Imagine a world where the haves ignore and exploit the have-nots. Gee, some stretch, you say. Imagine it with zombies, then.

For horror buffs, this one's a — pardon me — no-brainer: the long-awaited new zombie flick from the man who invented horror's most popular subgenre. For normal humans, the fourth installment in George A. Romero's series stands apart from the ranks of Romero's numerous imitators and remakers who have saturated a generation of pop culture, in a couple of ways: liberal, unrepentant doses of social commentary; and gore, meant to jolt you out of smooth, thoughtless consumption.

The rules have been firmly in place since "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968: The dead rise up, and with a hunger for human flesh. The people they kill turn into zombies. And anyone who just gets bitten is infected and turns into one of them in hours or days.

Movie review

Showtimes and trailer

"George A. Romero's Land of the Dead," with Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento and John Leguizamo. Written and directed by George A. Romero. 92 minutes. Rated R for pervasive strong violence and gore, language, brief sexuality and some drug use. Several theaters.

But now there's a new wrinkle: The undead "walkers" have begun to show an ability to learn and communicate with each other. Riley (Simon Baker, "The Guardian") notices this on his final supply-scavenging run leading the crew of a heavily armed tank-bus dubbed the Dead Reckoning. Its owner, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), is the scotch-swilling corporate tyrant who runs Fiddler's Green, a fortified luxury outpost whose residents are distracted by material comforts from the horror that's overtaken the outside world.

The have-nots are the humans who subsist in the ghetto outside the exclusive community, as well as the zombies. Some zombies are chained in a club where the decadent pose for photos with them. Others are hung upside-down and plastered with targets for practice.

It's that sight that makes a big zombie (Eugene Clark, billed as "Big Daddy") howl in outrage. More intelligent than the others, he becomes a zombie leader, leading them in a cannibalistic march on Fiddler's Green. He even empowers a female zombie by handing her the gun of a fallen human.

Meanwhile, Kaufman has dispatched a reluctant Riley with a team to recover the hijacked Dead Reckoning from crew member Cholo (John Leguizamo), enraged at the discovery that Fiddler's Green is too exclusive for him. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," Kaufman proclaims.

Chew on this irony: It's taken the success of "28 Days Later," the remake of Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," the comedy "Shaun of the Dead," the "Resident Evil" and "House of the Dead" video games, and numerous comic books to get Romero the juice to make this movie — 20 years after his previous installment. So Romero has transformed from near-invisibility in Hollywood to a respected elder statesman with his name in the title.

"Land" does feel less substantial than its predecessors at a scant 92 minutes, and at this late date of zombie-saturation, it's just not as shockingly groundbreaking as "Night" or 1978's "Dawn."

But its novelty and nerve are the work of the master showing those feeding on his body of work how this zombie thing is done.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com