Rave drugs and beach parties – they’re going to make Zombies out of you; at least they would if you lived in the world of “Go Goa Gone”, Bollywood’s first-time Zombie-comedy.

Ideas can be infectious. And they can be deadly as well – especially when they turn up half-baked, sputtering dead half a mile or two before they reach their full potential. Case in point: Go Goa Gone is a patchy comedy, loosely molded around the paradox of Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland’s serious and parodist nature. Where Shawn and Zombieland succeeded with indistinct, at times daft, humour, Go Goa Gone, directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, stumbles, falls and literally becomes zombie-food.

Kunal Khemu (who plays Hardik), and his roomie Luv (Vir Das) are stoner wrecks. The latter has just dumped his long-time cheating girlfriend, while the former is unhappy with his metropolitan’s 9-to-5 grind. When their third roomie, the reserved straight-laced Bunny (Anand Tiwari) mentions a business meeting in Goa the slackers press-gang him to turn the trip into a mini-vacation. Here Luv meets Luna (Puja Gupta), a facebook friend, who tells them of a rave party allegedly held by the Russian mafia on a small offshore island. One half-baked song later, people turn into Zombies as a side-effect of an untested rave drug and the movie turns amateurish for all the wrong reasons.

While the bulk of the goras and goris (and some Indians) turn into the undead, Hardik and co. flee from place to place until they bump into Boris (Saif Ali Khan), a Russian Mafioso whose mean-introductory line is: “I kill dead people!”

Boris (and his beefed-up Ruskie Right-hand) have the right idea: Kill the dead; the others, hardly mean street zombie-killers, have a harder time offing the reanimated. Ergo: a lot of girly screaming.

Go Goa Gone, despite a short running time and an insistence to cram genre-stereotypes, never really clicks after the cast leave Mumbai’s “drudgery”. Sure, there are some genuine rib-tickling moments – especially a scene where Hardik cries a puddle remembering an ex (Soha Ali Khan in a flashback cameo). For the most part though, the screenplay written by Mr. Nidimoru, Mr. DK and Sita Menon becomes a tired, unoriginal mess that runs around in circles with a cast you don’t really feel that bad for in the first place.

As a rule of thumb, those surviving the zombie plague learn from the experience. They become better people. These people…well, they’d look better as zombie-food. ‘Nuff said.

Starring: Saif Ali Khan, Kunal Khemu, Vir Das, Anand Tiwari and Puja Gupta. Directed by Raj Nidimoru, Krishna D.K. Produced by Saif Ali Khan, Dinesh Vijan and Sunil Lulla. Written by Mr. Nidimoru, Mr. D.K. and Sita Menon (story by Mr. Nidimoru, Mr. DK and Haris Baloch). Go Goa Gone is rated A – for profanities, bad make-up and the assertion that metropolitan life is all about the ease of a one-night stand.