I AM ZOMBIE, HEAR ME ROAR

REVIEWED - LAND OF THE DEAD: FEW entities in US popular culture provide a more comprehensive measure of the state of the nation than what has now become George Romero's Dead tetralogy.

Since 1968, when we were offered the US as a house under siege in Night of the Living Dead, the director has returned once a decade or so to encourage his living dead to do the things Americans were then doing.

Now it appears they are cowering in fear behind gates and in towers as those who, to quote President Bush, "envy our way of life" mass outside (unless, of course, they are part of those massing). Land of the Dead, though still successful as an epic horror shocker, is as politically charged as any genre film you will see this decade.

Humanity is now divided into three social strata: a pampered elite living safely in secure sky-scrapers; an underclass getting by on the streets; and the lumbering, though evolving, undead. Prime among the upper classes is Kaufman, an oily bully played, with hints of Donald Rumsfeld, by an uncharacteristically restrained Dennis Hopper.

When Kaufman has a falling out with Cholo (John Leguizamo), one of his proletarian underlings, the disaffected ingrate steals a hugely fortified armoured vehicle and heads into zombie territory. Kaufman hires handsome Riley (Simon Baker) to get it back.

The plot is more reminiscent of the sub-Fordian strutting of John Carpenter's work than earlier Romero pictures, but it is really little more than a vehicle for the aggressively broad satire. As ever, the sight of the zombies pathetically going about the tasks that defined them when living is funny, touching and disturbing. However, something has changed.

In the previous pictures Romero, a left-winger from the old-school, made a point of having an African-American among his heroes (an unusual move in 1968). In Land of the Dead the most prominent black character is an emerging leader from the zombie, erm, community. Dismayed by the attacks on his fellow dead folk, Big Daddy, as he is listed in the credits, leads a ferocious assault on those luxuriating in the tower.

A call to revolution? A warning against insurrection? A comment on civil wars already in progress? Whatever your view, Land of the Dead is delightfully incendiary stuff.