Lost in Translation? – House of the Dead

Welcome to Lost in Translation? – the Ready Up series where we look at the rocky two-way road of media adapted from video games and games based on films and TV shows, in a bid to decide whether the juice was worth the squeeze, or if what made the source material great in the first place got lost in translation.

Oh, you are a lucky bunch. For this daredevil installment of LIT? we’re delving into the first of director/producer/butcher Uwe Boll’s oeuvre of game-to-film adaptations, 2003’s House of the Dead, released two years after Lara Croft: Tomb Raider bucked the trend of video game movie adaptations and made some serious money.

Before we proceed, it’s probably best to be clear on this one: House of the Dead is somewhat of a stinker; an astonishingly duff B-movie that at times makes you wonder whether you’re watching a parody of a zombie movie. But here on Lost in Translation? our role is not to say whether a film is good or bad (even though I just did), but whether it holds up as a decent adaptation of its source material.

The source material in this instance is Sega’s House of the Dead series of on-rails lightgun games. Light on plot but heavy on action, each installment of House of the Dead pits you and your trusty gun against an army of undead creatures on your quest to quell the evil source of the zombie scourge. Enemies get progressively tougher to kill as you’d expect, and each level ends with a hefty boss battle.

At the time of the cinematic House of the Dead’s release, the latest in the game series was House of the Dead III, which introduced shotguns as the default weapon and looked something like this:

Opening with a doom-laden voiceover that lets you know there won’t be many survivors by the film’s end, the movie begins with a group of rich twenty-somethings arriving on the Isla de Muerte, expecting the ‘party of the year’ and instead finding the island deserted. Eventually finding a group holed up in an old house, some clunky exposition reveals that the rave was attacked by zombies, with those in the house the only ones who got away. Together, the group attempts to escape off the island and, failing that, survive the night.

So, quality aside, how does House of the Dead measure up as a game-to-film adaptation?

What it got right

If you boil down the House of the Dead games to their core components, they are about shooting zombies and other undead beasties until they explode in a grisly fashion and stop attacking either you or a smattering of survivors you occasionally encounter. In this regard, you could argue that the film is quite a success, featuring as it does a cast of characters who, after being victimized by the various zombies infesting the island for a fair chunk of the film’s runtime, pick up arms and engage the zombie horde on their own turf, in front of the titular House of the Dead.

The games were never about tension in the same respect as Resident Evil, where at times you would dread turning the next corner for fear of what threat may be waiting for you. Tension in the original House of the Dead game came mainly from the sheer number of foes thrown at you simultaneously and the fact that even standard enemies always took several shots to kill – a direct contrast to popular on-rails lightgun games of its day, where most enemies were significantly easier one-shot kills. That being said, the film reflects this more action-oriented tone with its sprinting acrobatic zombies, though perhaps takes it a little too far with its use of Matrix-esque cameras spinning round its actors as they dish out the violence.

What it got wrong

Hoo boy. Where do we start? I’ll be frank – there’s all sorts of things wrong with this film, but bear in mind our focus here – the quality of the adaptation – and amazingly there’s not a huge amount to criticise. The House of the Dead games are, after all, supremely shallow narrative experiences (as is the film), and any attempt to faithfully recreate them would restrict the cast to two primary heroes with infinite ammo, one primary villain and a smorgasbord of evil zombies and undead mutants standing between them, which is the direction the film takes, for a time at least.

One thing the film does attempt is to use some of the game’s iconography within the film, specifically the manner in which the player-character is seen to die on the ‘game over’ screen in-game, recreated in-film by spinning the camera around the recently deceased character while blood trickles down the screen. Going even further down this road, the film frequently intercuts footage from the game actually within the film, especially during the mass shoot-out towards the film’s end. While the bravery of the filmmakers is perhaps to be applauded, the end result is that the film looks ludicrous, an experiment that attempts to be a style-over-substance experience that seriously lacks in style.

The Verdict

Watch it as a comedy, as a parody of zombie movie conventions and you may yet find something watchable in this train-wreck of a film. Taken on any other level and House of the Dead is a disaster of epic proportions. Perhaps as good an adaptation as anyone could ask for from its source material, it is nonetheless lost in translation.