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Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 25, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Even if you prefer slow zombies to the fast kind and the serious undead to funny ghouls, you’re likely to get a kick out of Zombieland (screening at Austin, TX’s currently running Fantastic Fest and opening nationwide next Friday). Like many of the better horror/comedies, it doesn’t so much poke fun at the genre as plunk a group of humorous characters down into a dire situation and let ’er rip.
Our guide through an America overtaken by the walking dead is a young man who will come to be called Columbus (more on the nomenclature in a moment), played by Jesse Eisenberg. A former shut-in who was never comfortable around others, he has found himself in an existence not much more devoid of human contact than it was before—aside from the hordes of former living that are now trying to eat him. Having adopted a series of rules allowing him to survive, he’s on the road to Columbus, OH—where he hopes to reunite with his parents—when he encounters a fellow survivor/cowboy type played by Woody Harrelson. Dubbing the kid Columbus after his destination, and similarly calling himself Tallahassee, he’s not as bound by rules but a lot handier with a shotgun, and the two become traveling companions, if not quite friends for a little while.
Columbus’ rules and their graphic presentation (as onscreen type animated in various ways) evoke plenty of laughs, and help get Zombieland off to a rousing start. They’re funny because they make sense as logical reactions to an outrageous situation, and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick turn a few of them into sustained running gags. There’s plenty of splatstick, too, with a number of improvised ghoul-killing techniques, plus Tallahassee’s shitkicker attitude toward dispatching the walking dead, delivering many moments that are too lighthearted to be truly called black humor. After an opening-credits montage featuring a zombie stripper and the like, however, director Ruben Fleischer largely keeps the creatures’ own actions and appearances on the serious side, not skimping on the flesheating and providing a credible menace for the heroes and heroines to play off of.
Said heroines are 20something Wichita (Emma Stone) and tween Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), whose goal is to reach a California amusement park they believe will provide a safe haven. After a couple of antagonistic false starts, they join forces with the boys, and bad-ass Wichita softens up enough to provide a potential romantic interest for Columbus. Of course, he’s pretty inexperienced in such things, and the last time (also the first time) he got close to a girl, she tried to consume his flesh the next morning. This encounter is one of several flashbacks to the protagonists’ pasts that serve to flesh out the characters somewhat, though overall, Zombieland lacks the surprising depth that elevated the similarly inclined Shaun of the Dead to the very top rung of the shocks-and-yocks ladder.
Mostly, Zombieland is content to be a jokey good time, and it succeeds, in no small part thanks to the well-cast lead quartet. Eisenberg, last seen facing very different amusement-park troubles in the underrated Adventureland, is perfect as the withdrawn Columbus, who doesn’t make his inevitable emergence from his shell without a fight (a lot of fights, actually). Harrelson’s role is, for the most part, more thinly written—his big quest is to find a Twinkie amidst the undead apocalypse—but the actor brings just the right attitude to the table, and Stone and Breslin ably balance feistiness and vulnerability. The rapport between the four keeps the film moving down its episodic road, with one notable pit stop that’s inspired if a bit overextended, featuring a lengthy big-star cameo that’s been an ill-kept secret (but just in case, it won’t be given away here).
Although the director and writers hail from TV, there’s nothing small-screen or sanitized about Zombieland. The humor may not exactly be highbrow but it doesn’t depend on cheap punchlines, and Fleischer teams with cinematographer Michael Bonvillain to give the picture an expansive widescreen look, staging scenes of chaos and its aftermath befitting a seriously intended postapocalyptic picture. Same goes for the many and varied ghoul getups and gore gags created by makeup FX artist Tony Gardner and his team, which are as visceral as any zombie fan could desire, augmented by well-wrought CGI splatter. They help Zombieland pass the test of any good horror/comedy: Even as it delivers the laughs, it doesn’t forget that it’s basing them on scary subject matter.
