his latest release for fans of both video games and horror movies, two categories currently enjoying a spike in popularity, attempts to bring to life the characters and conflicts from a well-known Sega title. Like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil, House of the Dead is intended to have broad-based appeal, including moviegoers who have never played the game. Familiarity with Dead's universe might enhance the experience.
A group of five teenagers arrive too late to catch a ferry to an offshore island, where word has it that a rave is on that night. When they miss the boat, they cut a deal with the captain of a small cargo ship bound for the very same island. Soon Greg, Simon and their girlfriends are ready to shove off, unconcerned that they're bound for a place called the Isle of the Dead, that the ship is named the Lazarus and that the first mate is none other than Ron Howard's spooky brother Clint, who usually shows up in the sleaziest of B movies. And never mind that Capt. Kirk (yes, that's his name) defies a pair of law-enforcement types who want to search the suspicious cargo in the hold. After all, it's getting late, and who wants to miss a rave?
Once they hit the island, there's no sign of a rave, only a Harvard medical student, a red-white-and-blue superheroine named Liberty and hordes of zombie moshers waiting to nosh. The law arrives, still intent on searching Capt. Kirk's cargo, which conveniently turns out to be an arsenal of semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles and grenades. The group's survival trek leads them through a graveyard, a haunted house and an underground tunnel, all teeming with the hungry dead. By the last reel, hundreds of zombies—and, despite their superior firepower, most of the humans—have been reduced to blood-spattered oatmeal.
Romero's world—not!
"Doesn't any of this bother you?"
That's the question Simon's ex asks calmly, once they make it into the moss-covered house, having just blown away more shamblers than there are in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. She should know better.
The med student explains that they're in "Romero's world," meaning the one created by George Romero in his classic zombie trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead), a holy grail for horror-movie buffs. Rudy seems to know Romero's universe, but not well enough to remember its most famous line, the one about killing the brain if you want to kill the ghoul. Hundreds of rounds are wasted on nonvital but splattery areas like shoulders, stomachs and chest cavities before enough bullets, blades, shovels and explosives strike enough cranial matter to hold the reanimated ravers at bay. The bloody finish sees two shell-shocked survivors on their way back to the mainland, where the game promises to reset and begin again, possibly on yet another level of irreality.
It's all pretty silly and not interesting enough to be fun. At first glance, the technical credits appear slick, but closer scrutiny seems to reveal an entirely post-looped soundtrack and videography transferred to film, blown up and cropped to simulate a widescreen format for theaters. It should have gone straight to VHS and DVD. The actors are pleasant enough to watch. Howard is ludicrously over the top as always, and it's nice to see Jurgen Prochnow working again, though it's depressing that he's still trapped in, or at least on, Das Boot. But this one is an insult to horror fans and film fans alike, all of whom require some minimal semblance of story, motivation, characterization, drama, suspense and believability. It would be easy to call House of the Dead a total failure, were it not for an almost cute early reversal on the opening of Jaws, along with what Joe Bob Briggs would count as several hundred decapitations, disembowelments and exploding heads, plus four naked breasts. Unfortunately, if you're more than 12 years old, that's not enough, in this universe or any other.
