Movie review: Zombieland

by John P. Meyer

Director Ruben Fleischer makes a big entertainment splash with his big screen feature film directing debut, Zombieland. It's a frenetically-paced, no-punches-pulled 80 minutes of unapologetic apocalyptic mayhem and imaginative zombie-killing action.

Plus, it's fun to look at, employing lots of intercut real time/super-slo-mo footage in the establishing shots, which describe for us how the world went to Hell in a handcart after a zombie virus spread rapidly around the planet.

In danger of typecasting himself as an actor who only appears in movies ending in "-land" is Jesse Eisenberg as Columbus, a guy who thinks he has this survival game figured out. He's got a set of rules to live by (literally) that includes things like "Cardio" (i.e., run faster than the varmints chasing you), "Be cautious of bathrooms" (which is a problem for him, thanks to irritable bowel syndrome), and "Double tap" (as in: shoot them twice). And he's about to add "Check the back seat" to that list -- if it wasn't there already.

Columbus has been traveling alone since he hot-footed it out of his college apartment in Austin, Texas with the intent of working his way back to his parents' house in Ohio. The hot-footing results from what starts out as a delightful encounter with his across-the-hall neighbor, a lovely young lady (Amber Heard) who's just escaped the clutches of a confrontational, unusually nimble street person; in the aftermath she requires some coddling. By way of cuddling.

But the delightfulness of the experience morphs into something markedly less delightful, forcing Columbus to flee for his life.

In the midst of his journey (armed with a break-open double-barrel shotgun and a ziplock bag of chips), Columbus encounters Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, giving his Texas drawl free rein). Tallahassee is an expert zombie slayer who -- though he has no set of rules -- nevertheless survives by dint of quick wit and quick draw.

He offers the kid a ride and the two make excellent progress -- impeded only by Tallahassee's craving for Hostess Twinkies, which gets them into a good deal of trouble in a grocery store full of the living dead. Yeah, the zombies themselves are dangerous, but the boys' real challenge comes in the form of two sisters (Emma Stone as Wichita and Abigail Breslin as Little Rock), who are living by their own hard-and-fast survival rules.

The remainder of the movie chronicles the progress of this motley crew as they make their way toward an amusement park that is rumored to be totally zombie-free. (Rumored by whom is one of those bothersome questions that it's simply best not to ask in terms of this sort of entertainment. So don't.) The end-of-world sets engineered by the film crew are remarkably well done, allowing one to go with the suspension-of-disbelief flow with nary a second thought: Interstate highways are realistically littered with crashed and abandoned vehicles; city streets have that genuine post-apocalypse aspect; Los Angeles actually does appear to be deserted. (How'd they do that?)

Nervous, hormonal Columbus quite naturally develops a serious letch for the deceptively doe-eyed Wichita, while Tallahassee sees something of his dear departed puppy dog in the precious, precocious Little Rock. That's about it in terms of character development, but I'm betting few will walk into a theater showing Zombieland in search of nuanced intellectual shadings.

There's an inspired semi-comical, cautionary-tale episode involving an overnight stopover at the Hollywood mansion of a legendary star whose initials are "BM." For my money, though, the highlight of the movie comes when Tallahassee locks himself into a metal mesh ticket booth on the midway and gears up for his own personal Little Big Horn. Unlike Custer, he's come to the battlefield with eyes wide open and loaded for bear. (If one could think of bear as being hunted with a pair of Colt .45 autos. Which one can't. But still.)

The thrill of seeing Zombieland in a theater full of people dressed as zombies (and, in several disturbing cases, acting like them) cannot be overstated. So I won't bother to try. All I can say is, I wish more audiences had this opportunity.

The video features a quartet of mildly-zombified performers from Fort Worth's Hangman's House of Horrors as they did their Thriller dance thing before the show. Notice how the glitching sound system fails to disturb their aplomb.

[NOTE that far more than four Thriller dancers will be involved on the evening of Oct. 24 (at 7:30 p.m.) when Hangman's sponsors "Thrill the World," during which hundreds of zombies will attempt to break the most-people-Thriller-dancing world record. NOTE ALSO that you could be one of them. For details go here.]