August 8, 3:00PMFinsbury Park Picturehouse
dir. Uwe Boll
USA, Canada, Germany, 2003, 90 mins
August 7, 8:30PM
Canal Film Club
On an island off the coast, a techno rave party attracts a diverse group of college coeds and a Coast Guard officer. Soon, they discover that their X-laced escapades are to be interrupted by zombies and monsters that attack them on the ground, from the air, and in the sea, ruled by an evil entity.
On House of the Dead, Uwe Boll has expressed that he believes he “made a perfect movie, because it really shows how the game is. It's a lot of fun, it's over-the-top action.” In a post–video-game-adaptation-as-bargain-bin-fodder landscape, where A Minecraft Movie is directed by Jared Hess and the Super Mario Bros. films’ box office runs stronger than Superman, The Fantastic Four, and Captain America, there is increasing evidence to suggest that provocateur Boll may have been right.
The result of a $12 million production in 2003 is a work of kinetic excess: feverishly kaleidoscopic action, woodland-rave aesthetics, and a collage of formal experiments that feel closer to the dopamine rush of playing an arcade shooter than many of the genre’s more recent, focus-tested counterparts. By comparison, watching it now can feel like encountering Ang Lee’s Hulk after Endgame: a film operating within an entirely different set of industrial expectations. How did we get here?
TFFF are proud to collaborate with Canal Film Club to present House of the Dead in the exact form it deserves: surround sound in the woods.
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