(Boll and Hearst universe)
Professor Curien is the father and murderer of Rudy Curien and an antagonist of House of the Dead 2. Loosely based off of Dr. Curien from the video game series, he was played by the late Sid Haig.
History[]
In the film, he is portrayed as a sadistic and deranged college professor, introduced by hitting a student with a car, then with a crowbar to ensure her death. He then steals her corpse, taking it back to his secret lab, where he's been experimenting with revival of the dead. Upon his son Rudy's return from the Isla Del Muerte incident, he learns of Rudy's discovery of a blood compound created for immortality by a man who had lived for centuries before Rudy and his partner killed him. Rudy infected Alicia to keep her alive after being stabbed through the heart. Learning of this, Prof. Curien kills Rudy and kidnaps Alicia for interrogation.
Some time later, she turns into a zombie, and Curien keeps her locked in her cell, running tests on her. He takes some of her blood, and injects it into the body of the student he killed, which he believes doesn't work, angering him. When he turns around, the body is gone and while he celebrates his success, the reanimated student attacks and kills him, ending the Curien family's experiments, until he himself reanimates and escapes into the city, attacking people and spreading the infection, leading the A.M.S. to run an operation to find the source of the first generation plague, retrieve a blood sample, and develop a cure, which they fail to do as the city falls to chaos. Curien has last been seen wandering the streets of the city frantically searching for a living victim to attack, breathing heavily and rapidly as he does so in the post-credits scene of the film.
Background[]
During creation of the film, the director firmly declared that he wanted this film to be as different from the original Uwe Boll film as possible, hoping to create a film closer to the games themselves. As such, the story was written to be loosely based on the first game rather than be mainly a party movie with flashes of the game. Part of this was the creation of Curien. In the games, Curien is a mad scientist who developed the creatures in the games, and in the end, it leads to his ultimate downfall only for him to become one of the creatures himself in the third game. With this in mind, the film version follows roughly that same path with some differences. In the film, he is a college professor instead of the head of the DBR Corporation. He also never develops any major boss creatures from the games such as The Magician or Hangedman. Rather than save his son Daniel, he kills his son Rudy for information on the immortality genome.