by The Film Blogger

Created on: October 11, 2009   Last Updated: October 12, 2009

The horror genre owes the little vitality and originality it has left to comedy; hits like the Evil Dead series have paved the way for more recent efforts such as Shaun of the Dead, and it also means that through mitigating the sadism inherent to the genre with humour, filmmakers are able to pass gorier films through at the 15 certificate, as long as the violence is exaggerated to an absurd effect, as is true of the above films, and certainly of Ruben Fleischer's breakout feature Zombieland.

A ragtag band of survivors traversing a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested wasteland is hardly a new idea, so how does Zombieland freshen things up? A superb slow-motion opening credits sequence set to For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica ought to do it, if not the unique tone introduced by narrator Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), an anxiety-ridden college student who has survived this long because he has no real personal attachments, and also due to his strict set of rules, such as always checking the back seats of cars he enters, and always double-tapping zombies to make sure they're dead. In attempting to get to Ohio and see if his parents are still alive, he meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), an aggressive and charismatic man who lives only to hunt zombies and sink his teeth into any remaining Twinkies on Earth, but his search for the latter has so far been fruitless. The two form an uneasy partnership, deciding not to use real names and instead refer to each other by where they are heading.

Things become even more complicated and uneasy as they meet sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who will do anything to survive, and seemingly cannot be trusted. They all share one common ground, though; they want to get to Pacific Playland, a theme park where there are reportedly no zombies. Narration is so often a lazy expository device used to move the plot forward, but in Zombieland, it is used sparingly, most often for the sake of laughs, as the plot itself trundles along and doesn't require much explanation. Columbus frequently takes us out of the action to tell us a new survival rule, or to let us in on a bit of personal insight, or even inform us of the Kill of the Week, and although Eisenberg's delivery isn't charismatic, that's exactly why it works, because he's the counter-balance to Harrelson's off-the-wall performance, the voice of reason in a group of selfish and untrustworthy survivors.

If there's something I have against Zombieland, though,

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