Anime Forum Games Links Movies Music Profiles Survivor TV Shows As far as video game movies go, they tend to be horrible. If you saw the trailer for House Of The Dead, I'm sure you groaned because it looked horrible with all of the bullet time garbage. Now after paying to see this film, I can safely say I was pleasantly surprised. While it may be based off the game series, the plot has nothing much in common. A group of college kids go to an island where it turns out that it's infested with zombies. These aren't your normal slow and dumb zombies. These zombies are hyper active and just want to kill and kill. The plot is generic but really so was the plot of the games. The actors in the movie are pretty bad. First of all you have an unknown cast besides Jonathan Cherry who also starred in Final Destination 2. The cast gives mediocre performance at their bests and while I thought Cherry gave a decent performance in Final Destination 2 but when it comes to showing any emotion in House Of The Dead he fails to deliver. The other cast members are pretty bad but it just adds to the cheesy feel of the movie. The script is bad, so bad in fact that I groan at a line in the movie. Not sure what line in particular but it may have been the one where the character, Simon, says "Simon Says" and he said something after says but I forget what it was, it was just lame. Now as for the directing, I really enjoyed it. The first thirty minutes are pretty bad, you get tons of useless female nudity but once the group gets weapons the movie picks up. The action scenes are fun and fast and while the bullet time stuff is cheesy, it was also kind of fun. One thing the director does is stick actual footage from the first game into the movie. It looks bad at first but when it matches up with the action on screen it's kind of cool. Of course there are a few problems with it like the times where you can see "Free Play" written on the screen, it kind of takes away from the movie. The budget must have been really low because there isn't much in the way of special effects, just a few decent looking explosions. Now the make-up effects on the zombies are decent, they aren't great or anything but they look more like zombies then what was in Resident Evil, but that movie had a reason for it's non-zombie like zombies. What were my final thoughts after seeing the movie? It was fun, plain and simple. If you can look past the flaws which there are a number of, one being the fact that zombies wouldn't bleed, you can have fun with this movie. I honestly can't say the movie is worth seeing in the theater but I do know I'll probably pick up the DVD just because I had that much fun watching the mindless action that was taking place. Reviewer: Americanpieflute Score:C- Reviewed on October 10th 2003