Yours truly and an intrepid Manolith editor recently had an opportunity to check out a screening of Zombieland with about a hundred or so other zombie fans and what appeared to be a lot of people wandering in off the street. (It was in San Francisco, after all.) There was an Intel Developers conference down the street at the Moscone Center and it seemed like more than one of your stereotypical IT geeks hoofed it up the block to join us at the screening. Say what you will about the nerdy types, but there’s nothing better than watching a campy movie with a bunch of people who will really geek out about it. (Have you ever watched a horror movie with your Mom? Not much fun.)
OK, so the crowd was a mixed bag, but what about the movie?
First of all, full disclosure: I’m something of a zombie movie aficionado, so I might be a little biased when I say I really enjoyed it. My first reaction was to make an easy analogy: If Shaun of the Dead was The Office (BBC version, duh) with zombies, then Zombieland is on the level of Arrested Development, but with zombies. IMDB trivia tells me that director Ruben Fleischer set out to make Shaun of the Dead for an American audience and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that could have been absolutely awful. (Although, the cast of Two and a Half Men seems pretty lifeless already, and America loves that.) But he did a great job balancing the zombie gore that we all know and love with a lot of heart that gets the audience rooting for more than just another undead decapitation.
As with every zombie movie, Fleischer doesn’t waste too much time trying to explain what’s causing the outbreak and instead we’re thrown right into the story. (Which, again, is driven by the tried-and-true “We’ve got to get to the ____!” plot device.) In this case, all of our main characters are headed to different towns and in order to avoid becoming too friendly (you know, in case they have to shoot each other in the face) they simply refer to each other by their destinations. Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee, the appropriately rowdy redneck with all the ammo and an Escalade outfitted with a snowplow who picks up Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) walking along the freeway. These two make a great odd-couple: Tallahassee provides a host of creative zombie kills, while Columbus merely wants to stay alive by following his simple set of rules for survival in Zombieland (Which includes things like: “Always Buckle Up”).
En route, the pair meet Wichita (a smokin’, black-haired Emma Stone) and Little Rock, who pretty much round out the cast of living characters in the film aside from a few cutaways to hilarious “Zombie Kill of the Week” scenes and an incredible cameo that I will decline to mention further. (No spoilers here!) As I mentioned, the focus isn’t really on the destination or escaping the outbreak altogether, but rather we start to see how each person deals with a world turned completely inside-out. Columbus awkwardly navigates Zombieland only slightly better than Michael Cera got around New York in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (because that seems like a good comparison to make). Meanwhile Tallahassee heads straight for danger with guns blazing, spouting off ridiculous one-liners that make John McClane sound like he’s reading a recipe for cupcakes. Wichita is hot as hell, but she knows it and uses this to her advantage to get what she wants from the two male leads. Little Rock, the youngest, plays the Little Orphan Annie card to get others to do the work for her, but she can still handle a shotgun if she has to.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a truly great zombie flick if it didn’t include commentary on society at large. Romero used the mall to mock American consumerism and Shaun of the Dead pointed out that we’re all basically zombies floating through our boring lives. In Zombieland, however, everyone else is a braindead, walking corpse and our heroes have to figure out who they can trust to help them navigate the horde. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of “life-is-so-hard-for-middle-class-people” movies, but not a single one of them is as much fun as watching those problems represented by an undead clown or a fat, brain-hungry redneck who gets his head caved in.
All-in-all it’s a personal message wrapped up in a disgustingly fun package. Fans of Shaun of the Dead or even the video game Dead Rising will not be disappointed, but you don’t have to be a Romero-geek to love it to death. And that makes Zombieland the perfect movie to transition from the season of Summer blockbusters to the Fall Oscar-bait. It fits right in with the mid-October slasher films, but you also won’t leave the theater feeling dirty because you just watched a bunch of people get torn up in one of Jigsaw’s grimy warehouses; or guilty because – how many times can you really watch Michael Myers hack people up? And you can even bring your girlfriend to this one!
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