The House of The Dead - RELOAD!

Waffling Taylors Goes To The Movies

Don’t forget to check out the other episodes in the series. Make sure to click here to see which movies we’ve already covered - we’re sure that you’ll love what you have to say.

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Players

Squidge

Jay

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Content Warning

Due to the nature of the movie we talk about in this episode, we’d recommend that you don’t listen to this one with little ones around.

This film (whilst also being pretty dreadful) contains nudity, swearing, violence, and pretty badly acted out zombies.

We’ve also left in all the swears, as it’s an episode about a horror film.

Please listen responsibly.

Show Notes

Our amazing intro was performed by Morgan Ritson, definitely check him out for similarly amazing stuff.

We decided to change up the format of our “goes to the movies” episodes. Instead of working through the plot, we decided that it would be much more fun to focus on a handful of scenes from the movie. This serves the double purpose of:

• Simplifying our episodes, and getting to the gags quicker
• Not having to discuss the plot which this movie doesn’t have

With that said, we jumped to jump straight into a description of this movie…

Basic Info on the Movie

We didn’t even get through our introductions before Jay started complaining about this movie

Jay:

The dynamic range compression in this movie is almost non-existant

In fact, the audio issues in this movie made Jay “do The Bushwackers thing”, which is the walk that the legendary pro-wrestling tag team did on their way to the ring:

Squidge sets the scene by reading the IMDB plot summary for this “cinematic experience”:

Squidge:

A group of college students travels to a mysterious island to attend a rave, which is soon taken over by bloodthirsty zombies

and that’s about all that really happens in this movie, to be fair. However, the 1978 movie with a similar name sounds pretty good:

Squidge:

A 1978 film consisting of four short stories about a man who takes refuge from a thunderstorm in the residence of a mortician

Initial Thoughts

Remember that this movie is based on a 1996 on-the-rails arcade shooter which takes less than 26 minutes to get through. Sure, there was a story but it was essentially:

On December 18, 1998, AMS Agent Thomas Rogan receives a distress call from his fiancée Sophie Richards from the Curien Mansion. Rogan and his partner "G" fly to Europe and arrive at the estate, finding it overrun with undead creatures, which Dr. Curien unleashed

Like, that’s literally it.

Seriously, there’s so little plot in this game that the arcade cabinet takes 28 minutes to get from booting to completion:

Plus, it’s set in a mansion in the middle of Eastern Europe.

But the movie takes place on a tiny island, and the mansion was replaced with… well, this:

The ADR (Additional Dialogue Replacement) in this movie is off the charts:

Jay:

This is ADR: the movie

With all of the important dialogue being recorded on set, with a microphone which was located two galaxies away, and all of the un-important dialogue

the grunts, screams, and such

being replaced with ADR.

And if you want to read Jay’s notes, you can by clicking here. Warning: he took this notes whilst watching the movie, and was several beers in by the time he got to the 36th minute mark.

Jay:

it was the only way to survive this "cinematic experience"

And the intro sequence for the movie takes this very… interesting approach to showing video game footage:

This one time effect is used at the start of the movie, but never again. All other video game footage

and there’s a lot, mainly to cover up "boring" dialogue

is shown as is - screen flashes and all.

But why Squidge loves this movie so much:

Squidge:

This film is fabulously stupid. If you need some cheese, you could spread it on your toast.

And of course, there’s a wonderful bit of serendipity at the very end of the movie:

we’ll save you the trouble of typing it out: houseofthedeadmovie.com

And if you head to this URL, you’ll see that someone else bought it after it expired and has created a page dedicated to showing all of the negative reviews for this movie.

Both Squidge and Jay agree that this movie was made in the wrong era. Just like the Double Dragon movie

which we’ve covered before

it should have been made in the mid-to-late 1980s into the early 1990s. It would have fit perfectly alongside other synthwavey distopian sci-fi shlock released during that time, such as Trancers. And Squidge very succinctly sums the movie up in a single sentence with his “crackpot” theory:

Squidge:

This movie is clearly aimed at Mortal Kombat fans. Because, correct me if I’m wrong, this is Mortal Kombat but with zombies.

and of course he had a spare “crackpot” theory - because it’s always good to have a backup:

Squidge:

The organisers of this rave, guaranteed it’s not actually SEGA, decided to hold the rave on the island on the same day that the inhabitants were having their yearly fun run. It’s happening in the middle of their running track, and they’re getting really annoyed.

And both of these theories make perfect sense. At least, more sense than anything that the movie posits.

The Scenes We Want To Highlight

We decided that it would be more fun to discuss certain scenes in this movie rather than try for a play-by-play of the scenes involved. This would mean that we could hyper focus on something which we either thought was good or something which was diabolical about this movie. We each picked a few scenes, and intentionally didn’t tell each other which scenes we would pick.

First up is one that Jay called:

The Jumping Into The Water Scene

Since these are the dead

seriously, it’s in the title of the movie

they shouldn’t be able to run, let alone do John Woo style wirework stunts and swim!

Seriously, these zombies are meant to have been dead for 200 years.

And yet, and yet.

Liberty, who is the character dressed in a stars and stripes onesie, decides to fist fight with the zombie underwater.

Squidge:

Hardcore parkour. Nothing like being chased through a forest by zombies before taking a refreshing swim.

And none of this includes the zombie who can spit acid:

Jay here.

Firstly, this thing has no lips.

Secondly, it doesn’t breathe.

Both of those things are required if you want to spit something.

Thirdly, I can see the flubbing pipe coming out of the mask.

And finally, Sgt. MacGuyver.

Oy vay.

Lunch at The Bungalow

Ignoring the fact that there are boobs on display throughout this film, and ignoring the fact that this scene has boobs on show.

A lady goes swimming without her top on, and her chaperone

Squidge: was to misunderstand that they were up to

disappears. The lady then gets out of the water, gets dressed, and goes for a walk in search of her beau. She ends up at the titular bungalow of the dead

with ensuite graveyard

and heads inside.

In the building, she finds her beau standing all awkwardly.

Suddenly zombies with LEDs for eyes appear, and a really cool practical effect happens:

They only have these red LED eyes in this one scene, too.

Squidge:

Just Eat for the undead.

It All Went A Bit Matrix

Imagine that you’re making an action horror movie, and you get to the 50 minute mark and realise that you haven’t got a lot of actual movie left, but you also haven’t had the one major action set piece for the film. Now imagine that you are creatively bankrupt.

So you start thinking:

What’s an exciting thing that I can film with lots of stunt people dressed as zombies? It needs to be exciting, and it needs to be fresh. It needs to be hip and sexy, and we need lots and lots of gun play.

Wait a minute. Fun. Sexy., Gun play. Hip.

I know! Let’s take all of the action stuff from The Matrix and make that… but stretch it out to 9 minutes

And that’s what they did. They took what could have been a fun handful of minutes and made it into a nine minute snoozefest, which took all of the actiony bits from The Matrix and made them boring… somehow.

Jay:

This action scene starts at 51:07, and ends at 59:43… this scene is them approaching the House of the Dead, right? Just like the beginning of the video game.

It takes the "heroes" an hour and 45 seconds to get into the house of the dead; something which takes two minutes and 36 seconds to do in the original game.

And on top of THAT, there’s a shot at exactly 54 minutes where an extra, who is the focus of the show, runs toward the camera… except that they are not wearing any zombie makeup or costume:

There is no explanation by this in either the movie or any literature we could find online.

There’s also a zombified extra (far right in the following screenshot) who carefully makes their way around the corpses of the recently downed undead:

Zombie Zorro

Jay:

I would watch the f$*k out of that movie!

Also, this exchange happens:

Rudy: You did it all so that you could be immortal. Why?

Casillo: To live forever

Academy award winning writing there. That’s a verbatim quote, by the way.

We’re not going to provide a screencap of the injury that Alicia suffers at the end of this scene, as it’s a little creepy.

Also, it’s very clear that Uwe Boll wanted to apply that makeup.

How Would We Rate It?

We don’t usually rate games or movies, in fact we have never done that. And this was a conscious decision that we made early in the life of the site

we discussed this with Chief on one of his early episodes

But we needed to figure out a way to tell you all whether we think you should watch this movie or not. Normally we would rely on three ratings across three categories, which are:

• Love it (best)
• Try it
• Fling it into a tree (worst)

Across these categories:

• As an action horror movie
• As a video game movie
• As a House of The Dead movie in the House of The Dead canon

Squidge’s Ratings

Jay’s Ratings

External Links of Interest

• Join our Discord server and be part of future episodes
• Us on Twitter
• Our Facebook page
• Support us on Ko-Fi
• House of The Dead on IMDB
• houseofthedeadmovie.com
• Double Dragon - Witty Remark Here
• Our other Goes to the Movies episodes
• Trancers

Music

Links to the music used in the podcast can be found below. Definitely check them out, because they're amazing tracks by awesome musicians.

• Intro music is Final Lap, by LonePeakMusic
• Spoiler Break music is Spectrum (Subdiffusion Mix) by Foniqz (BandCamp)
• Pallet Cleanser music is Breath Deep Breath Clear (Wu Chi) by Siobhan Dakay
• House of the Dead 2 RELOAD
• Nuke the entire site fom orbit
• Rise of the triad level 1
• Star Trek Communicator - Sound Effect
• The House of the Dead game over screen
• Highway 1 by LonePeakMusic
• Outro Music is I N e e d Y o u 私の側て by G.H (removed from BandCamp)