House of the Dead 2 Review

House of the Dead 2 is the type of film you truly wanted to love (or at least like) but for one reason or another couldn't. With HOTD 2, I was hoping for a "guilty pleasure" type of film, but the only guilt I felt was actually staying around long enough to finish it. I went into this film with an open mind and was actually enjoying the opening moments (what’s not to love about a panty raid at a sorority house with super soakers), but when it was done, the overall film ended up being a mess. From the poor writing to the "conveniently acting zombies," to the stupidity of the characters on screen – HOTD 2 was all over the place.. and it very rarely did it find the deadman’s "happy place."

Here’s how the story for HOUSE OF THE DEAD 2 breaks down: "At a local university, Professor Curien (Sid Haig) is experimenting with eternal life, when he unwittingly unleashes a zombie plague onto the university campus. Soon, the whole campus is infected and overrun by zombies and 29 days later a Special Forces unit, along with two AMS agents Emmanuelle Vaugier (Alex) and Ed Quinn (Ellis) are sent in to find any survivors and retrieve a blood sample from the "zero generation" zombie – in hopes of creating an antidote, but they only have until 0700 hours before cruise missiles are sent to destroy to whole area."

Now with the film being 95 minutes long, you would think that one would at least find some redeeming value to the film or at least some certain elements that one would like – and for the deadman there was several, but the onslaught of a bad script almost choked out any pleasure I might of derived from this film. I will first talk about the positives.. and straight up the SFX and zombie make-up in HOTD 2 is a lot better this time around.. credit the boys at Almost Human for a job well done. Even though a majority of the gore consisted of "head shots" and blood oozing out of a zombie’s mouth, what we do see on screen was well done… I just wished we had more of it.  Read his whole review right here: House of the Dead 2 Review