ZOMBIELAND

MORE ZOMBIES?!
I like Woody Harrelson and this looked like something i'd see until they added the romance factor. The humor and action would've got me through, but teen romance will just make it lamesauce.

Also, I LOVE THE FUCK OUT OF THIS SONG! is a stupendous line.

I could watch that when I don't want to have to pay attention much.

Looks like fun to see. I hope one day i DO live in Zombie Land, I would own a pretty awesome car and do whatevs, just shootin' deads.

it looks like he spray paints a giant #3 on each car they steal.

That's such a manly photo.

What makes me most excited about the movie (other than the fact that it looks hilarious and full of action) is that Jesse Eisenberg is in it. Do you know who he is? He's Michael Cera's clone, that's who! And we all know how much I love Michael Cera.

Also, when the lady hit the pavement with her face in the second trailer I cringed.

when i heard the voice over i thought it WAS michael cera!

Great concept but do we really need another apocalyptic boy meets girl zombie eats girl boy kills zombie we wast money type of movie? drop the teen romance and add more gore then ill pay 10 bucks to see it...

Great concept? Lawlz. They've been milking that cow for way too long.

EDIT_
Zombie-cow, that is.

Saw the trailer with my boytoy when we went to see District 9.

It looks funny and I love Woody H. and Michael Cera's clone. Boyfriend had a different opinion than me because he whispered, "ZOMBIES CAN'T RUN. GAH!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set

As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of last week's five-night TV zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4's Dead Set made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populace of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and I had hired Krishnan to do the very same thing in our own zombie opus, Shaun of the Dead. It was a bit like seeing an ex-lover walking down the street pushing a pram. Of course, this was a knee-jerk reaction. It's not as if Edgar and I hadn't already pushed someone else's baby up the cultural high street - but that, to some extent, was the point. In Shaun of the Dead, we lifted the mythology established by George A Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.

Still, I had to acknowledge Dead Set's impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity: a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the Big Brother house as the last refuge for the survivors. Scripted by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness I have long been a fan of, and featuring talented actors such as Jaime Winstone and the outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.

Another thing: speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting "Boo!" and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth on to their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes; his were figures to be pitied, empathised with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches (as opposed to the correct mournful moans of longing), they cease to possess any ambiguity. They are simply mean.

So how did this break with convention come about? The process has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shamans, or bokors, who would use digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be nzambi (a west African word for "spirit of the dead"). From the combination of nzambi and somnambulist ("sleepwalker") we get the word zombie.

The legend was appropriated by the film industry, and for 20 or 30 years a steady flow of voodoo-based cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A Romero changed everything. Romero's fascination with Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor struggling in a world overrun by vampires, led him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author: namely, the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. Romero adopted the Haitian zombie and combined it with notions of cannibalism, as well as the viral communicability characterised by the vampire and werewolf myths, and so created the modern zombie.

After three films spanning three decades, and much imitation from film-makers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O'Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Michael Jackson's Thriller video, directed by John Landis, was entertaining but made it rather difficult for us to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body-popping. The blushing dead went quiet for a while, until the Japanese video game company Capcom developed the game Resident Evil, which brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero's shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective subconscious.

Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and I decided to create our own black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end-of-the-world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero's work, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as "rage".

The success of the movie, particularly in the US, was undoubtedly a factor in the loose remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004. Zack Snyder's effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle's "infected" into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar-chomping, focus-group-happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation's demand for quicker everything - quicker food, quicker downloads, quicker dead people. The zombie was ushered on to the mainstream stage, on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. The genre was diminished, and I think it's a shame.

Despite my purist griping, I liked Dead Set a lot. It had solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we've come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire, it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness and, more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights standing outside the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those inside. Like Romero, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to its literal conclusion, and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply in our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favourite piece of television ever. As it was, I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.

Yes. Yes we do.

HELL YES we do... Shawn Of The Dead meets Army Of Darkness meets Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer... the only thing missing is Bruce Campbell and a smaller budget

Saw this friday. Awesome movie. Very funny. Satisfied my bloodlust. I heard there would be a cameo and usually when I hear that it ends up being shitty person, not the case in this movie. Love that actual metal like metallica's for whom the bell tolls was played during the opening credits.

It's a shame though, I remember when zombies slowly walked toward you and somehow got you due to carelessness. I guess it's all about running zombies now.

It was an awesome movie. Hilarious.

i sooo went Twinkie hunting after the movie and there was just one left at seven eleven.

Ah Simon Pegg lol. I thought Dead Set was rather fantastic too, don't care that zombies run though. If he wants another zombie film with slow zombies, he should get someone to start making a film out of the book Handling The Undead, can't remember the zombies running in this. He shouldn't watch the remake of Day of the Dead then, he would have a field day with that, flying/jumping onto the ceiling zombies... terrible.

Zombieland looks fabuloussssssss.

So is it as obvious that at the end Woody gets bitten and then sacrifices himself to save the kids as I think it is?

No. The movie isn't a cliche. It doesn't try to get all meaningful at the end. It knows what kind of movie it is supposed to be and i doesn't try to be anything it's not. That's what I liked about it.

this was an awesome movie. Well worth the $8 i didn't spend (one of my friends just quit the movie theater and as a final fuck you he let in 60 people for free!!!)

I hope in the DVD extras they have a section going over all of the rules. that was fucking hilarious!! Double-tap bitches

Aside from all the awful narration and running zombies, it was pretty great.
Wasn't that one gal wearing a little too much eye shadow for the Apocalypse though?

Yeah. And what's more outrageous is that she was complaining about needing a shower...but she looked perfectly clean.

Anyway, I loved it.

The sooner Hollywood gets over this Desperate Housewives 24/7 Narration/Commentrak bullshit, the happier I'll be. Remember when good writing could stand on its own?

And the thing was, this was a good, well written movie. All of the rules, all of the shit he blathered at us, that could have been done through dialogue and action.

How much more annoying is it going to be to listen to an audio commentary on the DVD when you got everyone trying to talk over each other.

i didn't see this until last week and was way fucking disappointed. the same kid that ruined Adventureland also takes his toll on Zombieland. His voice, his questioning dialogue, and his whine are all so very very annoying. Michael Sera/Cera should've been in this and it would've been 10x better. Matthew McConnoughy shoul've played Woody's character and it would have worked perfectly.

If it weren't for the hype and my own anticipation, I would have liked it better. But with the anticipation and the hype, it's a fucking letdown. That actor is possibly more annoying than Keanu Reeves.

I'm gonna kill you dead.

I'm not any kind of woody harrelson fan but i thought he was pretty great in this.
I love the fact that they never even address him painting #3 on all the cars. It's just what he does.

I guessed that it was how old his son was when he died. Also, I don't think I could hate more of what Chesterfield said.

Woody was awesome. The Cera clone was okay, I just wish they'd found a way to get over the non-stop exposition. Decent movie, overall.

Haha. My mom always says this and I always make fun of her for it.

Dale Earnhardt's number.

"I'm gonna kill you dead" just sounds hilarious to me. But seriously, Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera are like, my favorites. I would marry them so hard.

Also, I thought it was in Honor of Dale Earnhardt too.

Also also, when i realized the guy was talking about his dead son I cried.

nathaniel parker wrote:

You made me look like an asshole. Damn you and your edit button.

I didn't realize I was looking like the asshole first with a broken image link. I had to fix it!

that chick can't act worth shit either. in fact, aside from the rules, the only thing all that great about the movie was the little girl. she outacted everyone in the movie. bill murray was, well, bill murray.

how about now?

i did, however, love the opening credit sequence. now, swallow my soul, beeotch

How about posting some SPOILER tags there, Chesterfield?

What did he spoil?

the surprise cameo role.

SPOILERS (kind of)

I liked the film a lot. Nothing to mind-bending, just good-gore-fun. The opening credits with For Whom The Bell Tolls with all the slow-mo zombie attacks was pretty epic, and the Bill Murray cameo was especially great. I do agree with someone above that it would have been better without the young love aspect, but whatever, it was still pretty mild compared to most big releases.

And I think people might just have to get used to the fact that zombies can now run and no longer moan "brains".

*SPOILER ALERT!*

It sucks.

The best thing about this movie was the credits, b/c that meant it was over.

Also, it's not a big deal to see Bill Murray in a movie, seeing as he is an actor. On the street... okay. In your closet... yeah... But being surprised an acter is in a movie... Just go rent Caddyshack or somethin'.

i hate matthew mcconnoughey so much. don't compare him to woody harrellson.

Great, fun movie. I really liked it. That is all.

This movie was much better than i expected. Best cameo in a long time, too.
And the lead, whateverhisnameis, he's great. Or can be. Awesome in The Squid and the Whale. I just wish he didn't try to be Michael Cera for this movie, who becomes more and more annoying to me with every passing day.

Anyway, yeah, really enjoyable film.

Agreed.

Seeing this film tomorrow.