Yet more zombies, but dead on arrival

July 08, 2005|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

They come shambling forward, arms outstretched, eyes a putrescent, unseeing white, spitting regurgitated parts at our feet. They are the young filmmakers who would be zombie mavens, and their numbers are legion. In ''Undead," sadly, rigor mortis has set in.

God knows the Spierig brothers, Michael and Peter, have precedent on their side. Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson are just two of the many directors who have leapt from low-budget gore-a-go-go beginnings (the ''Evil Dead" trilogy and ''Dead Alive," respectively) to Hollywood fame and fortune -- and, like the Spierigs, Jackson's from Down Under. (All right, they're Australian and he's from New Zealand, but their collective bathwater still drains clockwise.) ''28 Days Later" and ''Shaun of the Dead" have primed audiences for a new strain of zombie with accents and (severed) tongues in cheek. And here's George Romero, the man who first essayed the notion of spleen-munching corpses kicking down your front door, with the new ''Land of the Dead."

All for naught. ''Undead" has high spirits but a fatally low pulse rate, and its shoestring enthusiasms are undone by confused plotting, off-the-rack special effects, and acting so amateurish that it's difficult to separate the living from the living dead. What's missing, above all, is that gleeful governing intelligence that gives all those other movies a spark of life.

To be sure, the denizens of the tiny outback burg of Berkeley are as dumb as they come even before shards of a comet bring an alien viral strain into their midst (quite literally, in the case of one unlucky softball player who finds himself with a brand-new strike zone). The afflicted are immediately transformed into a growling, entrail-hungry mob, and the few survivors hightail it to -- where else? -- a basement.

These include Rene (Felicity Mason), a local beauty queen intelligent enough to have been leaving town anyway, a bush pilot (Rob Jenkins) and his pregnant wife (Lisa Cunningham), the town's macho constable (Dirk Hunter) and his plucky new deputy (Emma Randall), and Marion (Mungo McKay), the town oddball who wears a low-slung gator-hunter hat and wields his triple-barreled shotgun with slow-motion aplomb. Marion is supposed to be a goof on Clint Eastwood in his spaghetti Western heyday, but since McKay looks like a chubby kid with a spirit-gum beard, the comparison doesn't really stick. (And the shotgun's a lift from ''Evil Dead," even if the Spierigs would call it an hommage.)