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'Gifts' a fresh, gutsy approach to zombie apocalypse movies

"The Girl With All the Gifts" finds a fresh, gutsy approach to the zombie virus apocalypse movie, a film genre so shopworn and recycled that recent incarnations, such as the "Resident Evil" films, don't even bother with press screenings.

In Colm McCarthy's tentative feature directorial debut "Gifts," 14 minutes pass before we discover why a group of normal-looking, well-spoken children are strapped in wheelchairs under armed guards while attending classroom instruction in a rural British military bunker.

Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) gives sympathetic teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) a brutal reminder of why she should never get too close to her favorite student, 10-year-old Melanie (charismatic newcomer Sennia Nanua). He lets a boy sniff his forearm.

The boy lapses into a seizure, violently chomping at the air with his teeth, thrusting and convulsing to get out of the wheelchair. Then, other students lapse into carnal fits.

Hard-nosed military scientist Dr. Caldwell (a nicely obsessed Glenn Close, armed with a macho military buzz-cut) needs these offspring of humans and infected "Hungries" for experiments to stop the disease that has turned most of the planet into primal, flesh-eating creepozoids.

When the Hungries overrun the military base, she, Helen, Melanie, Sgt. Parks and two soldiers (who might as well be wearing red shirts in a "Star Trek" TV episode) escape in a military truck on a last-ditch quest to save humanity.

Anyone who has read Richard Matheson's vampire virus novel "I am Legend" - the source material for "The Last Man on Earth" (1964), "The Omega Man" (1971) and "I am Legend" (2007) - might appreciate how British screenwriter Mike Carey, working from his own 2014 novel, suggests a similar premise involving the expiration of the human race's time on Earth.

"Gifts" lacks the social and political subtext of a George Romero zombie opus. McCarthy settles for a straightforward survival tale that's never as bone-chillingly scary as it should be, or as dramatically insightful as it could be.

In an impressive performance, Nanua shows us the raging internal conflict between the polite, intelligent student she wants to be, and the ravenous primal-driven animal she lapses into without warning.

Regrettably, McCarthy doesn't quite know how to make Carey's dry humor work. Take Sgt. Parks' warning to Melanie when she goes outside: "Don't play with anybody who looks dead!"

He delivers the line as if he were a Hungrie stand-up comic.

“The Girl With All the Gifts”

★ ★ ★

Starring: Sennia Nanua, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close, Paddy Considine

Directed by: Colm McCarthy

Other: A Saban Films release. Rated R for language, violence. 110 minutes

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