Movie Review Time – Zombieland

The day South African geeks have been waiting for is upon us – the release of Zombieland. Which is a bit of a bummer because I was wholly underwhelmed by the whole thing.

I was seriously excited for this movie because I’m a horror geek and that includes horror comedies. I watch Shaun of the Dead and Undead at least once every couple of months. At the end of the day though, I can’t say I’ll be doing the same thing with Zombieland.

Now if you don’t know, the story focuses on a couple of people who are some of the remaining survivors after some sort of apocolyptic event in which everyone became zombies.

And it’s great it really is. The directing, writing, camerawork, acting – all top notch really. Woody Harrelson is fantastic in his performance as he manages to go from batshit insane to an emotional wreck whilst keeping it light hearted. He and Michael Cera Jesse Eisenberg (what? They both do awkward and sound alike, you can’t blame me for getting confused) have a chemistry on screen that really works and they offset eachothers characters wonderfully.

None of that was my problem.

My problem was that it just wasn’t THAT funny.

Yes, there are moments that are laugh out loud fantastic but the story is more like an off-beat indie flick about this small group of survivors and their relationships with eachother (almost like a coming of age film) so there’s a fair amount of drama. This is probably why it has such a high rating on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

Then there’s the other problem. Throughout the movie I felt like Christopher Walken when he says, “I’ve gotta have more cow bell”. Except I was saying, “I’ve gotta have more zombies”. This is where the movie really lost points for me – for a movie titled Zombieland, there was a massive lack of zombie action except for a couple of awesomely executed action filled scenes.It was wholly disappointing.

So in conclusion (if you want a long winded review go elsewhere), the movie is a good solid movie, it really is, but it didn’t completely deliver for me and I feel it has been very overrated as a horror comedy. If you called it something like Nick and Norah fight Zombies occasionally with a weird older guy, I’d be more understanding and rate it higher but right now I’ve got to settle with giving it a mediocre 6/10.

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