zombieland

I saw Zombieland last night. It's the pretty much the first new zombie film I've seen since I finished my dissertation on George A. Romero's Dead cycle in April. I say 'pretty much' because I watched about fifteen minutes of Dead Snow, the Norwegian nazi-zom-com that was touted pretty hard earlier this year. I fell asleep before the Nazis arrived and meant to finish watching it but in the end didn't bother. I also use the qualifier 'new' because I've watched Re-Animator and Return of the Living Dead a couple of times each since I handed in the rotting behemoth.

I thought it was good. The zombies were fast, but there's nothing to be done about that; apparently zombies are just fast now. It was important that the zombies were fast infact, the thing was only 80 minutes long so there wasn't really the time for traditional shamblers to ratchet up the suspense. In fact with it being so short there wasn't really a lot of time for anything. The plot was pretty thin, the whole thing being hung together by comic violence and pop culture references. And Bill Murray. This is hardly a gamble though - people love comic violence and pop culture references, and people really fucking love Bill Murray. The characterisation is pretty weak and the damsel-in-distress climax sticks in the throat a bit, but to be honest it's just a thrill to see zombies being hacked to pieces on the big screen. The zombie makeup is great, incidentally, and they really throw prosthetic limbs and buckets of black blood all over this thing. If there is a major weakness to Zombieland it's that it relies so completely on an understanding of the world of the infected super-zombie, as depicted in 28 Days/Weeks Later or the 2004 Dawn of the Dead 're-imagining'. There is almost no setup of the particular world in which Zombieland takes place, except for a throwaway line blaming the outbreak on a contaminated gas-stop cheeseburger. The film comes, on a few occasions, dangerously close to parody or what seems, even more bizarrely, like direct homage; one segment in particular, in which a 'soccer mom' drives away in a minivan whilst beset by little zombie girls, may as well be an outtake from the 2004 Dawn. Also zombies can't climb. Or open doors.