Zombies follow predictable plotting

By Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times

'House of the Dead' R, for pervasive violence/gore, foul language and nudity 92 minutes

Dave Parker and Mark A. Altman's serviceable plot finds five University of Washington students missing a party boat for a spring-break rave on a remote island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

They soon have reason to be sorry that they plied fishing boat captain Victor Kirk (Juergen Prochnow) and his goofy, jittery first mate (Clint Howard) with enough cash to take them to the island — it's not called La Isla de Morte for nothing.

La Isla, it seems, was the refuge of a Spanish pirate (David Palffy) with a passion for eternal life and enough knowledge of alchemy to transform the native population into zombies. Inside the pirate's mansion, the students find three people who are the only survivors of a zombie attack on the rave.

The question swiftly becomes whether anyone will survive to tell what has happened.

None of this is exactly riveting or even very scary, so predictable is the material. But the film's young actors, headed by Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, give this hokum all they've got, with the seasoned Prochnow, star of the classic "Das Boot," and the reliably colorful Howard providing ballast.

Parker and Altman aren't bad at structure, but their dialogue includes such deathless lines as "There must be some scientific explanation for all this" and "We can't stay here for long, those creatures are everywhere!"

"House of the Dead," which surely benefits from David Richardson's dynamic editing, is no great shakes, but it does reveal a concern for decent craftsmanship.