who is still immortal and sends his headless body over to strangle Mr. Emotions. Alicia is not as dead as she should be and gathers the strength to stand up and stomp on the Pirate’s head, uttering the line “Game over.” Then she dies.

A helicopter lands in the clearing, and a guy in a suit gets out along with a bunch of snipers. The suit guy talks into his cuff, telling someone to maintain alpha alert. He’s keeping an eye out for reanimated homo sapiens and his snipers are dashing around pointing their guns at various rocks and trees. Mr. Emotions, with the body of Alicia hanging off him, steps out of the shack. Oh wait, she’s not dead because she’s walking a bit. Or she is dead and the actress can’t do dead. I don’t know. I don’t even care.

Suit guy tells Mr. Emotions he’s here to rescue him and they stagger to the helicopter. Alicia isn’t dead because she’s flopping around. She should totally be dead, so I guess pre-med Mr Emotions went back to the destroyed medical room and fixed her up proper with some immortality, though I’d have thought all the special magic mutant blood would have been blown up. We’re back to voice over  now, with Mr. Emotions being all anguished about how everyone died and how he doesn’t know what he’s created, how it’s not the end, but only the beginning and the credits roll. The credits roll and I am so, so happy to see them. Oh lovely credits, ending my suffering.

At the start of the movie, I was planning to make a comment around here about those two stars, and how one of them was probably a pity star. I’m revising that, I think both of them were pity stars. This movie has no redeeming features at all. Not one. As a sign of how terrible it was, I couldn’t even watch it all in one go. I started it at 12pm today and the credits have rolled at 11:15pm. I had to take breaks, do other things and basically not be looking at this train wreck for a while.

Before the early zombie attacks and during the longer fight stuff, footage from the video game was spliced in. Zombie gets shot in the game, zombie then gets shot in the movie. This was irritating and broke any kind of immersion in the movie. On the other hand, the movie itself discourages immersion by being bland, predictable and poorly written.

The movie fails on two counts. The first count is that of being a horror movie. There was no horror. The gore wasn’t gory and while the zombie make up was pretty decent, the zombies themselves were inconsistent. Are zombies shambling horrors or super fast freaks? This movie can’t decide, choosing which ever option seems to fit best at the time. One person alone in the woods gets the super fast freaks, but if there’s a horde of zombies that should by rights be able to catch up with our intrepid team and murder their heads off, those ones are the shambling slow kind. The deaths of the characters were not even shown – they’d fall down under a pile of zombies and then the scene would cut. Lame, and lazy.

The second count is as an advertisement for the video game. I’ve seen better stories and acting in a 30 second ad spot for yogurt so perhaps the money would have been better invested in doing one of those. For the game I mean, not for yogurt.

The characters were not even one dimensional. I’d give each of them half a dimension, if that. They were absolutely stock standard, off the peg horror movie characters. None of them stood out for being in anyway different or unusual, they all recited the standard lines for their type. At least Karma wasn’t stereotypical, which was a nice change because I fully expected her to be. Jumpsuit was though, pulling some fierce kung fu moves probably because Asians are born with kung fu in their veins. There was Vapid Valley Girl, Strong Independent Woman, Idiot Guy, Nice Guy, Broody Guy and Just A Girl. You can find these characters with the same lines in any of a thousand other movies. There was nothing to endear them to me, so I didn’t care they were killed. I only wished it had happened sooner.

A Better Movie

A Better Movie

A major improvement to the movie would have been having the boat sink. That could have happened at the 15 minute mark, leaving the following 1 hour 15 minutes as a long shot of the water where the boat went down. That would have been more fun to watch, but I guess I would have missed out on some shocking editing, poorly delivered lines and headache inducing fight scenes with fast cuts, spinning cameras and handguns with the speed and ammo capacity of machine guns.

At least no one sprained an ankle running away from a zombie. That’s worth half a star.

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