A Good Zombie Comedy Thriller

Rating: 8/10 (11 October 2009)

Watching freshman director Ruben Fleischer's audacious but entertaining lowbrow horror movie/road comedy "Zombieland" reminded me of author Max Brooks' tongue-in-cheek manual "Zombie Survival Guide" about surviving a zombie apocalypse. Brooks establishes the difference between "Solanum" zombies—zombies spawned by a virus--as opposed to voodoo zombies, along with helpful tips to outwit a zombie. Remember, zombies are reanimated corpses or a mindless human being. Despite their complete lack of intellect, zombies compensate with violent, uncontrollable behavior. For example, Brooks recommends that you keep your hair trimmed so a zombie cannot seize you by your locks and take a chunk out of you. Incidentally, the zombies in "Zombieland" qualify as "Solanum" zombies. Radioactive fall-out didn't create them like the zombies in director George Romeo's touchstone 1968 horror picture "Night of the Living Dead."
Scenarists Rhett Reese of "Clifford's Really Big Movie" and television scribe Paul Wernick have forged a formulaic, uneven two-star road picture. Nothing occurs here that you haven't seen in any other z-movie. Blood, gore, and guts constitute an integral part of the action, but "Zombieland" is rarely frightening. Think of it more as a young, steroid Woody Allen meets "The Road Warrior" in a Looney Tunes comedy about zombies run amok. Meanwhile, the scenarists' attention to characterization, dialogue and the humor ranks as four stars. A virulent strain of mad cow disease precipitated the zombie epidemic. A college student from Austin, Texas (Jesse Eisenberg of "The Hunting Party") has managed to survive the zombie holocaust. He is driving back to Columbus, Ohio, to visit his parents. The trouble is that he doesn't know if his parents are alive. Our protagonist is also somewhat of a modern-day, urban hermit who doesn't venture out that often and prefers to play video games.
As the narrator, he dictates his laundry list survival rules. First, 'cardio' heads the list. You've got to be faster on your feet than the zombies chasing you. Our narrator informs us that the fat humans were the first to die. Second, he advocates the 'double tap' rule. Shoot each zombie twice to make sure that zombie is kaput. Third, he warns us that restrooms have ceased to be havens of privacy. Somehow, zombies learned that they could corner their helpless prey in a toilet stall. Fourth, you must always wear seat belts, because you will survive a car collision and the zombies will not. Fleischer takes these first four rules and demonstrates each in the gas station/parking lot scene as our hero tries to elude three zombies. Fleischer renders each rule in visual text graphics like something out of "Fight Club."
Later, our hero meets an older guy in a Cadillac truck with a bulldozer scoop on the grille. The older guy agrees to give the kid a lift, but he doesn't want to know his name. Instead, they refer to themselves by their destinations. Columbus is going to see his parents, while Tallahassee is searching for the last Twinkie in America. They cruise the accident cluttered four-lanes of a destitute land until they run into two females. These gals are sisters, and Tallahassee nicknames them Wichita (Emma Stone of "Superbad") and the girl Little Rock (Abigail Breslin of "Signs"). No sooner have our heroes met the heroines than they pull a fast one on Columbus and Tallahassee and steal their truck and their arsenal. Predictably, our heroes go after them. Wichita and Little Rock are bound for a California amusement park called Pacific Playland where there are reportedly no zombies. You can guess what greets them when they wheel into Pacific Playland. Despite the overall predictable plot, "Zombieland" still serves up some thrills and chills.
Primarily, this movie succeeds as a release valve for anti-social behavior. The humans kill the zombies with no more thought to their demise than if they were playing a first-person, shooter video game. They destroy stores as if they were vandals. Having Bill Murry around, playing himself in a cameo, is simply genius. Woody Harrelson of "Natural Born Killers" and "Adventureland's" Jesse Eisenberg develop a rapport with each other that makes them seem believable despite their differences in age and intellect. People who cannot stomach the blood and gore of a standard zombie movie may not survive "Zombieland." Although the film carries an R-rating, director Ruben Fleischer doesn't try to gross you out like he could have. He shuns close-up shots of zombies dining on road kill. When he does show a road kill munching zombie, Fleischer relies on humor to underwhelm the horror.
The zombies of "Zombieland" are fairly typical. They attack fearlessly in mobs with nothing on their minds but killing people and gnawing the flesh from their bones. These zombies all appear basically alike. They are easy to spot since they are in some stage of physical decomposition, with rotting flesh, tarnished eyes, and gaping wounds. Unlike traditional "Night of the Living Dead" zombies, they can scramble across open ground like an aggressive football team. Zombies of the fleet feet variety first showed up in the 1980 Italian gore fest "Nightmare City." Fleischer films the first encounter between Columbus and Tallahassee as if he were shooting a Spaghetti western with the appropriate south-of-the-border favor music. The most suspense that he can milk out of the material is the climactic showdown in the amusement park when our heroines are trapped on a drop tower ride.