Well, I'll tell ya. I saw this thing in the theater and found it almost tolerable, at least up to the point where Jürgen blows himself up... although part of the fun was mentally whining over all the things I hated about this movie. I thought I would write them down later, after the DVD came out. But I couldn't, because sitting through the movie again on DVD was impossible. It's been a while since I even attempted that, so I'm just gonna wing the comments (she says, as though she ever does anything else).
In fact, the DVD was more interesting because of the special features, from which I learned that the filmmakers were quite proud of themselves for this effort. They were proud because making a video-game-based gross-out slasher zombie flick with no redeeming merit whatsoever was their precise goal, and they almost suceeded. The failure - and I don't think they know this - was putting Jürgen and Ellie Cornell in it. Ellie was to HOUSE OF THE DEAD as Gene Hackman was to THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, and I hope she had some nice person to rub her feet at the end of the day. I recall at least one of her lines being quoted in a review as a sample of the bad dialog in this flick, but I didn't notice it in the movie because she delivered it so well. Her level of credibility in this impossible and utterly thankless role was way out of place, but it gave us something to cling to whenever Jürgen wasn't onscreen. Thanks, Ellie! Clever distraction.
Jürgen was just having a good time and spreading whatever fun there was to be had out of this thing. It was a cool part, anyway, aside from the context. He was a boat captain running a smuggling operation who takes these idiot kids to the world's biggest rave on a zombie-infested island. The smuggling comes in handy later when he reveals a stash of automatic weapons and dynamite. After that, he shoots up a lot of zombies, gets bitten on the arm, shoots up a lot more zombies, gets his leg hurt, and then blows up some zombies along with himself. I liked him in it because had attitude, and was entertainingly unfazed by the zombies. When he first sees them, they're climbing onto his boat in the dark. He has no idea who they are or what's going on. He turns around, sees one, and automatically shoots it without even changing his expression. He never looks scared or even startled (that's okay, neither were we). That's one tough bastard there!
I hated all the young actors in this at first. Then the two most annoying ones were killed off early, and the others got a lot better after that. For the DVD version, the worst attempt at a character-development scene was edited out; I'm not sure what it was supposed to accomplish originally, but its main effect was to make you hate all the characters a lot and wish your movie ticket had been cheaper. The other advantage to removing it was that its absence caused Jürgen to show up a lot sooner.
The bottom line is that it was made by a bunch of guys suffering from severely arrested development. I have met 11-year-old boys who could make a better zombie movie than this, given the same budget.