MOVIE REVIEW

A waste of time, zombies and plastic eyeglasses.

By Michael Ordoña, Special to The Times

"Night of the Living Dead 3D" is sure to make audiences scream — in frustration.

Even for ultra-low-budget, grade-Z horror movies, this is a truly incompetent film. No wonder it carries a disclaimer that George Romero, king of the zombies, had nothing to do with it.

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That doesn't stop the new edition from cannibalizing the original, resulting in food poisoning-like symptoms for the viewer.

The flesh-eaters in "3D" are the old-school, slow-as-embalming-fluid zombies, the ones you can run around and tickle without fear of a nibble.

Fortunately for them, the humans they stalk are idiots. These are folks with cellphones for whom calling the police when they're being chased by monsters is a low priority. They also like to stop what they're doing to carry on boring conversations.

The raison d'être for the new film is presumably the 3-D gimmick — also the best reason for its shunning. It's not just that the most imaginative use of the underwhelming technology is having a pot-smoking character offer the camera a joint, but the finished product is actually hard to watch. Throughout the showing I attended, viewers were fiddling with their red-blue glasses until a few gave up.

"Night of the Living Dead 3D" is as nimble and clever as its zombies. And that's not good.

MPAA rating: R for horror violence, gore, language, sexual content, nudity, drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. In selected theaters.