E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brain Dead (continued)

Where was I? Oh yeah, the "plot." The kids show up on the island, only to find the party deserted. The Sega banner is torn. It's really sad. The kids are too stoked for the party to let a little thing like there not being a party stop them. After all, the beer supply is still abundant, so let's get down! Forget these bloody clothes all over the ground! To be fair, one character does express concern, and decides to go off and investigate. The only reason she doesn't go alone is because two of the kids decide to stay behind and get it on.

On the other side of the island, Prochnow's boat is anchored in a driving rainstorm.

Back to our heroes, dry as a bone, wandering through the woods. They happen upon the same house from the beginning, the one with the night-vision zombies. "No!" you're thinking. "Don't go in there! There are zombies in there!" Sure enough, the kids get jumped ... by other people. Where did the zombies go? The grocery store?

This is where we finally meet the main character, the guy who did the beginning voiceover. We still don't get his name. In my head, I referred to him as "Sideburns," but it's hard to root for a guy solely on the basis of his facial hair. The survivors fill in the newcomers on what happened: "We got attacked by zombies." They have video to prove it. Compared to House of the Dead's party massacre, the similar scene in Freddy vs Jason is the bridge sequence in Apocalypse Now.

The group decides to make a run for Prochnow's boat, where, fortunately, the rain cloud has dissipated. But – oh no! The boat is crawling with zombies! This doesn't deter one of the characters, who heroically leaps into the water and starts swimming towards horrible, horrible freedom. To his surprise, the zombies come after him. But wait! Here's Prochnow! With ... an assault rifle! And here comes the cop who's been chasing him, also with an assault rifle! If you're wondering why I didn't mention the cop until now, it's because it really just doesn't matter.

Everyone makes it back safely. The cop and one of the guys go off into the woods to look for ... something. I don't remember what. The dude ends up getting killed by zombies. His death shot is taken directly from the video game. The camera pans around him while the screen fades to red.

People in the theater were walking out by this point. One guy took a cell-phone call and I didn't care, because whatever he was talking about was more interesting than what was on screen. I almost left myself, but I cowboyed up, knowing I would never have the chance again to see such a cinematic abortion on the big screen.

It was a good thing I did, too, because things were about to get a whole lot worse.

The reason the cop was chasing Prochnow, and the reason he had an assault rifle, was because his character is a gun smuggler. They open up a weapons cache and arm themselves. All they can do now is take refuge in that same stone house and wait the night out. First, they'll have to fight through hundreds of zombies.

This leads to a sequence that, years from now, people will look back upon and find that it doesn't exist, because all existing prints of this movie should be burned. The characters stand side-by-side, not really moving, and fire their weapons for about half an hour. The sequence follows the same pattern: close-up of one character firing, say, a pistol, and then a low-rent Matrix shot revolving around that character as they fire, say, a shotgun. It happens with just about every character. Out of nowhere, they're holding different guns.

Throughout the whole scene, there is no sense of movement or of anyone's spatial relation to anyone else. It really is people standing still, firing weapons. I've never seen such a faithful cinematic translation of a video game. Many times, rather than spend the money necessary to depict awful gore effects, Boll cuts to yet more shots of the video game. I think if you were to add up all the shots of the game in this movie, you'd find at least 10 minutes of screen time devoted to it. Sometimes it says "Reload" on the screen.

And during the whole sequence, we're treated to the aural stylings of the House of the Dead rap. When the song ended, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking the scene was over. Then the song started over. I have no idea how long this went on. If I smacked myself in the forehead once per second during this scene, and smacked myself – estimating conservatively – 3000 times, then it must have gone on forever.

After the characters make it into the house, two of them share the most awkward on-screen kiss since Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie. The zombies keep coming and people keep dying, until only two people remain. They find a trap door that leads them to a catacomb beneath the house. "What is this?" the girl wonders.

"There must be some kind of catacomb beneath the house!" says the hero.

They find the cause of all the madness: a Spanish criminal from hundreds of years ago, who keeps himself alive by grafting the body parts of others onto his own accursed corpus. "You created these things so you could be immortal!" says the hero. "Why

"To live forever!" answers the criminal.

I forget how they escape. But they do. Then there's the aforementioned swordfight. Finally, with only Sideburns left alive, two government agents (which is the one understandable nod to the game in the whole movie) show up. "What's your name?" they ask.

"Rudolph."

"You got a last name?"

Prepare for drama, people. The hero turns to them, waits a moment (I can imagine Boll telling him to make this one count), and says, "Curien." He then walks away, carrying his girlfriend's body. Get it? Curien! Curien's the bad guy in the game! That must mean Sideburns was secretly the bad guy the whole time! Right? Or that he ... um ... what the hell does it mean?

He ends with an inaudible voiceover. I only remember the very last line: "Is this the end, or is this the beginning?"

Fade out, cue the reprise of the House of the Dead rap, and we're done.

Listen. This movie will be out, at most, for another five days. House of the Dead is so horrendously bad that you cannot in good conscience miss it. You may never get another chance like this in your life. In the meantime, I'll be over here, slamming my head against my desk until I've killed the part of my brain holding this film in my memory.