There is yet to be a truly classic video game movie. Sure, the first Tomb Raider was a slick and enjoyable yarn, made all the better for the casting of stunning and talented Angelina Jolie, and both Resident Evil movies were enjoyable and competent zombie films, but pretty much every other movie based on a video game has ranged from mediocre to appalling. And despite the effort, enthusiasm, and incredible amount of prosthetics thrown in, House of the Dead comes in somewhere near the bottom of the scale.

As with any arcade video game, the story in this film is a clichéd, flimsy excuse to get a bunch of people together and have them kill a whole lot of zombies. Five friends, with more money than sense, hire a boat, complete with weathered sea dog and creepy, superstitious first mate, to get to an island where the rave of the year is taking place. What they don't know, however, is that the partying is about to come to a brutal and bloody end, something only hinted at by the first scenes in the film, where a couple split off for a swim at the beach, only to end up (inexplicably) in a ramshackle house, where they're horribly killed by rotting corpses.

So, the friends arrive on the island at night, to find the scene of the party trashed and no sign of life. They split up, some of them soon finding the house and hooking up with three survivors of the massacre that just occurred. They hook up with their friends back at the party, meeting up with a female member of the coastguard police, who has been tracking the captain of the boat that brought the friends to the island, then make through the zombie-infested woods for the boat, which is inevitably besieged by the undead. Fortunately the captain is a weapons smuggler, and after arming the group of survivors with an array of serious hardware, they make for the house, to fortify their position until help arrives. But how many of them, if any, will be able to survive until then?

Dear oh dear oh dear. Where to begin. This film really is terrible for so many reasons. For starters, the reason behind the zombies being on the island is so utterly stupid that it just defies belief. The screenplay is laughably bad throughout, drawing upon countless clichés and stringing them together in a way that completely fails to entertain. The characters are likeable enough, but totally two-dimensional, and none of them show anywhere near enough grief at the death of their friends, or shock, horror and terror as they're set upon by hordes of animated corpses at various stages of decomposition. The acting isn't actually that bad, considering how poor the script is, but there are no stand out performances here, and it's barely worth mentioning any of the actors names. The only one I recognised was Tyron Leitso, who did a fantastic job as Eric in the tragically short-lived but utterly superb TV series Wonderfalls, which is well worth picking up on DVD if you have a multi-region player - at the time of writing, there is no European release.

In actual fact, this film is probably the most faithful movie of a video game ever, because it is like watching a one and a half hour long cut scene from a video game. A cheesy, plotless video game with shallow, badly drawn characters and brainless but sometimes impressive action sequences. The one good part of this whole debacle is that some of the action scenes are just about worth watching - although by the time you reach them you're so bored out of your brain that you're starting to feel as mindless as the living dead yourself. The main scene where the seven survivors storm the house and take out probably over one hundred zombies with an array of powerful weapons (shotgun, sub-machine guns, dual pistols, heavy machine gun, automatic rifles, grenades and even a machete - hang on, is this a DVD or a game review?!) is fairly impressive. There's a couple of Matrix-style bullet time shots, and each character gets showcased in video game style, as the camera pans around them in a unique freeze frame 360 movement, then we get to see them strutting their stuff and wiping out the zombies. Unfortunately, the zombie prosthetics are pretty naff - it all looks like make-up and the blood and gore just looks like syrup and bits of clay, somewhat destroying the realism, but still, this scene is an impressive achievement just for the camera work and incredible number of stunts. It's interesting to note that Tom Savini is behind the special effects, a guy I know and love as 'Sex Machine' from the excellent From Dusk Till Dawn

Uwe Bole's direction is totally unspectacular - there are a few nice moments, such as the house storming scene, but the rest of it is very run of the mill, and the way he keeps cutting actual House of the Dead video game footage into the scenes, both during the action and as a way of switching between scenes, is the lamest thing I've ever seen committed to film. It simply doesn't work - it's jarring, out of place and destroys what little realism there might have been left. I could go on for a lot longer, about how bad some of the cheesy moments are, about how boring and superficial this whole film is, about how there's pretty much no scares, totally uninteresting zombies, and a complete lack of tension of any sort. But then you might end up as bored as I was watching the film.

The video quality is sharp and clear during the daytime scenes, but at night those blacks are looking a bit grainy and washed out at times, while the Matrix-esque moments aren't quite blended with the footage quality of the rest of the film. The audio quality is okay, but the soundtrack is simply appalling - it really is like a video game score, and not in a good way. The pumping music during the action scenes rarely works, nor is it interesting to listen to, while the music is so forced and cheesy during the 'heartfelt' moments that it almost makes you laugh. Utter rubbish. The extras are thin on the ground, just a couple of TV spots, trailers and two featurettes, although one at least has George A. Romero in interview, talking about his script for Night of the Living Dead 4, which he's up for making if he can get the finance together. Now that's something I would like to see! They're making a House of the Dead 2 apparently - at least it's unlikely to be any worse than this one.

House of the Dead is shockingly poor, low budget zombie nonsense that remains faithful to the game upon which it is based by having a paper-thin plot, two-dimensional characters, utterly mediocre dialogue and music that simply doesn't belong outside of a video game. Uwe Bole's direction has a couple of good moments and there are some impressive scenes, but they're hardly worth enduring the entire film for, and they're nothing that we haven't already seen done a lot better in the Resident Evil movies and The Matrix. I'm a big fan of horror movies and I'm easy to please, so if you still want to satisfy your curiosity about this film, then be my guest - just don't come crying to me if you don't enjoy your stay at the House of the Dead.

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).