The Walking Dead (1995)

The zombie-horror-film title is the most dramatic feature of this meandering combat melodrama, in which five Marines, all but one of them African-American, skulk through the Vietnam jungles after a devastating ambush in an attempt to hook up with a second platoon. The one performer who holds the screen is comedian Eddie Griffin, who looks like Heckle and Jeckle and snarls out his lines like a grunt Snoop Doggy Dogg. Griffin's sinuous-pimp hip-hop style is completely out of period, but at least he's a comic live wire. The rest of the major characters are earnestly dull; even the gifted Joe Morton, as the platoon's hard-hearted sergeant, seems to turn to stone in front of the camera. The combat scenes, which look as if they were shot in the same swampy wasteland where Ed Wood filmed his octopus battles, are interspersed with civilian-life flashbacks that might have been snipped from a sampler reel of failed TV pilots.

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