Badaptation! Featuring: House of the Dead
Greetings, dear reader, to the Game Revolution Vault of Revulsion. Please, be seated, relax, and take your time, for the night is long and your attention span is…not. But sit tight, for on this eve of All Hallows we have cancelled our regularly scheduled programming to bring you the first course in what shall be a feast so unwholesome and unsanitary it could only begin on a night when people everywhere accept candy from strangers. We call it…Badaptation! So, please, open your mind like a pillow case, and glimpse with us beneath cinema’s tail into the mad, red eye of movies based on video games!
Warning: This will definitely spoil your appetite.
For some things, gentle reader, are evil fresh out of the oven, including clones, resurrected pets, sewer clowns, and movies based on video games. Can your mind even comprehend the unnatural chopping, stitching, and gross transplantation required to stretch the opening cut-scene of a video game across the skeletal structure of a feature film? The result is the movie equivalent of Joan Rivers’ terrifying face, and in this case its name is House of the Dead.
Based on the Sega arcade classic, where two guys in a big house shoot a bunch of monsters, House of the Dead shamelessly grave robs the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as other movies about Republicans.
Instead of hacking through the plot joint by joint, let me put it this way: The kids arrive at “Isla De Muerte”. Then they find a ripped-to-pieces rave, triggering about ten minutes of stock “Zombies running and climbing trees” footage. Then somebody says, I kid you not, “So this is why the call it…Isla de Muerte.” The kids find a bevy of futuristic assault rifles (At this point I’ve drunk myself stupid), then they get in a half-hour shoot-out that’s a cross between Double Dare and an episode of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. That’s when you learn about the undead conquistador zombie-smith. Then everybody dies (mostly off camera) except for the main guy and girl, who get in a Kung-Fu fight with the Don of the Dead, including lots of slow-mo dodging, and grape jelly squirting from a severed head.
That’s a rough blueprint, but there’s a long, ridiculous segment where a woman washes dishes topless, dialog that makes your average porno sound like V for Vendetta, and these four gruesome scenes of filmmaking gone mad. If you are weak of heart, epileptic, or vomit easily, by all means, watch this!
(Please excuse our movie player, it objects on moral grounds to what you are about to see, and must be coerced into action)
The worst line.
It is said, gentle soul, that Freddy Kruger was born when his mother was raped by a thousand maniacs. We think this line might have raped her, too.
The epileptic flashback.
When star-spangled candy raver Liberty gets killed by zombies, the main character has this brief psychotic episode. In the very next scene, someone is vomiting violently. Oh wait, that was me.
The gunpowder room.
In the game, the “House” is a straight up castle. In the movie, it’s like a mid-sized condominium; it only has three rooms, no bathrooms, and one gunpowder storage room. We guess that’s fine, it’s not like zombies pee. Then again, we didn’t realize they liked to horde gunpowder, either.
Shooting the fish tank.
This is just an awesome scene, it speaks for itself.
We’ve chosen Halloween to launch this ghastly feature, but don’t think you’ll escape the horror that easily. We’re going to bring you the rancid meat of a different movie based on a video game every single month until you beg for mercy… or we do.
So next month look forward to (or cringe in terror awaiting) Street Fighter, a movie so awful it actually killed one of its actors. Until then, dear reader, don't go poking around in any abandon houses, or a zombie conquistador might dress up as you for Halloween! Mua-ha-ha-haaaaaaaa!
