Uwe Boll’s name is sometimes tossed around whenever bad movie directors are mentioned. But which movie is his most emblematic? Tommy Wiseau is forever tied to The Room, and Ed Wood has Plan 9 From Outer Space. Boll is better known for the hucksterism that let him find a loophole in German tax law that allowed him to make terrible video game adaptations, or for luring Something Awful’s Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka into a boxing ring. While I am no Uwe Boll historian, I feel confident that his piece de resistance should be House of the Dead, an adaptation of a zombie survival video game that creates bad movie choices that will never be paralleled.

The story takes place on an island somewhere off of Seattle, where Bif Naked is performing. A bunch of bland college students hitch a ride on a boat crewed by Captain Kirk (not William Shatner, sadly) and Clint Howard (a.k.a the creepy baby from Star Trek). When they make it to the rave, there’s no one there. Rather than assuming that they may have fallen for a Fyre Fest style scam, they get on with the making out inside the abandons tent. After which… they are attacked by zombies.

Is Boll more of a visionary director than Zack Snyder? A full year before the Dawn of the Dead remake, Boll seems to be fully onboard with the fast zombies trend. Boll beat Snyder to mid-2000’s zombie trend by transforming the zombie movie genre from the slow, ponderous horror of the Romero movies into a mindless action gorefest.

When our crew of idiots finally make it to the titular House of the Dead. What follows is a near-perfect distillation of the pop culture of the early 2000’s. The nu-metal gets pumped up and our heroes do a slow-mo hero pose. There’s a woman jumping up and firing a shotgun (with zero kickback) while a hatchet is thrown her way like this is a particularly low budget The Last of the Mohicans. A zombie pops its head up like a whack-a-mole only for it to be shot in half. Parts of the video game’s first person footage is directly spliced in. It’s glorious… and actually fun. And so.

Much.

Bullet time.

Should you have doubted that Uwe Boll had seen The Matrix, there’s Kira Klavell in a Star-spangled outfit doing a backwards lean to duck out of the way of a zombie haymaker. Why go bullet tile for this scene, Uwe Boll? Or the shot where Ona Grauer looks like she didn’t even know you were doing bullet time, or even had the camera on? My favorite, though, might be the odd choice to do a zoom out and rotate on Captain Kirk just standing around. Bullet time also makes an appearance elsewhere in the movie when we see a character die and the camera spins around them in a video game homage. Dammit, Boll scammed the tax auditors to pay for all these cameras and he’s going to get his money’s worth!

And if you think that’s the pinnacle of the madness therein, we get to the sepia toned flashback of our movie’s villain. He’s a Spanish priest named Castillo who was banished from his homeland for practicing the dark arts. Do we see footage of a old-timey sailing ship? Hell yeah we do. His accusers tried to hang him from his crimes, but he snaps from his bonds and cackles like he’s a GI Joe villain.

House of the Dead is not a good movie. It’s not scary. The action is ridiculous. The zombie make-up looks straight out of Party City. But by God do I have a ball every time I’ve watched it. Unlike other bad horror movies, it’s not boring. It’s fast paced and the directorial decisions get increasingly bizarre and unpredictable. House of the Dead is sublime in its badness, transcending even the typical reasons for a video game movie being bad and arriving at avante-garde schlock.

Rating: 1/5 stars traditionally; 5/5 stars on the bad movie scale