{alltv} AMC's gory 'Walking Dead' is one killer of a zombie show

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There's life in them living dead yet.

Ever since George Romero's Night of the Living Dead reanimated zombie movies with a bracing shot of flesh-munching gore, the unliving have continually moved among us. They're incredibly versatile: They can do comedy or horror, play it camp or straight, and come as humans or animals. And best of all, you can kill them without remorse because they're already, you know, dead.

So what approach does Green Mile writer Frank Darabont (who also directed Sunday's extended 90-minute premiere) take in his six-episode adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic-book series? He lets you know in the opening scene, as our on-edge hero — seemingly the only living being for miles around — runs across a little blond zombie girl and blows her brains out. Which we see in stomach-churning detail.

In other words, it ain't for the squeamish.

Our shooter is Rick Grimes (British actor Andrew Lincoln), a Kentucky cop who wakes up from a gunshot-induced coma to discover the world has gone through a zombie apocalypse.

Even after three episodes, we still don't have an explanation, but we do learn the rules of the dead road fairly quickly: Don't let them bite or scratch you, and if you want to kill them, aim for the head. Preferably with a shovel, because a gunshot calls them like a dinner bell.

Rick fears he's alone, but he soon meets new people and acquires a new goal: to find his missing wife and son and get them to safety in Atlanta, where the government set up a refugee camp. And as he searches, the show morphs — or tries to — into a drama about a group of disparate people (some of them a bit too cardboard-ish examples of social or political types) struggling to survive.

Taken as a fright fest, pure and simple, Dead succeeds admirably well, capturing the terror and confusion of waking up in a world where you've gone from person to endangered-species zombie food overnight. You're supposed to be uneasy and, often, grossed out (it's incredibly graphic and gory by TV standards). And chances are you will be.

Yet for all its attempts to stress the living over the life-challenged, and for all the effort Lincoln puts into creating a full-bodied character, Dead is not a genre-buster in the same sense that Mad Menand Breaking Bad were. (Though when it comes to AMC series, even the corpses in Dead show more life than Rubicon.) It will be a hard sell for some viewers, but for people who love monster movies or zombie comic books, Dead may be just their cup of blood.

We'll see if there are enough of them to keep Dead alive.

The Walking Dead
AMC, Sunday, 10 ET/PT
* * * out of four