A group of teens hire a captain (Jürgen Prochnow) to take them on his boat to a rave on a mysterious island. Unfortunately, most of the party-goers have already been killed by zombies. Luckily, the captain has a chest of high caliber pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and hand weapons that they can all use to fight the horde.
Well, it’s nice to see a movie that knows its heritage (allowing me the convention that movies can “know” things). In this case, we’re talking video games. Now you may have thought that other films felt like a video game, or had video game violence, or had as little character development as a video game, but you’d be wrong. In House of the Dead (based on the video game of the same name), after an overlong introduction where it pretends to be a bad teen slasher, the characters are reintroduced by freezing the action, and having them, one by one, rotate with a weapon held at the ready. I felt I should use an arrow key to choose my character. Then, when someone dies, the action stops, the person, now standing in a dramatic, armed pose, rotates, and then the screen fades to red. “Please insert 2 quarters” really needed to pop up. Character can use any weapon they find perfectly (including throwing axes). They move from a graveyard to a main house room to a laboratory to an underground tunnel. All that was missing was text telling us that we’d just made the next level. And in case all that doesn’t make it clear, there is actual video game footage spliced in.
All this has a somewhat interesting effect. It is different, and I applaud the makers for not generating yet another standard zombie flick. The problem is that they didn’t end up with a film, but some new kind of entertainment that’s a spin-off of video games and has yet to be named. Too bad, because if this new diversion had a name, and some defining properties, I could figure out if House of the Dead was a good one. I’d be able to determine if the creators’ decisions made sense. They certainly don’t for a film.
The work (I don’t want to use the word “film”) starts with a group of interchangeable teens-about-to-turn-thirty hiring a German smuggler for a huge sum to take them to a rave on a deserted island, the mere mention of which frightens an overacting Clint Howard in a yellow raincoat. Now go back and re-read that sentence. Is there any amount of additional information that could make that reasonable? Does it help to know that several girls take off their tops as they search for new extremes for the word “gratuitous”? I didn’t think so. But don’t think I’m against the bare breasts—they are the only thing of any value in the opening.
Even in this movie-like section, the video game foundation is still strong. None of the characters show any emotion beyond mild interest in the disappearance, and death, of everyone on the island, including close friends. This is the kind of stoicism I’ve come to expect in a first-person shooter. Then all attempts at making a movie stop as the characters meet the zombies in the water and the weapons come out.
The sea of zombies is a pretty nice scene, shot well and filled with excitement. The march through the tunnel is enjoyable as well, in a watching-someone-else-play-a-game kind of way. For most of the rest of the time, I can’t say I was liking or disliking what I was seeing. Rather, I was astonished by it.
I did find it handy how they coded the girls for easy recognition. One black, one Asian, one blonde, one brunette, and one cop. I suppose they had names, but as they didn’t have personalities, the codes worked better. The males were a bit trickier to tell apart, so as a service, one wore a bandage on his face, so I could refer to them as the submarine commander, the bandage-guy, and the other one. Sticking a Mohawk on one would have worked better, but it was nice to have something.
If this pops up on your cable or satellite, I do recommend watching it just as a curiosity. It is certainly that.