Fridae

Zombies are the new vampires. When Hollywood stopped making vampire movies with vampires and started making other movies that coincidentally had vampires but didn’t really needed them to work at all (Blade: Gangster movie with vampires! Ultraviolet: dystopian sci-fi kungfu movie with vampires! Twilight: Teen high school romance with vampires!), zombie movies had to move in to serve as the social commentary genre.

In the last decade that zombies have been developed as a celluloid shorthand for capitalist excess and hubris, a reflection of class struggle, the failure of government and bureaucracy, and paired with horrible alt-rock soundtracks (28 Days Later), and self-absorbed, moping storytelling. But all this is unnatural. This is madness! The entire look of zombies lend themselves far more easily to camp horror and horror comedy than to existential, philosophical, or even political allegory.

The team behind Zombieland understand this basic fact of zombie flicks, and together with Michael Jackson’s Thriller video zombie make-up creator Tony Gardner, have created a horror comedy that is engagingly funny, free from the high-minded moral smugness that has pervaded the genre recently.

Narrated as a survival guide to life in Zombieland after the conclusion of a worldwide zombie outbreak, the movie takes us on a wild road trip headed by a gun-loving survivalist with a pronounced weakness for twinkies (Woody Harrelson) and his brood of unlikely fellow travellers. Part of the fun here lies in the director’s sense of visual humour, which extends from zombie designs that spoof the Thriller video, neatly timed gore and action, a fine balance between horror and comedy, and quirky surtitles that could have come from Stranger Than Fiction, if it had zombies... The icing on the cake (yes, it does get even better than you expect) happens to be a killer cameo by Bill Murray, who makes karmic amends for the travesty that was Garfield.

Overall, Zombieland is the perfect antidote to a depressing trend in horror movies, and I for one would love to see a sequel to this.