House of the Dead

The usual slasher-movie teens charter a boat to attend a rave in Washington's San Juan islands, find zombies there, and splatter their guts all over the place. House of the Dead shows early promise when the boat captain is the dude from Das Boot (Jürgen Prochnow) and the mate is the inimitably weird Clint Howard. Alas, things devolve from there. The movie includes frequent flashes from its video game inspiration, not that we need much reminding of the obvious source. Amongst the rotten dialogue, bad acting, and gratuitous topless scenes, there's one looooong shootout sequence in the middle of the picture that should be the main attraction for fans of this kind of thing. Otherwise, it's at the level of every other slasher movie, video game or no video game, in which stupid people do stupid things to keep themselves in harm's way. --Robert Horton