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SOURCE-Lionsgate DVD
When it came out in the early 2000s I heard how bad House of the Dead(the movie) was and avoided it. A few years later while looking at a site loaded with rips of screener dvds I saw House of the Dead 2 was out. Grabbed that rip burnt it to a disc and either never watched it or saw it and don't remember watching it.
Skip ahead to one weekend earlier this year. Was at my secret junkstore,where dvds/blu rays are 50 cents. Saw HotD2 and took a chance.
Now pretty sure I have played the second House of the Dead video game,and this movie appears to not folow the plot of that game.
Sid Haig has one of the surviving Hyper Sapians,AKA Zombie,from the first film. And this causes an outbreak of zombies on a college campus up near Seattle.
Which means a Special Forces team is sent in to contain the zombies and prevent it from getting worse.Standard zombie movie tropes of course.
Thankfully the cast and a few minor things make this stand out a bit from the glut of DTV zombie movies that came out in the mid 2000s.
One change,and one I liked,was it isn't just getting bit by a zombie that will change you into one. If a mosquito bites a zombie the people they bite afterwards will become infected. Neat idea I haven't seen before in movies. Wish they did a bit more with this.
Then this cast. It is packed with people I know from various tv shows. People like Victoria Pratt Who I knew from Mutant X. And Nadine Velazquez who most will know as Katalina on My Name is Earl.
So while the budget ain't high, the combo of new ideas and a cast that is use to working with a smaller budget helps boost this movie over similar zombie films from the same era.
Sure this isn't nothing mindblowing.And it aint one I would say you should buy,unless you find it cheap like I did. For a DTV sequel to a film considered one of the worst horror films of the past 40 years this ain't bad.
House of the Dead II gets a C-.
