Here it comes: rough, raw, furious, hilarious, disgusting, disgusted, dripping bloody guts – a great American movie. “George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead” does more than resurrect corpses; it revivifies the moribund practice of smart, subversive, sensationally entertaining pop cinema. Mr. Romero’s triumphant return to the genre he immortalized is tougher than “Batman Begins,” slyer than “Bewitched,” shrewder than “Crash,” and more inclusive than “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” It figuratively bites the head off everything in sight.

Fear not, horror aficionados, it does so literally as well. As befits zombie flick perfection, “Land of the Dead” is deliciously revolting. Limbs are gnawed, torsos munched, fingernails are torn like soda-can pop-tops. Entrails spew. Faces explode. In one memorably nasty attack, a zombie plunges his arm down a victim’s throat, distending his mouth like a rubber chicken, and pulls out a gloopy organ. A navel-piercing is chomped off and spat out like the pit of an overripe fruit. There is an encyclopedic survey of decapitation strategies.

As everyone knows, to kill a zombie you must destroy the brain or sever the head, breaking what remains of the mind/body connection. They tend to creep no faster than drool, so, given the proper armament, this isn’t too difficult. (Good riddance to the swift neo-zombies in “28 Days Later” and the lousy “Dawn of the Dead” remake. They may move fast, but their directors are intellectual slugs next to the master.)

Throughout their “Night” and into their “Dawn,” the zombie brain was fixated on a single thought: how to satisfy its perverse, parodic appetite. Break of “Day” saw the first stirrings of complex thought. Now, the ascendancy complete, the blip of zombie consciousness has quickened.

“EAT” screams the sign of an obsolete diner in Uniontown, our entry point to “Land of the Dead.” Sheathed in swirls of silver mist, the undead lumber in the indigo night. Suddenly, the sky lights with fireworks. Once launched to celebrate a nation’s patriotism, they are now used to distract the populace, who gawk slack-jawed (or lack-jawed) at the shiny display. In an epochal leap of mind, a hulking black zombie (Eugene Clark) turns his lifeless gaze away from the sky.

He has learned to equate this spectacle with annihilation; the first evolutionary domino has been tipped. From the depths of his rotting chest gurgles a primitive warning to his companions. He picks up a gun. In a matter of moments, the dominant species on earth has learned logic, solidarity, language, and revenge. EAT has given way to KILL, and “Land of the Dead” races forward with its exhilarating meld of plot to thought.

The fireworks have been deployed by a squad of mercenaries led by Riley (Simon Baker), his slow-witted sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy), and Cholo (John Leguizamo), a friendly (for the moment) rival. Secured in a tank-like super vehicle dubbed Dead Reckoning, they’ve ventured into Uniontown with a three-part agenda: gather supplies; massacre zombies; slip in the subtext.

“Nice shooting,” says Charlie, after Riley blows the skull of a “stench.” “No, it’s good shooting,” he rebuts; “there’s no such thing as nice shooting.” These two could be cowboys in a Howard Hawks Western. Riley is a typical Romero protagonist, which is to say an antidote to sham Hollywood heroism: loyal, sympathetic, unpretentious, anti-macho, reluctant. His goal is emblematic of the movie’s caustic liberalism: Do as much good as possible, but once conditions in America become completely intolerable, escape to the greener pastures of … Canada.

Newly enlightened, Big Daddy has a different goal: feast on the body of Fiddler’s Green, the sleek, self-contained refuge of the ruling class. Part apartment tower, part shopping mall, the vacuum-sealed Green (“Where life goes on!”) is fortified by drawbridges and electric fences. Completing the “Metropolis” schematic, working-class shantytowns and red-light districts cluster, miserably, at the base. Lording over it all is the rapacious Kaufman, a corporate baddie played by Dennis Hopper – a luscious irony.

Cholo has long done Kaufman’s dirty work (“taking out the trash”), but after he’s refused a spot on the Fiddler’s Green waiting list, he takes off in Dead Reckoning and blackmails the complex with a missile launch. (“If he doesn’t pay I’ll do jihad on his ass.”) Kaufman hires Riley to get back the vehicle by any means necessary. (“We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”) But Riley, of course, has plans of his own.

“Land of the Dead” cuts between this retrieval narrative and the inexorable march of the zombies toward Fiddler’s Green. Maximizing his relatively small budget and boundless imagination, Mr. Romero fashions a palpable pulp universe and commands its every inch. His direction is lean, supple, vivid, propulsive, ruthlessly gripping from first frame to last. Like David Cronenberg’s forthcoming masterpiece “A History of Violence,” the allegorical dimension hums through impeccable genre engineering.

It’s the subtext that will keep you talking long after the shock wears off. Uniontown, the ironic fireworks, Fiddler’s Green, and Cholo as blowback barely scratch the surface of this splendidly ferocious jeremiad. “I don’t care about love,” Cholo sneers as he ransacks a liquor store, “all I care about is money.” The line is no sooner out of this mouth than a zombie lunges for his greedy heart.

Mr. Romero has never been a subtle social analyst. His value resides in the force of his illustration, the brute impact of his metaphors. It doesn’t take a genius to see the deleterious effects of rampant consumerism, but it took a special talent to formulate “Dawn of the Dead’s” definitive image: the zombie siege of an abandoned shopping mall. Less remarked upon but just as trenchant was that film’s destruction of mock bourgeoisie by a nihilistic biker gang, the detritus of a wrecked utopian counterculture. Never underestimate Mr. Romero’s appetite for irony and paradox.

“Land of the Dead” is a swifter, more polished film than its predecessors. It doesn’t have the gritty grandeur of “Night,” the magnificent structure of “Dawn,” or the admirable idiosyncrasies of “Day,” but it moves with a confidence, verve, and wit of its own. Hand in hand with tremendous speed comes a more scattershot patterning of the allegory. Ultimately the devil isn’t in the details, but right there on-screen, blunt as can be, gorging on human flesh. The zombie is a shape of humanity debased, drained of all civilizing energies. He isn’t a creature come to hurt us; he is us. In his great zombie films, including this one, Mr. Romero reckons with that harsh idea, then drives it home with unparalleled flair.