Undead (2003): C-

There’s barely a brainwave in Undead, a tongue-in-cheek zombie-E.T. hybrid sculpted in the stale Evil Dead/Dead Alive/Shaun of the Dead mold. In the Australian outback, a local beauty queen, a gun-crazy former alien abductee and a group of similarly annoying Aussies confront a zombie invasion (sparked by a meteor shower) that increasingly appears to have been orchestrated by extraterrestrials. That the outer spacemen don’t, upon finding Earth populated by such morons, simply abandon the planet is certainly more puzzling than trying to figure out which classic movies directors Michael and Peter Spierig adore, as the filmmakers copy countless horror and sci-fi movies (including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Dawn of the Dead) without a shred of cleverness or humor. After a steady stream of familiar slow-motion camera tricks, DOA one-liners, and gun battles in which the walking dead are felled by – you guessed it! – bullets to the brain, the film rockets into the stupefying stratosphere with a finale in which captive people are suspended motionless in the clouds. I can’t say why otherworldly visitors would hang people out to dry in the atmosphere as a means of studying them. But I can say that the most fitting fate for this third-rate zombie flick would be a six-feet-under burial.