Films: House of the Dead (2003), House of the Dead 2-Dead Aim (2005)
Alias: Various, notably Castillo Sermano
Type: Man-Made/Mutant
Location: Haunted home/Forest/Swamp/Civilized Area
Height/Weight: That of average humans.
Affiliation: Evil
Summary: In all the kingdom of the living, there is no more reviled genre of film than the video game adaptation. For some reason, Hollywood seems to go braindead upon having to bear the responsibility of being faithful to an art medium many have yet to accept. It's better than it used to be these days, but those days...brrrrr...
History: Long ago, the evil Spanish priest Castillo Sermano went full-on mad scientist in a not-so-futile quest for immortality. He got kicked off the mainland for it, and after murdering everyone on the ship taking him away, he settled at Isla de Mort, a deserted island off the coast of Seattle. Using whatever dead bodies he could find and after bringing the neighbors to their knees, he began to tamper with creation, and proceeded to make an entire army's worth of zombies to inhabit the place and kill off intruders. He also began to graft other's parts onto himself to preserve his own life. Now, some teenagers have gone land ho...
Notable Kills: Nothing special.
Final Fate: Most of the zombies on the island are shot, stabbed, and blown up in no particular order. Castillo himself is decapitated in the end, his still-alive head smushed under a heel so that he dies for good. Then it's revealed that one of the survivors is a relative of the first game's central antagonist, Dr. Roy Curien. Then a sequel happened that ditched the house for typical zombie outbreak city fare, for all the good that did.
Powers/Abilities: Castillo can survive any attack, and has achieved immortality.
Weakness: Anything conventional, though Castillo cannot function without his brain intact.
Scariness Factor: 2-Castillo is literally the only being with any semblance of eeriness, looking like a truly villainous pale patchwork of a man. Unfortunately, in spite of some of the grotesqueness of his minions, the whole affair is bogged down by over-the-top action, the zombies dropping like flies, and...well...THEY USE GODDAMN FOOTAGE FROM THE ORIGINAL ARCADE GAME AD NAUSEUM DURING FIGHT SCENES!!! There's cutting corners, and then there's THAT malarkey!
Trivia: -In case you haven't noticed, this was the first video game adaptation cursed upon us by Uwe Boll, a notoriously awful German filmmaker with an ego the size of Jupiter and a propensity to challenge his critics to legitimate one-on-one wrestling matches. Nowadays, he's an old coot who could never hope to get any more projects off the ground, and is currently spouting nonsense (and we do mean incomprehensible NONSENSE) in the review sections on Letterboxd about how terrible modern movies are.
-For some reason, Boll found it in his blackened heart to make a "Funny Version" of the first film. No, it isn't a sign of self-awareness. It was just an excuse to make a DVD commentary in which he mouths off about how great he is, and how nothing is ever his fault. We can only assume he did this while completely drunk. But what's scarier? The idea that he was, or wasn't?
