Here’s an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser; albeit, a crowd-pleaser with lots of blood spewing, limb-chewing, and bone breaking – but really, why would you see a movie called Zombieland if you didn’t want to see that?

Here’s a horror film that acknowledges how ridiculous it is by depicting a group of eight-year-old zombie girls before the opening credits; and a comedy that, by casting Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role, quickly establishes an enjoyably quirky tone, and maintains it by adding Abigail Breslin as a shotgun-toting 12-year-old and Woody Harrelson (in a terrific performance) as the movie’s resident badass.

Here’s a genre movie with a coherent plot – Breslin and Emma Stone, playing nervy sisters, push the thin but logical story along – and which pays attention to its characters, giving each of them solid backstories and respectable screentime. (My biggest complaint with Zombieland is that while the sisters are much stronger than typical damsels in distress, they nonetheless wind up being damsels in distress).

Here’s an action movie with an extended, glorious climax at an amusement park, with all the standbys (roller coaster, tilt-a-whirl, drop mechanism) used in exactly the way you’d expect; plus characters using really big guns, and firing them with a generous helping of one-liners.

Zombieland is that rare film which knowingly (rather that ignorantly) prefers to play into its conventions rather than create new ones, parading its influences on both the front and back of its blood-splattered t-shirt (in one scene a pair of characters actually sit down to watch Ghostbusters). What is wrong with that? When it’s done this well, nothing.

Horror comedy is a tough sell with audiences, and even the gold standard of this decade, Shaun of the Dead, barely raked in $13 million at the North American box office. However, I must confess I did not particularly like Shaun of the Dead. It was a great movie, but the “happy” (of sorts) ending was so dark I had forgotten what I was laughing at by the end.

I had no such problems with Zombieland. While it has few genuine scares, and much of it coasts on warm-hearted good humour rather than laugh-out-loud laughter, I can’t remember the last time I consistently heard an audience gasp, laugh, or clap at the same moments during a film.
What a wonderful year we’re having when I can say Zombieland is the best pop entertainment to hit theatres since District 9.

Related posts:

1. Movie Review: The Social Network
2. Movie Review: ‘Takers’
3. Movie Review: Bride Wars

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