Grade: D-

If the words “directed by Garry Marshall” aren’t enough to scare you off “Georgia Rule,” surely the addition of “and starring Lindsay Lohan” should do the trick. Marshall hasn’t made a movie that even approached tolerability in years, and Lohan’s track record isn’t much better. But together they outdo their individual faux pas with a seriocomic take on a dysfunctional family that’s a berserk combination of tasteless comedy and even more tasteless melodrama.

The initial premise has something in common with “Secondhand Lions,” though Mark Andrus’ script is much less genial. Well-to-do San Francisco mom Lilly (Felicity Huffman) brings her rebellious teen daughter Rachel (Lohan) to stay the summer with her estranged mother Georgia (Jane Fonda) in a small Idaho town. All three are troubled characters. Rachel is nasty-tongued, demanding and inconsiderate, and acts the part of a young seductress. Lilly is harried and, we learn, an alcoholic. And Georgia is outwardly brusque and rigid, though she has a soft side for the two kids she hosts—Sam (Dylan McLaughlin) and Ethan (Zachary Gordon)—while their parents are at work.

Lilly quickly decamps, leaving Georgia and Lilly, who’ve barely met before, to bond as best they can. Georgia doesn’t help matters by forcing the girl to work as a receptionist to kindly Doc Simon (Dermot Mulroney), a veterinarian who also tends to human folk, and who just happens to be the fellow Rachel forced to give her a ride into town when her mom dumped her on the road—as well as, we later learn, a one-time boyfriend of Lilly’s. And Rachel shows her troubled side by coming on not only to Simon, but to hunky field hand Harlan (Garrett Hedlund), a sweet-tempered Mormon who finds the loose girl’s attractions irresistible—something that makes him feel unfaithful to his intended, a petite thing off at a nearby college.

But all that becomes secondary to Rachel’s big revelation to Georgia—that she’d been molested by her stepfather Arnold (Cary Elwes), a wealthy lawyer, a fact that perhaps explains her promiscuity and generally bad attitude and brings a distraught Lilly back into the picture, desperate to determine whether her daughter or her husband is lying. It isn’t long before she’s back on the sauce in a big way, and Georgia has to become a real mother again as well as a new grandma.

The narrative elements here are bad enough individually, but collectively their awfulness increases exponentially. On the one hand Marshall tries to make “Georgia Rule” a sometimes comedy, though some of the gags (like having tyke Sam attracted to Rachel in a most revealing way) are really distasteful. But at other points it’s an over-the-top soap opera, especially in the plot threads involving Lilly. And then, of course, the whole molestation theme takes us into the realm of grim cautionary tale and (since Rachel recants her accusation) mean-spirited “he-said-she-said” melodrama. As if that weren’t enough, the picture’s references to Mormonism reek of caricature, not just in terms of Harlan and his insipid girlfriend, but her friends, who take it upon themselves to keep a close watch on him after his confession in some of the movie’s most deplorably farcical moments.

The cast is helpless in such circumstances. The haggard-looking Fonda and the skanky-acting Lohan are both unbearably shrill, though in different ways, and Huffman plays most of her scenes as though she were in a state of shock, which may have resulted from reading the script. Mulroney and Hedlund coast on good-natured niceness, but casting directors should certainly learn one major lesson from the picture: if you’re looking for somebody who can convincingly play a guy who may or may not be a sleazeball, Cary Elwes is not your man. Ambiguity is beyond his range. Of course, nobody would fare well under Marshall’s sledgehammer direction, which pounds home every obvious point while letting the rest of the movie limp along lackadaisically, including the scenes involving his usual good-luck charm, Hector Elizondo, playing a Basque (!) with a hernia. (Well, at least he has a reason to look pained.) On the technical side, the movie barely passes muster, even with cinematography by the skilled Karl Walter Lindenlaub. The editing by Bruce Green and Tara Timpone is especially inept; great chunks of the story seem to have been mislaid along the way. (Not that one would want them restored.) And John Debney’s score is as obvious as Marshall’s direction.

It took a kind of crazy courage to mix such disparate elements in a single movie. But in the event it proves to have been a foolhardy choice.

D

One doesn’t expect a great deal of intelligence in a film about bloodthirsty folk, infected by a “rage virus,” who chase the unaffected with the intent of chomping them to bits. But this sequel to the hit “28 Days Later” is based on a premise, and filled with characters, that are a lot dumber than they needed to be.

The idea is that after 28 weeks, the ghouls who nearly depopulated England have themselves died off of starvation, and a NATO-authorized force of American troops have arrived to seal off a section of London where those free of the ailment can begin resettlement. One of those brought to Dog’s Island in the British capital is Don (Robert Carlyle), who—as we see in a prologue—ran away like a coward from the cottage where he was holed up in the original assault, leaving his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) to die at the jaws of the marauders, along with all the other people who’d taken shelter in the remote house. Happily his children, Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) and Tammy (Imogen Poots), were away on a school trip on the continent when the epidemic struck, and now they’re returned from Spain to join their Dad in a high-rise apartment in the so-called “green zone” that none of the residents are supposed to leave (the rest of the metropolis still filled with rotting corpses, untouched debris and unknown dangers).

Now you might immediately ask: why would one begin resettlement plan in such a desolate urban jungle, rather than in some secluded area that could be easily controlled? Why, for the sake of “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” visuals of abandoned streets and empty landmarks, of course. There’s no other reasonable explanation.

Of course, once the premise is set, things have to go wrong, very wrong. So it’s not surprising that the U.S. army’s security in London’s post-infection “green zone” is no better than that in Baghdad’s post-invasion one. Not only do the troops under the command of General Stone (Idris Elba), including regular fella sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner), allow Andy and Tammy to escape the protected area and make their way back to their old London house, but they then bring back to the zone not only the kids, but Alice—who had unaccountably made her way back home after being abandoned by Don (no explanation of how she escaped certain death is ever given) and has been living in hiding there ever since (on what she subsisted is never indicated, either).

And that’s not all: they leave Alice completely alone in the medical unit, strapped to a gurney, and then don’t notice that Don sneaks in to see her. Naturally, bad stuff results, since she’s a carrier of the infection though unaffected by it herself, and she immediately turns hubby into a raving ghoul, starting the whole process over again. Of course, the military forces, try as they might to contain the renewed outbreak by killing all the re-settlers, can’t get them all, so soon there are bands of the infected running about the city and chasing our heroes—Andy, Tammy, Doyle and Scarlet (Rose Byrne), a doctor who’s trying to save the children and get them out of the country in the hope that their blood will carry their mother’s immunity to the plague and serve to develop an antidote to it. Needless to say, the now-gruesome Don turns up whenever the script demands a shock to menace the kids and their protectors, and in his absence General Stone’s troops can be relied on to show up and threaten them. As if all that weren’t enough, there’s a “twist” ending that couldn’t be more obvious—or more threatening in terms of a third installment.

What’s unclear about all this is why we should have the slightest concern for Andy and Tammy at all, since they’re the nitwits who causes all the trouble by using their first day back in England to break the rules and thereby bring about the renewal of the epidemic. Of course if they hadn’t done that, there would have been no movie, but that would have been a blessing.

“28 Weeks Later” was co-written and directed by Juan Carlo Fresnadillo, best known for the offbeat but mediocre “Intacto,” and unfortunately his helming is no better than his scripting. Pretty much everything in the picture is a mindless blur, the visual cacophony accentuated by jittery, hand-held cinematography by Enrique Chediak that also overuses extreme close-ups and crazy-quilt editing that, together with the use of strobe lighting effects (and some particularly ugly “Blair Witch”-like night vision sequences), makes for a hundred minutes that irritate the eyes something fierce. (There’s plenty of bloodletting, of course, but the murkiness makes it less offensive than it might have been.) One’s ears are tested, too, by the blaring music and sound effects.

As to the cast, youngsters Muggleton and Poots come off best, especially the former, whose tight-jawed imperturbability is sometimes reminiscent of Michael Baldwin in the original “Phantasm.” (Can’t you just imagine “Muggleton and Poots” as a bad vaudeville act at an English music hall, or the name of a London boot shop?) Playing an ordinary Joe, Renner doesn’t fulfill the promise of “Dahmer,” though he does have a nifty farewell scene, and Byrne is annoyingly stiff as the femme medico. As for Carlyle, he plays things too broadly even before he turns, and afterward he chews up everything in sight literally as well as figuratively.

There’s a ready audience for “28 Weeks Later,” so it will probably do well. But even for a zombie-ghoul movie, its idiocy is beyond the pale.