House of the Dead in its arcade form is an enjoyable game, though the only real story element in the game is that you’re moving through a house with the dead in it. This movie doesn’t even have the house. In fact, other than the occasional jump cut—where footage from the video game is inserted with little or no logic—the game and the movie are two entirely different entities. This should make you mad. It should because this film was put together and the title HOUSE OF THE DEAD slapped across it to draw in your—the gaming community’s—money.

It might be forgivable if the movie turned out to be really good. The video game is—at best—a medium baked first-person shooter, and it would have been entirely possible to turn out a film that was more enjoyable for the fans than the game itself. There aren’t enough good zombie films out there and this could have been chance to unite two large (and lucrative) fan bases.

Instead, we got a half-assed script that we were just supposed to swallow and thank them for. Did the vile Sega Exec think you weren’t going to know the difference? It was so bad that it made ME mad, and I’m not even a hardcore gamer. I suppose I could be characterized as a zombie fanboy (though with thirty fast-approaching, fanman might be more appropriate), and as such this film offended me just as much but in a different way.

In the game, the creatures just keep pouring in—all different kinds from every different angle. The film, in trying to keep with this face-paced spirit, gave us fast moving—hell, sprinting—zombies, but left out the other creepy/crawling evil creatures that really gave the game its character. Their hearts may have been in the right place, but the leaping/running/quasi-flying-through-the-air zombies doomed this film to ridiculousness. I’m going to make stick my neck out on zombies here, so buckle down and get ready for some controversy.

Zombies are slow. When they run, they are not scary. Bold statements, I know. Here’s the logic behind them.

In 1967, George Romero produced Night of the Living Dead—the first contemporary zombie film. The zombies in it are slow, shuffling creatures that aren’t particularly coordinated or intelligent. Over the course of the film, more and more of them surround an isolated farmhouse—creating an escalating tension. On the inside, the stress of the situation takes its toll on the people holed up inside until finally they fight each other. It all comes to a head roughly around the same time and the slow, building force outside (like a boa constrictor) is finally able to break through the boarded windows and doors. If the living worked together, they would be able to stay safe, they fought and wound up being eaten (like the Revolutionary War poster said, “Join or die”). It is as much as story about human nature as it is the walking dead.

As an element in horror, the slow zombie works on more levels and is more effective than the running corpses in House of the Dead. The obvious avoidablity of the creature results in a ‘tortoise and the hare’ type attitude in many characters, while the primal fear of death inspires everything from a religious response to outright panic in others.

The slow zombies rise and you get away. You are safely locked in your farmhouse, or shopping mall, or underground bunker and you watch the rest of the world fall away. It is not that you are cut off, the problem rises in the fact that there is nothing left in which to be connected. Facing this trauma, as well as the constant moaning, scratching, and snarling of the stupid, rotting things on the other side of that door, safety glass, or chain link fence are stresses that will break down your character just like they have your civilization. The slow zombie confronts its would-be victim with the one thing our increasingly impatient society can’t deal with: time.

With the running zombie, you run until you are out of breath, then they get you. Or you find a safe place and stay put—trying to get anywhere else is not an option. Other than the instantaneous primal option of fight or flight, the characters don’t have any choice to make—without choice, you have no conflict. It is this lack of choice that is the single greatest flaw in the story of House of the Dead.

The Evil Sega Exec didn’t care about that, though. He only wanted a flashy film with explosions and hot girls and Clint Howard to rip off the gamer and zombie audiences. Why would they do something like this? Because it cost $7 million to make, they released it in early October in time for Halloween, and it grossed a little more than $10 million. They did it because they made three million dollars of your money in one month.

The lesson here is that films like this will continue to be made as long as there are people like us to see it. One noodge in particular is the director of this film, Uwe Boll (and as the director, this should really be the person on whom most of the blame for this film is placed) who has begun to make a career out of taking popular video games and butchering their film adaptations. Remember BloodRayne? Guilty. How about Alone in the Dark? Guilty again.

In the evil character of Castillo, House of the Dead gives us a villain who sits in an isolated place, taking pieces of people and putting them together in the hope of creating an perfect body with which to live forever . . . much in the same way Uwe Boll sits in the dark edit room, taking pieces of video games that are fine on their own, ripping them apart, and trying to put them together in some other combination to give himself eternal life in the media of film. It certainly feels that way, considering he has five films in development for the next two years—all based on video games.

So keep watching the skies, my friends, for horrible video game knock-offs. Thanks to the easy-to-shoot, quick-turnaround, fast-cash production style and run of movies like House of the Dead it looks like they’re here to stay.

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