"Zombies ate my brain." That's a good quote for anyone involved in Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis to use as an excuse.

Necropolis certainly isn't the worst zombie movie I've seen lately, but true to its Sci-Fi Channel roots, it hangs in the balance between mediocre and banal. (That's a fine line, you know.)

The movie begins predictably with a nefarious visit to a secret lab called Hybra Tech (I like to think of it as a hybrid between Office Space's Inatech and Resident Evil's Umbrella Corporation), which has its fingers in every pie from toxic waste disposal, military weapon-making, and snack food packaging. A Starship Troopers-like faux commercial plays, touting Hybra Tech as the leader in anti-zombie serum, keeping the world safe for over a decade. But Hybra Tech is playing both sides of the court — they're also doing illegal testing on human subjects using a poisonous, zombie-making gas called Trioxin 5.

Cut to a typical American neighborhood, where a group of typical teen stereotypes (black guy, tough guy, smart girl with glasses, braggart, foreign kid with bad accent, level-headed unlikely hero, and so on) live, work and play. In fact, they play endless in the beginning of the film… the scenes showing them riding their motorcycles are like a less self-indulgent Easy Rider meets a Hotwheels commercial.

If you haven't lapsed into a coma by now, your interest might be piqued for a little while when one of the boys, Zeke, suffers from a stunt-riding accident and is sent to the hospital. His frantic friends are told he has died, but they soon figure he's really been sent to Hybra Tech for zombie experimentation. Zoinks! In true Scooby Doo fashion (without the comedy), the team goes into action (without the action).

Standing in their way are — duh — zombies, and Uncle Charlie (Peter Coyote), a mad but expressionless scientist hellbent on turning the world's population into brain-munching zombies.

Aside from atrocious acting, bad direction and an appalling script, zombie fans in particular will likely be disappointed by the lack of rules (and still further by the abandonment of all the was sacred in previous Return of the Living Dead films).

If you're holding out hope for nudity or gore, the joke's on you. No nudity (personally, I don't care about that but then, I am not in the zombie-genre's prime demographic) and very little gore or violence. There is a somewhat amusing (though probably unintentionally funny) scene involving a pair of rat-roasting bums that results in some blood spatter, but that's where the creativity begins and ends in Necropolis.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson