UNDEAD
R, 100 mins.

For audiences who find George Romero’s “Land of the Dead” too taxing or who are worried about subliminal messages about Scientology in Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” here comes “Undead,” a low budget Australian gorefest. Directed, produced, written, and with computer effects by the Spierig Brothers, this homemade horror-comedy sports an impressive wall-to-wall score, and lots of inventive violences. It goes down like a bagful of your favorite greasy junk food, leaving little behind but some cheesy residue stuck to your fingertips.

After establishing an Outback Steakhouse’s worth of cartoonish small-town grotesques, the Brothers Spierig pepper their rural community with a meteor shower that causes zombies to rise up and attack the living. A band of survivors fights back, before UFOs suddenly scream down at the eleventh hour to thoroughly scramble the already hectic proceedings. At this point the story careens off the highway and slams through a jungle of alien abductions, giant walls studded with spikes, gorgeous shots of nighttime skies clotted with suspended abductees, zombie fish, and Peter Jackson-style slash-stick.

A “Fangoria”-reading fanboy’s after-school project executed with astonishing slickness, “Undead” would be a remarkable artifact if it had stayed on the horror convention circuit. In the cold light of the commercial marketplace, however, the seams are showing.

“Land of the Dead” and “War of the Worlds” are likewise predicated on poorly thought-out ideas – reanimated corpses with decomposed digestive systems eating human flesh? Underground UFOs and giant robotic tripods? They rely on big-budget thrills to divert attention from their ridiculous premises. “Undead,” to its credit, takes a baker’s dozen of ridiculous premises, half-bakes them into a goopy cream pie, and splats you right in the kisser.

-Grady Hendrix

REBOUND
PG, 87 mins.

“Rebound” represents Martin Lawrence’s attempt to refashion himself into a child-friendly entertainer, a la Eddie Murphy. All he’s actually managed to do is create a new form of child abuse.

One look into Mr. Lawrence’s glazed eyes shows that exposure to his own career has left him totally unhinged. Mr. Lawrence plays Coach Roy, a college basketball coach who has been banned from the NCBA for being a poor role model. Through a series of mind-numbingly idiotic circumstances, he winds up coaching an inept 8th-grade basketball team at a middle school headed by a haggard Megan Mullally, who does her “Will and Grace” shtick so automatically here that she may not even remember having been in this film.

The basketball team has only five members, and Mr. Lawrence’s coaching contribution is to add two more. This proves so inspirational that the team goes on a winning streak and takes the state championship. In the process, Coach Roy rediscovers his love of the game and hooks up with a hottie mommy. The cast includes Patrick Warburton and Horatio Sanz (“Saturday Night Live”), both of whom exercise a ninja-like restraint that keeps them from delivering anything even remotely resembling a joke.

There is a lot to be said for comedy that appeals to the lowest common denominator, but “Rebound” is so pathetic that the most you can say in its defense is that it isn’t an active carcinogen.

-Grady Hendrix.

MODIGLIANI
R, 128 mins.

In “Modigliani,” Andy Garcia plays the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, major figure in European Modernism, tubercular party animal, and fixture of the Montparnasse cafe circuit in the early part of the 20th century. Scottish director Mick Davis has likened 1919 Paris to “the rock ‘n’ roll of that time.” And if a portrait of the artist as a proto-David Lee Roth appeals, then “Modigliani” is for you.

As Mr. Garcia plays him, Modigliani is the kind of monster of rock who swaggers into a cafe and immediately elicits sighs, murmurs, and spontaneous applause. In an early scene, he’s introduced to a wealthy New York art dealer described by a lover as having “a lot of money, but no taste.” When the dealer expresses an interest in his work, the artist flings the money in his face and stalks out of the room.

The story loosely spans the last three years of the artist’s life, from his first meeting with the young art student Jeanne Hebuterne (played by Elsa Zylberstein, a swan-necked French actress who bears a striking resemblance to a Modigliani portrait) to their deaths in 1920. It was a hectic period, which Mr. Davis loosely scrambles and compresses for the sake of expediency. The couple produced a daughter, his first solo show was shut down by the police, he expired, and Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second, flung herself from a window the following day.

Apparently surmising this was not quite drama enough for a movie, Mr. Davis has devoted a large portion of the film to a mostly invented rivalry between Modigliani and Picasso, who go mano a mano for the top cash prize in the “Salon des Artistes.” In between bouts of drinking and getting up in the grill of Jeanne’s father, the artist prepares for his big face-off with the famous Spaniard, played by Omid Djalili as a petulant buffoon in a bad rug.

Mr. Davis takes pains to infuse the solitary and introspective act of painting with as much testosterone as possible, a move that culminates in an unfortunate painting-as-sex montage set to a techno-chorale, in which Rivera, Utrillo, Soutine, and Modigliani climax simultaneously. Deeply silly and tendentious, “Modigliani” is a sincere attempt to construct a myth from shopworn notions about artistic genius.

-Los Angeles Times