Zombieland (2009): A Deathly, Ha-Ha-Horrifying Delight

Zombieland is as clear-cut, ludicrous and short as its title suggests. It is a cinematic marriage of horror and comedy, tells the tale of a small band of wanderers surviving amid a global infection where people eat people, and clocks in at just 82 minutes. It comes loaded with elements to please fanboys, such as smart-alecky characters and quips, twisted pop-culture references (at one point, toughie Woody Harrelson sobs, “I haven’t cried this much since Titanic…”) and a bit of a video-game dynamic, yet rarely devolves into purely juvenile fare the way Twilight did. There are even a handful of cool tunes (including classic ditties from Metallica and The Velvet Underground), a superb cameo that comes to an uproarious conclusion, and even a bonus scene tucked at the end of the end credits. (Actor-writer Mike White, of Chuck & Buck and The School of Rock, delivers this 2009 film’s other, uncredited cameo.)
Zombieland has some horrible imagery and a handful of supposedly emotional moments, yet its main agenda is to be funny as hell. The flick not only shows characters who seem smarter than those in earlier zombie movies, it manages to retain said agenda almost without letup—unlike 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, which oddly turned sympathetic halfway through. Zombieland’s humor itself is not of the contrived, har-har kind that, for all their enjoyability, were typical of the Airplane and Naked Gun movies but rather of the life’s-like-that type relished via, say, 2009’s (500) Days of Summer.
And Zombieland’s makers were smart enough to retain the zombie genre’s allegorical flavor—in this case, of how other people make life hell. This is right-out dramatized in the hilarious opening credits, which features a slo-mo succession of mundane activities and Kodak moments (including a wedding reception) fouled up by flesh-eating fiends. (Slow motion tends to be an annoyance yet in Zombieland, despite its repeated use, it comes off being as meaningful as leisurely mastication.)
One primary trait of this movie is the rattling off of “rules” in surviving a wasteland where zombies are the dominant species, one of which is to “Enjoy the little things.” There’s also a running joke where Harrelson’s character longs not for wine, women or the world but a Hostess Twinkie, that sugary, puffy concoction which, in a Zombieland world, is hard to come by. These twin points are repeatedly stressed throughout the flick, almost to an irritating point, but it does help drive home the apparent moral of the story and the film’s very reason for being: In a world where madness lurks at every turn, a small burst of pleasure such as Zombieland is what everyone needs to get by.

Zombieland
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
Screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and 199 zombies