"Dawn of the Dead" has seen better days.

	George Romero, Pittsburgh-based director of the original "Dawn of the Dead," sits in his home/office with the film's poster above his head. (John Heller, Post-Gazette)

The high-octane update of the 1978 zombie fest offers gore galore, some truly creepy images, occasionally wicked humor and impressive performances for a genre where acting usually is secondary.

Beyond its strong cast, though, the new "Dawn" lacks the bite of George Romero's original, a low-budget affair that served up real drama and sharp satire of American consumer culture as side dishes to its victims' entrails. Like almost all of Romero's films, it was shot in and around Pittsburgh.

Director Zack Snyder's "Dawn of the Dead" mainly is a run-of-the-mill action flick packed with loud gunfire and louder explosions. The movie piles on a bigger group of central characters than the original, so the filmmakers have more real people to zombify, but you end up knowing and caring less about each person.

The presence of Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer and especially Sarah Polley elevates expectations. If an indie-film queen such as Polley would choose "Dawn of the Dead" as her first action gambit, it must be something special, right?

		"Dawn of the Dead" Rating: R for pervasive strong horror violence and gore, language and sexuality. Starring: Ving Rhames, Mekhi Phifer, Sarah Polley Director: Zack Snyder

Wrong. While Polley and her co-stars are in on the zombie gag wholeheartedly, their earnest performances never quite lift "Dawn of the Dead" to fresh horror heights.

Polley's Ana, a nurse who lives in a tranquil Wisconsin housing tract, awakens one morning to find the world in chaos from a plague of flesh-munching zombies, whose victims inevitably die, then return as living ghouls themselves.

Ana hooks up with a group of survivors -- somber policeman Kenneth (Rhames), street hood Andre (Phifer) and his pregnant wife, heroic salesman Michael (Jake Weber) and others who barricade themselves in a shopping mall while zombies congregate outside hoping to sample the leg-of-living-human lunch special inside.

Unlike Romero's eerily lumbering monsters, which his heroes could sidestep and outrun, Snyder's zombies are fast, with the ferocity of rabid dogs. Nimble zombies would be a decent innovation to this horror subgenre if it had not already been done better and scarier in last year's "28 Days Later."

Because he's dealing with zombie mobs instead of humans, Snyder has leeway to snuff many of his walking dead in morbidly funny ways.

Screenwriter James Gunn offers a few darkly amusing exchanges and sequences, including a shooting gallery in which survivors on rooftops single out zombies that resemble celebrities -- Jay Leno, Burt Reynolds, Rosie O'Donnell -- to blow away.

"Is everyone there dead?" Rhames' Kenneth asks about a military base where survivor Steve (Ty Burrell) has just come from.

"Dead-ish," Steve replies.

The humor becomes so wisecracking that it undermines the horror. Even with a big budget and vastly improved zombie makeup, the remake simply is not that frightening, especially compared to the freakish chills of Romero's version, itself a follow-up to the stark 1968 classic "Night of the Living Dead."

With shoestring finances, Romero created enduring images of zombies scuffling brainlessly through the Monroeville Mall, a perverse commentary on our retail society. The remake presents zombie hordes as something akin to a screaming rave or sports crowd, a thin metaphor by comparison.

Romero's makeup artist, Tom Savini, also crafted far more memorably horrific images of zombie's feeding on humans than the remake manages. Part of the original's sick charm was Romero's willingness to go to gory places a studio movie would never dare.

Watch for cameos among the movie's TV news coverage of the zombie invasion by Savini as a local sheriff and two of Romero's original stars, Scott Reiniger as a military boss and Ken Foree as an evangelist.