Zombieland

 
by KYW's Bill Wine

Can the undead be fun dead?  Sure.  Take a look at Zombieland.
 
A horror comedy set in a post-zompocalypse world, Zombieland posits that a plague has turned nearly all humans into zombies.
 
What kind of zombies are we talking about, you ask?  Well, the kind of flesh eaters that run real fast (that's right, fast!), drool real often, bleed real profusely, and collapse real dramatically, especially right after they've been slammed in the head with, say, a shovel.
 
Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg are Tallahassee and Columbus, respectively, an odd couple embarking on a cross-country road trip.  Our two heroes are named for the cities they're from and the destinations where they're headed, as are nearly all the human characters who turn up. 
 
Tallahassee is a Twinkie-loving cowboy survivalist, Columbus our coming-of-age teen narrator who's more than willing to share the rules he lives by -- the ones that allow him to go on breathing even though hungry, bloodthirsty zombies pop up around just about every other corner. 
 
But while most remaining humans run from the ubiquitous zombies, Tallahassee seeks them out, the better to put them out of (or is it into?) their misery.
 
Tallahassee and Columbus meet a pair of sisters, Wichita and Little Rock, played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, who have turned themselves into clever con artists as their way of making it through the day and coping with the bleak, zombie-infested landscape.
 
Hoping to find a place to which the zombie infection hasn't spread, the four resourceful survivors make their way toward a seaside amusement park in California called Pacific Playland, rumored to be zombie-free.
   
But they detour to Hollywood and sneak into the house of movie star Bill Murray, whom they presume has become a zombie.  When the actor playing Bill Murray finally appears -- an appropriately deadpan fella by the name of Bill Murray -- you will be witness to what has to go in the books as one of the funniest cameo appearances in the history of movies.
 
Director Ruben Fleischer, working from a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, posts graphics detailing  the crucial but amusing rules that zombie-evading protagonist Columbus lives by, and they gain the film a few chuckles right out of the gate.
   
But it's the film's several truly hilarious comic highlights -- some of them moments of inspired slapstick and others perfectly judged verbal asides -- that bring down the house and give this zombie flick its knee-slapping memorability.
 
Zombieland doesn't have quite the polish, surprise, or cohesive structure of the zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, to some degree just because its running time is so modest.  But it's just as funny.
 
And although everyone pitches in effectively to keep the tongue-in-cheek tone as cheeky as possible, it's Harrelson who gets the most laughs with his off-kilter line readings of expertly tossed-off one-liners.
 
Know that this R-rated comedy has a dose of gross and gore galore.  But it's played for yocks -- boffo yocks -- and its cartoon violence should bother only the most sensitive viewers.
 
Hey, if today's readers are ready for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, maybe viewers are ready to visit Zombieland, not for a moment to be confused with Disneyland.
 
So we'll take a baseball bat to 3 stars out of 4 for the zippy zom-com Zombieland, a bloody romp about the walking dead that's very much alive and loaded with loud, loopy laughs.