Movie Review — Zombieland

I am so bored with zombie movies (and comics, and…).  The creatures are so one note — “Brains!” — that the entire genre comes off that way.  Most of the variations seem to be just a tweaking of the details: zombie super-heroes (maybe even zombie super-heroes in space), zombies in a shopping mall, zombies at the North Pole.

(Wait, that was vampires at the North Pole, wasn’t it?  Brains, blood, who can keep them straight?  Not Anne Rice, for sure.)

Which should make it no surprise that somebody did a “funny zombies” movie.  The surprise is that Shaun of the Dead didn’t bore me.

Huh?  I’m writing about Zombieland?  Oh, the American funny zombie movie.  Right.

Okay, while Shaun of the Dead is shot through (and it keeps shambling forward, hah!) with British humor, Zombieland is thoroughly embedded in two standard aspects of American film: teen angst and guns.

Thoughts:

• There are certainly plot holes big enough for a zombie to poke its head through, as encapsulated here.
• Wonder how many of the zombie survival rules can be mapped to the Ferengi Rules of Acqusition?
• The movie characters and sets interacting with the titles: a grand tradition used abundantly by Heroes and going back to… beats me.  Johnny Dangerously used it in 1984.

Ultimately, though, only one thing was needed for me to approve of this film, and that’s Woody Harrelson’s character’s dislike of coconut — “I hate coconut.  Not the flavor, but the consistency.”  Amen.

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Updated on March 9, 2010