Somehow, Uwe Boll returned: Although the infamous German director has been mostly out of the bottom-tier video game movie adaptation business for roughly a decade at this point—having transitioned mostly into non-licensed action movies as game studios have gotten at least a little more picky about who they hand their precious characters to—he’s still getting up to some of his old imitative tricks. For instance: Asking why his much-maligned 2003 horror adaptation The House Of The Dead can’t get an XX Years Later version of itself, just like Danny Boyle’s 28 ____ Later films so recently did.
This is per THR, which notes that Boll’s recently launched 23 Years Later—Castle Of The Dead is not an official sequel to House Of The Dead, given that Sega has wised up at least a bit about who it’ll just hand its franchises to. (More on that in a second.) But it’s certainly intended to be a spiritual follow-up to Boll’s zombie rave nonsense, including the slightly shocking news that the director is bringing back stars Ona Grauer and Jonathan Cherry, a level of respect for continuity we don’t typically associate with his oeuvre.
As for motivations, it sounds like Boll’s old pal Spite might be playing a healthy part. See, Sega recently announced that it was tapping Paul W.S. Anderson to make a new official movie version of the zombie shooter franchise, which appears to have stuck in Boll’s craw a bit. He has, after all, spent his whole career having his schlocky adaptations of video games unfavorably compared to Anderson’s, most especially the latter’s Resident Evil movies, which achieve a level of campy fun and overall watchability that stuff like Bloodrayne never could. Boll went so far as to launch an attack (non-boxing-based) on Anderson alongside news of his unofficial Dead sequel, saying, “When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House Of The Dead, I immediately knew that it will be a soulless CGI orgy. And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory and handmade.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.