Arriving just in time to miss peak steampunk by a year or two is "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," a one-joke movie that is itself based on a one-joke book, Seth Grahame-Smith's 2009 mash-up of the 1813 Jane Austen novel with B-movie zombie horror.

Grahame-Smith's book is, as one wag put it, "more a concept than an actual novel." The entire joke is contained in its cover, which took a classical period portrait by Sir William Beechey and rendered its demure beauty as a half-rotten corpse. The 300-plus pages that follows are largely redundant. Eighty-five percent of it is about the manners and mores of courtship in 18th-century England, as in Austen's original novel (now conveniently in the public domain), but with bits of ninja and zombie action stitched in like some snarky fanboy's revenge on his 10th-grade English literature teacher.

Yes, we're all so postmodern now, and enjoying both high and low culture is hardly news. I can recommend Joe Wright's faithful "Pride and Prejudice" adaptation as readily as airhead Austen parody "Clueless" or zombie gut-muncher "Night of the Living Dead." In a sense, I am this movie's target audience, but I spent the entire two hours absolutely baffled as to what possible appeal this movie could hold for any viewer.