Movie Review: Zombieland

Zombieland....kind of reminds you of things like playing Candy Land, singing winter wonderland or dancing to Earth Wind and Fire's Boogie Wonderland, right? Well, sort of....

The world had been overrun by zombies. How? By a fast acting virus. These are not slow moving zombies, they move quick they too are fast acting! The narrator of the story goes by the name of Columbus played by Jessie Eisenberg of this year's Adventureland movie and he has his rules that he lives by in order to survive. Rule number one is Cardio! Once you see the undead, you understand why. Hmmm....I wonder if Jessie has any other "...land" movies coming up? He was good in Adventureland too.

Coming into the picture is Tallahassee played by Woody Herrelson who really, really wants to find Twinkies in and amongst all the quick moving dead. He meets Columbus and the two start traveling together and this is really what the movie is about, it's a buddy road movie just like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope on The Road to Zanzabar. The zombies are just obstacles preventing them from getting to their destination which due to running into two sisters, Wichata and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) ends up getting changed from east coast destinations to Pacific Playland in California where zombies haven't taken over. Or so they hope. Going back to the names for a second...why names of cities? Because that way it can't get personal. Between the sisters, guess which of the two was the older one?

Like all good road pictures there are trust issues that need to be overcome. Issues between Columbus and Tallahassee and the guys vs the girls. As they work out those issues they end up in LA where they take refuge in a celebrity mansion before they make their final destination.

Along the way we the audience are brought into the movie with little interstitchels that made the movie fun. Columbus' rules were constantly being brought up and the rule was displayed on the screen. While they don't show you all 32, they show a good sampling. Kinda like tapas table service. You got to both read the rule and get a practical demonstration as to why the rule was important. Talking about ways to kill zombies or really not talking so much as seeing demonstrations are handed to you the audience. The scene in Los Angeles was funny. Lesson learned there is watching zombies killings is fun while dealing with real zombies is NOT. Notice the capitalization there.

What surprised me most was not the movie itself, but what was going on in the theater. The movie runs for 80 minutes and is rated R. So why in a movie rated R were there so many kids in the theater? It never ceases to amaze me seeing (and hearing) kids in these types of movies. You would think more parents would be concerned with showing their 6-10 year old kids about human sushi. I don't know what's going on in their own gray matter.

Overall it was a fun movie and would give it a double thumbs up for the appropriate age groups.