One part of being an objective reviewer is to keep the opinions of other critics out of your head when you view a movie for review. Sure, there are parts of their review that sink into your head and pop up when you are actually viewing the film, but for the most part I try to keep everything separate.  The pre-release press for House of the Dead was skimpy, but what was released wasn’t good at all. Director Uwe Boll has recently stated that he wants to make a movie based on the hit Dungeon Siege or WarCraft game series, I’m hear to beg and plead Microsoft and Blizzard, respectably, to never let this man within 100 feet of their licenses as House of the Dead now has the crown for worst video game adaptation…ever.

There isn’t just one part of the movie that stands out as the real downfall, there is so much wrong with this so-called-film that I don’t know where to begin. Absolutely no part of this movie is coherent at anytime during the excruciatingly long 90 minute running time what the producers call a script is nothing more than some fanboy fantasy of gratuitous nudity, extreme violence, and the tale of an action hero in a video game.

Our story starts off with a group of friends attempting to charter a boat from Captain Kirk (yes his name really is Captain Kirk and he doesn’t like Star Trek jokes). These over-sexed teens are attempting to hitch a ride to the rave of the century conveniently held on the Island of the Dead (cue evil music). The kids arrive on the island to find the party deserted, the beer on tap, and the guys realize they have tools in their pants that must be used, for fear of rust. Once they finally discover the cheapest zombies in Hollywood are roaming around, they gear up (how convenient that Captain Kirk is a weapons smuggler) and participate in one of the stupidest action sequences ever printed to film.

I originally wanted to give props to Artisan and Uwe Boll for bringing a game like House of the Dead to the big screen. It wouldn’t be an easy task for an arcade game only designed to eat quarters, but now all I see is a huge failure and a missed opportunity to cash in on one of videogaming’s most lucrative licenses.

As the film progresses the teens are picked off one by one, but as they die the lead characters don’t shed a single tear, in fact, after one teen blows himself up with gunpowder a simple, “He didn’t make it,” is all it takes for the grieving to end. Hell, at least the underwhelming House of 1000 Corpses had a respectable house, Dead‘s house looks more like a one bedroom painted grey with a blind groundskeeper, a far cry from the mansion featured in the game.

Most video game adaptations get a bad wrap because they are, in fact, based on video games, believe it or not, but where all those adaptations tried to bring in the masses House of the Dead flaunts the movie’s roots in the stupidest way possible. Between scene transitions the film actually includes clips from the video game, and while this might be okay for stylistic reasons, some of the clips they use prominently feature “Free Play” and other arcade notifications at the bottom of the screen. It looks like some guy with a DV camera filmed some other guy get his butt handed to him and then spliced it into a low-budget horror film.

But what is a horror film without the horror? The zombies, as stated before, are so cheap looking, they look like actors with grey paint. It appears as though they attempted to include every horror cliché imaginable, but where Freddy vs. Jason made the cliché, campy horror genre funny, House of the Dead attempts to take these bits seriously leading to horrible dialog and terrible leaps in believability.

As the film begins the main characters are scared out of their minds. Zombies have just killed all of their friends, but put a gun and grenade in their hand and they become military trained experts landing aerial kicks, reloaded brutally fast, and, presumably, becoming extremely nauseated with the camera swinging around them like it does.

House of the Dead suffers from so much that the film isn’t even worth watching, your $6.50 would much better be spent heading over to the local arcade and logging in an hour’s worth of time with House of the Dead III. It would be a much more rewarding experience and cause much less frustration. Don’t even see this film if you are a fan of the series.

Wanted: An extremely hot vampire capable of leaping great distances, landing on her feet, and staring you down with hypnotic blue eyes. Tight fitting leather apparel is a plus, but not needed when wearing a beautiful, black evening gown. Applicants must have a general hatred for werewolves and weakness for medial intern humans. Some disregard for vampire canon will be tolerated.

So sums everything you could want from a vampire movie featuring the lovely Kate Beckinsale as Selene a Death Dealer whose only goal is to rid the world of the werewolves. While on a hunt to destroy werewolves Selene encounters two of her enemies trailing after a human, only they don’t want to eat him, they need him for something else. Vampires and werewolves share a common bloodline, yet when the body is infected with both viruses you die. The werewolves, on the losing side of the war, are trying to develop a werewolf/vampire hybrid, which would be invincible, and the ultimate weapon in the war. Seemingly by chance, Selene falls for Michael (Scott Speedman), the human the wolves were chasing, and the story branches off from there including internal treachery and backstabbing all around.

The film does a great job of presenting itself to the audience. Director Len Wiseman has a knack for the cinematic feel with a color-barren exposition of an ancient war in modern times. The movie does borrow a great bit from action movies released in the last 10 years. The gunplay and aerobatics of The Matrix are present; the story is reminiscent of Shakespeare, and throughout the film you will notice subtle, and blatant references to other films. Still, this doesn’t detract from the film in any way, as it is still a great way to kick off the fall movie season.

Underworld seems to play around with the established vampire canon seen in movies such as Blade and TV shows such as Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. Some things make sense, while others don’t seem to. While specifics may be getting a bit too nick-picky the film does a good job of staying within the reasonable bounds of believability based on the fiction. The most interesting part is the description, and origin, of Lucian (Michael Sheen) the werewolf leader who has supposedly been dead for hundreds of years.

The film does a lot of things right, and only a few things wrong. The movie does have a few slow moments, and there isn’t as much gunplay as you would expect to see after viewing the trailers and TV spots, but the final battle more than makes up for it. The last sequence had the audience roaring with delight. It has been a while since I actually heard a group of movie goers respond to an action film like that. Not even The Matrix Reloaded produced that kind of effect.

Underworld is a moderately budgeted (hence the Screen Gems banner) action film that should be very profitable for Sony. The movie knows what it is, but isn’t the action mindless romp you would have pegged to be released in mid-September. The lack of overused special effects only ads to the argument that traditional film making is far from dead, and actors, such as the talented Kate Beckinsale, make the movies for the audience. Of course I don’t think the tight leather pants hurt anyone’s opinion of the film.

The Rock has arrived, pure and simple. The Rundown may be a simple movie, with a simple storyline that wouldn’t normally be considered a star-making film, but for the wrestler turned actor, the movie represents a coming of age and a succession to the throne.

Please note, The Rundown would be nothing without the performances of the main actors, in fact I’m betting that they were specifically written, for the most part, for the thespians that step into their shoes. The film starts off in a night club where Beck (The Rock) confronts a football player on some past bets he placed, and his lack of payment. After a hilariously awkward first confrontation, and a one-liner from The Terminator himself, Beck returns to collect what he came for and opens the film with a very well choreographed, entertaining fight sequence. The film has style and this is evident in the way the director approaches the fighting in the film, as well as the dialog. It sounds simple and trivial, but the added ESPN-like character introductions in the beginning were very, very cool and never overused.

After Beck gets the short end of the stick from his bookie employer he is sent on one last job to Brazil where Travis (Seann William Scott), his boss’ son, is hiding out from some people he shouldn’t have crossed. Once Beck meets up with Travis the movie really begins. But where would a movie be without a quirky, twisted antagonist in the form of Christopher Walken’s Hatcher? Walken brings to the screen the hilarity we usually only get to see on his guest stints on SNL. Scott, brining himself away from the peanut-brained Stifler from American Wedding also delivers his usual charismatic performance as a novice-archeologist hunting for a rare find in the jungle.

The film is just one of those movies that comes along, usually out of no where, and broadsides you as a fun, witty, enjoyable piece of filmmaking that isn’t fishing for an Oscar, but isn’t settling for the lowest common denominator either. What you get is a cleverly put together buddy/action comedy (sans the buddy part) that features two of the hottest stars in Hollywood trekking through the Brazilian jungle. Being strung up in trees and violated by monkeys just adds to the fun.

The action scenes are what you pay for, and action is what you get. Beck, in the beginning, refuses to use guns, opting to only punish his victims with his fists, but in a hairy situation two shotguns make their appearance and the crowd went nuts. As I explained in my review of Underworld, it is rare that you see an audience get so involved in a movie that they cheer along with every gun blast, but it happened here.

The best reason I can determine for this interaction is The Rundown is an extremely fun movie. It won’t win any awards, it won’t even be nominated for them, but anyone who makes it to the movies this weekend, or next, to see this film will be pleasantly surprised they ever doubted the acting abilities and uber-coolness of Dwayne Johnson after his no-line portrayal of The Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns and his staring role in the film named after that character.

Truth be told The Rock makes this film enjoyable, and even if you aren’t one to watch wrestling (which I am not) you will still have fun with such a pop-culture icon as The Rock. The Rundown is one of the best reasons to go to the movies this fall.

It should be called “Sucks BALLiStic” because that is pretty much all it did for me. The real shame is I read some reviews before going in to see this mess of a movie and I was really hoping that people were just being jaded about the fact that Lucy Lui gets all of the good action roles, but, man was I wrong, this movie was just so stupid, after it was over I couldn’t help but want to take my own life rather than watch the credits and find out who made this questionable piece of trash.

I remember thinking to myself that sanding my penis off with an electric sander would have been more fun and entertaining, in fact, I would probably have enjoyed it more than the aptly titled Ballistic. Which, by the way, has the stupidest name this side of Ghost Ship.

Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is just as the name implies, it is a pairing of these two agents who are suppose to be real rivals of each other, the real problem comes from the fact that neither of them know who they are until like 40 minutes into the movie when they look each other up on the most poorly guarded government controlled server in the world. If a command like “GetPass[Word]” gets you into a government database this is a sorry country, but what would a movie be without wannabe crackers getting in to where they should be.

So they finally figure out who each other are, but the movie just isn’t equipped for that, you see director “Kaos” (who has the stupidest name in the history of film) only thought to give this movie about 20 minutes worth of meaningful plot, then the rest of it is just stuff happening because he wanted it to…right. So this big bad government guy wants Ecks (Banderas) dead because he is shagging up with his “dead” wife, and he wants Sever (Liu) dead because she stole his son who just happens to be carrying a piece of technology that can give a person a heart attack with the push of a button. How original, these guys must have watched an episode of “The X-Files.”

The problem is that they mini-mechanical little spider-type thing seems so post-production that I think they just added it to give the movie another excuse to blow up more and more stuff. I was surprised when I heard this movie had an R rating, there is nothing here that I haven’t seen worse in PG-13 movies. There seems to be some debate as to what a good movie is these days.

Acting is horribly done. Lucy Liu looks like she just got ripped off at Keanu Reeves’ garage sale and Antonio Banderas looks like he woke up from underneath his trailer.

With a movie like this, which has seen delays due to massive editing in post production, and seen countless other movies pull off it’s plot better and less stupid, it just feels so right to show some spite. Walking out during the retro-80’s love ballad was bad enough, but when I thought that there were others this weekend that had to go through such turmoil I cringed and said to myself,

“I want my six bucks back.”

David Spade will have a lot more time on his hands now that his sitcom, Just Shoot Me, has meet the wrath of the cancellation man. Still, Spade has a sharp tongue and a friend, Adam Sandler, who has ties all over the place with his Happy Madison production company

Dickie Roberts is a former child actor starring in a show called The Glimmer Gang and is best known for his infamous catch phrase, “This is nucking futs!”, but after his show is canceled he is left high and dry without his mother who left him. Now 30 years later Dickie hears about a role in a new Rob Reiner film from his poker buddies (composed of various former child stars). Dickie goes to meet Reiner, who says he would be perfect for the role, but having never experienced childhood he doesn’t believe Dickie has the emotional capacity (and baggage) to do well in the role. So Dickie gets the great idea of hiring a family and treating him like a kid for a month so he can get the research material he needs to land the role.

The family he moves in with is comprised of a neglectful husband, George, who wants to use Dickie to help promote his used car dealership, Grace, the mom who can’t stick up for herself. They also have two children who want nothing to do with Dickie. Things get interesting when Dickie’s girlfriend NAME (Alyssa Milano) comes back after being “kidnapped” hitchhiking in the beginning of the film to add a new foil to the normal life he has settled in to.

Dickie Roberts suffers from the same genre curse that most of Sandler’s movies had, they slowly wane in the jokes halfway through and then become focuses on the story elements from then on. The problem here is the story elements are never nearly enough to support the entire film, as they are paper thin to begin with. Although Jon Lovitz does kick up the humor a bit as Sidney, Dickie’s agent.

The story itself is by the book as well. Dickie moves in, faces opposition from the kids, who label him “stranger danger,” and ends up earning the respect of the kids and helping them out in their personal lives. Dickie also helps Grace stick up for herself against prudish, bible-thumping neighbors who you would just like to punch and kick to the curb, but they move out because of a “hare” raising incident with a rabbit. (Sorry)

As a comedy the film is lacking in the laughs, as described above, but as a fun little movie that tells a thin story that actually has you intrigued, and makes you laugh every couple of minutes, Dickie Roberts is a great little film. Spade is in no way up to par with his hilarious antics seen in Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, or on Saturday Night Live, but he does bring personality to the film and his sharp wit is unparalleled once he gets going. It won’t win any Oscars, but do you think they were trying to?