Tallahassee is headed for Florida and has two great passions in life: kicking zombie ass and finding an edible Twinkie. He encounters the redneck zombie-killer Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, providing his best performance in years) on the road. He's trying to get home, mainly because he hopes to see a familiar face.
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Whenever Columbus follows one of these rules, Fleischer helpfully prints the rule # and description on screen to remind us.ĭespite having been born in Columbus, our hero is in Texas when the action begins. Our narrator, "Columbus" (Jesse Eisenberg), who bears the name of the city from which he hails, has survived into the post apocalyptic era by following a list of 31 rules - stay in good shape (to outrun the zombies), beware of public bathrooms, always wear a seatbelt, don't be a hero, etc. By the time the movie has started, the epidemic has long since swept across the globe, infecting nearly the entire population. The zombies of Zombieland are members of the "new breed," meaning they're not self-exhumed corpses that have come back from the dead to terrorize the living, but plague victims whose brains have rotted, leaving behind violent, cannibalistic shells. Director Ruben Fleischer, making his feature debut, and screenwriters Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick have accomplished what they set out to achieve. Zombieland is funny - sometimes very funny - and has a clever script. The production wants viewers to laugh if they leave the theater without doing so, the filmmakers have failed to do their jobs. The key with this movie, as with the others (and many more like it) is that, although there are "boo!" moments and gore, comedy always trumps horror. Films like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, Don Coscarelli's Bubba Ho-Tep, Michele Soavi's Cemetery Man, and (most obviously) Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Shaun of the Dead have paved a path that allows productions like Zombieland to make their road trips with ease. Nevertheless, the genre remains incredibly popular, so what better way to populate it than with movies that recognize the comedic potential of many staple horror situations? What was once an obscure and often derided cinematic category, the "horror comedy," has come into its own. I think the last horror movie that had me on edge may have been The Mist, and that was released two years ago. There are exceptions, of course, but those are increasingly rare. Simply put, most horror films are not scary.