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This listless big-screen blow-up of the Sega video game reduces horror genre conventions to banal clichés. Start with the five good-looking and painfully vapid posers who are stranded on an island where "the rave of the year" is supposed to go down but no one’s in sight. (Clue to the clueless; your buddies have all been chomped up by an army of flesh-eating zombies and you’re next.) Then there are the lascivious few who bare their breasts only to suffer coitus interruptus via disembowelment. The zombies, as the insipid back story informs us, are the minions of an evil Spanish conquistador, and to make sure the human hors d’œuvre have some fire power to drag out their fate (and the movie), the boat captain (Jürgen Prochnow picking up a paycheck) who ferries them out happens to be a gun runner as well. Director Uwe Boll performs his task like a video-game designer; bombastic carnage dominates, the plot’s a mere device, and every time a character dies, the screen turns game-over red. It doesn’t help that the no-name actors give flat, porn-star-worthy performances. Only Kira Clavell as the Asian rave dancer turned kung-fu-kicking terminator stands out.
BY TOM MEEK
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