Slashing The Seats

While the Zombie genre is fast becoming overloaded, first time helmer Ruben Fleisher has an ace up his sleeve – he couldn’t care less. While writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have produced a sharp, funny -and most importantly genre-savvy – script, they pull off the clever trick of ramming metadialogue into a post-apocalyptic world that brings absolutely nothing new to the table. There are no knowing nods to the camera, no attempt to make the Zombies unique, they’re your basic, shuffling, brain-munching simpletons, wobbling mindlessly around the Midwest – and latterly, Beverly Hills – and generally annoying our heroes as they casually subvert the romantic comedy road movie for all it’s worth.

Jesse Eisenberg is the first survivor to appear on screen, and he’s in fine form as he relays his nerdy rules for staying alive, including such gems as “cardio- the fatties were the first to go because they were easier to catch”.

Eisenberg comes off like a young Woody Allen for the first act, hooking up with ex-House Bunny Emma Stone and her young sister – an adorably murderous Abigail Breslin – on a quest to California in search of a Zombie-free paradise. While it’s amusing enough in its own right, the nebbishness starts to run out of gas fairly quickly, leaving you unsure where this is heading.

Then Woody Harrelson turns up.

The role of dedicated Zombie killer Tallahassee appears to have been custom written for him, and he revels in it, playing a sort of dim-but-good-natured good ol’ boy – think Woody from Cheers meets The Terminator – a gun toting maniac with a decent helping of common sense; his expression as Stone tells him “There’s no Zombies in California” is worth the admission price alone.

Fleisher shows some fantastic comedy timing as the methods of dispatching the undead become increasingly creative – the piano dropped on head being particularly noteworthy – and the cinematography alternates between some fantastic Evil Dead handheld, transforming one bull in a souvenir shop sequence into a frantic piece of comedy gold, while some truly unsettling desert vistas accomplish everything Resident Evil aspired to in an instant, actually adding some poignant notes to the carnage and laughs.

Overall it’s a great, quick witted hour and a half of comedy violence, not afraid to alternate between puerile and dark, dry humour, it never comes off as unbalanced. A great, shocking ride that’s been done before, but never quite like this.

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