*spoiler* Bigger scares in House Party II

Rating: 3/10 (20 March 2002)

I recently read a first draft for this movie by George Romero, and I can't understand why they discarded what he put together. A much better script, with a genuine sense of drama and hopelessness. Probably why they didn't use it.
Now, I have never played the game (and that should not be a requirement. If it is, you need to hire another writer) so I cannot say if it's true to the game or not. But then I don't really care if it does or not. I'm interested in what sort of movie the studio produced. Is it scary? Can folks act? Does it make sense? Is the ending a standard movie cliche? Resident Evil fails on all these points.
I won't bother going into the errors with their bio-toxin lab. (If you can't figure out on your own that the lab would NOT run off the same air ducts as the rest of the facility, then you won't understand the rest of the movie's problems. Go watch Ghosts of Mars and brace yourself for the surprise ending you'll never ever see coming. Honest.) The scene continuity is terrible. Folks are surrounded by zombies with no way out, then next scene they're safely out of the way. What happened? How'd they get out? Guess Paul Anderson wrote himself into a corner. Frankly, he does that a lot. Getting in and out of the lab appears so darn easy you have to wonder why they didn't send in the janitor to reboot the system while he's mopping the floor.
The biggest hole is why the computer simply didn't TELL someone that the virus had escaped, why this is a Very Bad Thing. But since there's an antidote, it's not really that bad, is it? How about shutting down the facility entrances, notifying folks in charge, and then giving them a shout of the green stuff before you go killing everyone? Must be a software error. Darn that Windows 2000!
Aren't we all getting tired of spotting the survivors when the movie starts? Could we at least have someone else survive for a change? Would really be so difficult to not film the ending of `Guess what-it's not over yet! Bet you didn't see THAT coming!' Umm, yes, we did. About an hour ago. It's such a standard ending now you'd think they teach it to film students.
Not much to see here, and very little to get excited about. Standard pulp fare for the masses.