The zombie movie, bless its dead but somehow still-beating heart, which seems to surface sporadically throughout the dark history of horror, generally reflects something of its social and political context. Its original central concept of reanimated corpses laboring in the sugar plantations of Haiti, apparently born from vague legends of voodoo, not only generated a powerful sense of fright and revulsion, but also addressed some vision of economic injustice, the enslavement (and eventual revolt) of workers turned into unthinking automatons by the wealthy and privileged. That theme of social injustice and class struggle resonates in most of the great popular genres of the 1930s, including other sorts of horror flicks, gangster films, even musicals.

George Romero's seminal "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) resurrected the form and inspired a great many sequels, remakes, and imitations, including, for example, the recent "Planet Terror" and the British sleeper, "Shaun of the Dead." Now "28 Weeks Later," the sequel to the highly successful "28 Days Later" (2003), demonstrates that the zombie continues to haunt the imagination and whisper of the Zeitgeist.

In an on-screen paragraph the movie cites the events of its predecessor, in which a mysterious "rage virus" struck the United Kingdom, infecting the citizenry with a madness that drove them to kill and devour their friends and family. Now, the few survivors, rescued and later returned by American troops, inhabit a safe zone on the Isle of Dogs, in the Thames River in London, living under strict guard in a kind of benevolent martial law, protected from the ravaging hordes who still apparently roam the country in search of flesh.

The film concentrates the situation in the plight of two repatriated children, Karen (Emily Beecham) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton), reunited with their father (Robert Carlyle), who hid from the zombies with their mother (Catharine McCormack), whom he abandoned in panic. When they sneak out to visit their old home and find their mother still alive, a military physician (Amanda Walker), seeking an antidote or vaccine, tries to discover how she managed to survive the infection. In the usual manner of horror films of any kind, science cannot cope with the intervention of ignorance, in the person of the guilty and repentant Carlyle, who manages to precipitate the catastrophe we all saw coming - the resurgence of the virus and its consequent attack on the remaining survivors.

In keeping with contemporary fashion and the expectations of jaded audiences, "28 Weeks Later," like its predecessor, exhibits a thoroughly contemporary fascination with the careful and graphic presentation of gore. The movie simply overflows with blood, which pours from mouths and eyes, geysers from ruptured arteries, and splashes all over the scenery and the actors. In addition it features a good deal of mutilation and dismemberment across a landscape littered with corpses in various stages of putrefaction.

Also in keeping with the traditions of its genre, the picture suggests some inescapable parallels with the horrors of current international politics, with the Isle of Dogs representing a version of the infamous Green Zone in Baghdad, a secure enclave in the middle of absolute chaos, guarded by a trigger-happy military ready to shoot anything that moves. Unfortunately, however, the action tends to devolve into an endless series of pursuits and escapes, with howling hordes of zombies chasing screaming throngs of victims, often through locations too darkly lit to determine exactly who is chasing whom. The director constantly stages confusing battles in tight closeups to create an entirely artificial sense of action, unnecessarily faking a violence that might prove more intense in a clearer and subtler visualization.

As the initially exciting script deteriorates into mindless repetition, the film squanders not only the potential for thoughtful examination of its context, but also even the presentation of the kind of scary events horror fans should rightfully expect. Its perfunctory, downbeat ending suggests that the director and the writers simply ran out of gas. Sadly, yet another sequel probably lurks in the imaginations of the filmmakers, which may result in "28 Months" following "28 Weeks," a prospect ultimately scarier than the movie itself. 

"28 Weeks Later" (R), directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is now playing at area theaters.