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Movie Review: Zombieland

Oi, I just watched Zombieland and I’m pleased to say I didn’t spend any money on it as I would have felt it wasted on the talented actors who made a boring zombie flick.  Making zombie movies is like being in a punk band:  unless you’re cross-genre, there’s nothing you are going to write that hasn’t been written before. We’ve all heard the political dissent, we’ve all heard the three chord song structures, and we’ve all heard the fast drum beats on every song from a band before. So if you’re doing it, you’re doing it just to add to the universe, not so much to affect it in some huge profound way. That’s how I see Zombieland.

It’s sorta upsetting, to be honest. A friend of mine from Emerson College had once told me that voice-overs in movies were a cop-out, and I never stopped agreeing with the sentiment. A narrator isn’t needed if they’re just going to explain what’s happening on the screen, for one, and if they’re going to give boatloads of background information then why not just leave the story in the book instead of attempting to squeeze so much into an hour and a half? Zombieland was more the former and it became so much so that I almost walked out, but decided to multitask with a text-convo instead.

The thing that this movie lacked the most was zombie fighting. Zombie movies are about killing zombies and there just wasn’t enough of that here. Instead, the emphasis is on the charming and unlikely college romance that buds between the nerdy protagonist and a random hot chick he finds on the street. He’s literally one of the last men on Earth and the other one is Woody Harrelson, so…. why is she falling for the nerd? Not very realisti-..Oh, right, it’s a zombie flick. Ok, but then there’s this random scene where Bill Murray shows up as himself and the theme from ghostbusters takes up a good minute or two. THAT feels a little bit like a cop-out, and it takes away from the film since now I’m thinking about another film.

Zombie movies are notoriously bad. The strange thing about it is that one of the first was Zombi 2 1979 which was actually well directed and well acted and can be watched as a serious film much like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s true horror and makes your skin crawl just like a good ol 1970s grindhouse flick should. This emphasis on the joke of these movies takes away from the art that went into the originals (think about the special effects in those movies).  Zombieland had some gore, but it was mild. The zombies were the fast-running kind just like 28 days later, which movies have been ripping off ever since. And then you have this geeky college kid telling geeky college kid jokes over the whole thing. It was embarassing, in a way.  Worst of all was the lack of originality throughout the whole thing. The narrator’s rules on living in zombieland weren’t as funny as they tried to be and nothing in the plot was anything we haven’t seen before in other movies.

All in all, I found it to be a waste of time cuz it was only mildly entertaining at best and should have been a waste of the production company’s (Columbia I think) money, but instead profited $40 million most likely due to advertising, or maybe people just seem to like this sort of crap. Either way, I’m not surprised, nor was I entertained. Now, you wanna see a good zombie flick that pokes fun of zombie flicks, go see Planet Terror..

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Tags: Movie, Review, Zombieland

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