31 Nights of Terror! Zombieland

There is nothing like to going to the cinema during a festive period to really stimulate the holiday gland; sure it’s fun to be alone in the dark at home curled up with a bowl of popcorn, but every once and again it is nice to get out of the house. With this in mind I decided to take 31 Nights of Terror on the road and go see the new Zombieland which has come out just in time for Halloween and it has solidly reaffirmed my conviction that there is no logical justification for going to the Regal Cinema: the tickets are more expensive, the popcorn is more expensive, the commercials go on forever and, above all, the movies, like Zombieland are terrible.

Now some might say that calling this film terrible is an exaggeration, and that I must have been taking the movie too seriously; but quite to the contrary, going into Zombieland I was expecting all out zombie madness in a post-apocalyptic America where logic in fact had no meaning. The first fifteen minutes or so of Zombieland put me in a great mood because it was exactly that: funny, stupidly gory and full of man vs. zombie action.

I read a long time ago a quote from a writer whose name has since escaped me who said that the beginning and ending of a story are easy, it’s the middle that’s really difficult and it would appear that the writers of Zombieland were in whole hearted agreement. I can easily see them sitting in front of their computers staring blankly at the screen with the first fifteen minutes and the larger part of the climax written realizing that they only had thirty minutes worth of screen time and that they were going to end up on the short real of some film festival if they didn’t fatten the story up…

Which I where I get really annoyed.

If the writers were in need of inspiration, why in the good Lord’s name did they look to teen comedies for it, as opposed to the numerous successful films of the same if not similar comedy/horror genres which have a strong reputation? I thought that I was going to go watch the nonsense of Woody Harrelson fighting zombies with a rag tag crew and instead got Superbad 2: This Time With Zombies except it would appear that Michael Cera was busy and so they had to hire another clone of the stereotypical insecure-nerdy-boy-who-represents-our-target audience since one apparently isn’t enough.

Normally I would complain when a film doesn’t have any character arcs or plot development but that said we need to straighten this out a bit because watching mainstream movies is a little like watching a child put on their mother’s make-up: you can see that they get the general idea and it would even appear they understand the importance of what they are playing with, but beyond that cute novelty they still look like complete fools and their effort to impress only makes us giggle. I was, or at least tried to be equally hard on Jeepers Creepers and there is a good point of comparison here: Jeepers Creepers failed because its complete lack of reliable character development and a plot so thin if you rubbed grease on it, it would disappear and this was a problem because we needed to feel something for the characters, we needed to know them so that we could be scared for them. The movie failed to deliver on this connection and so we watched annoyingly bad decision making from a distance. Inversely, I understood that Zombieland was to be a comedy where there is little need for characters to have as much emotional value so we can get on with the barrels of laughs and so I am not quite sure why we spent the better part of an hour getting to know each main character with a back story and even flashbacks to help identify each of their personalities. Who cares? Where are all of the zombies? Why aren’t they fighting them?

If you look at Shawn of the Dead in comparison you see better what I am talking about- the movie has a relatively simple plot which moves forward rife with jokes and pretty much from the first few minutes or so zombies show up on the scene and never really leave all the way to the end. Plot and dialogue serve merely as connectors between funny zombie scene to the next until the movie is over and you press play to watch it again and again, which I remember doing three times the first week. Zombieland, meanwhile, abandoned the chance to become a cult classic by sticking to the silly concept of four people left on Earth and going for a crowd pleaser, abandoning Zombies in the middle of the film all together, assumingly because they had spent that time slot of their budget on a big name cameo.

Speaking of which, I take serious issue with the casting of this film as well- though in the defense of the cast, they all played their parts well, it was just that their parts were completely wrong. As the trailers may have already shown you, it is Woody Harrelson’s character that keeps the laughs going and makes the film worth watching though, sadly enough, most of his best moments are already in the trailer. Aside from that, there is a little girl who is annoying when she is around, which is thankfully not much and then our still-in-college-just-like-you nerd and ambiguous mishmash of stereotypes of a girl who both help play out the all American geek fantasy of going from playing video games with no social life and probably writing bad movie reviews to being the hero boyfriend of a fantasy girl. Which, by the way, I suppose really is a fantasy because there is nothing realistic about her; not that I expect too much from a movie called Zombieland but this woman never takes her black eye liner off, day and night and it seems pretty much immovable and seeing as this is a post apocalyptic world where such commodities would be scarce, I am somewhat led to believe that she has it tattooed on her, which at least makes more sense. I mean, for God’s sake you might say that I am digging a little deep into detail here but they are the ones who pointed it out: there is actually a conversation between the two girls talking about how ugly they have gotten due to lack of showering and no make up. No make up! You could tear off some from around your eyes and give it to your sister and still have a large enough layer for tomorrow!

That is exactly where Zombieland falls apart, in its attempt to be ever so slightly too serious and I am sorry for picking on it so much but they started it: I went to the movies to see dumb jokes, lots of blood and zombies getting taken out in an hour and a half bonanza which I thought would basically be like Dead Rising: The Movie. What I got was a few laughs, most from the first 15 minutes of the movie which you see in the trailer, some clips which will most likely become youtube clips-of-the-week and then be forgotten when New Moon comes out and all the tenny boppers move onto something else.

Me, personally, I am going back to the Ritz.