Zombieland - Dead on Arrival

Never, never did I think I would say it, but I'm getting a bit sick of the undead. There are more reanimated flesh eating rotten bastards around now then even their halycon period of the early eighties and to be honest I blame Danny Boyle for it. But if its zombies or vampires well I'll have the shambling/sprinting dead over a lot of preening eurofag bloodsuckers anyday so yeah - Zombieland. Not really a horror-comedy this...its pretty much just National Lampoon's Vacation with some minor head trauma and cannibalism. Shaun of the Dead seems to be held up as the benchmark for horror comedy and to me that is a travesty when movies like American Werewolf in London, Reanimator, Return of the living Dead, Brain Dead and Evil Dead 2 vomit blood on it from a great height in terms of actually mining the elusive "humurous horror" seam. And most of those are zombie flicks to boot. So if movies starring the shambling reanimated corpses of our neighbours are already mostly funny/satirical anyway, what is Zombieland's raison d'etre?

 Heres the thing....its not really got any "horror" bits at all, the horror elements are almost just background static. Its a buddy pic. Its a post - apocalyptic Dumb and Dumber with the occasional post-post-modern "Scream"-type reference to horror movie RULES (these pop up in big writing on the screen when referred to in the flaccid voiceover, so you can nod a bit and go, "Oh yeah, thats right! This movie's Self-Aware and not adverse to Pointing Out The Cliches in the Genre in a Humourous fashion! I get it!" So that's all fine. It's quite fast and clever, and the first 20 minutes are great. After that it plummets. Woody Harrelson is good. The main character is a boring sub-emo wet blanket who looks like he would cry if you gave him a dead arm. I laughed twice. It's not a bad movie, it's just indicative of the appalling year its been so far that this is getting some pretty warm reviews and positive word of mouth.

 I'm going to wait for Rec2 and Survival of the Dead (and advance word on the latter is not good...not surprising considering "Land" and "Diary"....leave it George...just...leave it) And then I hope the entire zombie genre shoves it's flyblown head up it's desiccated maggoty colon and stays there until someone with real vision comes along to resurrect it once again.