Zombieland is a 2009 zombie, horror-comedy, road trip movie all centered around four strangers getting together to travel to their individual final destinations all while trying to survive a zombie apocalypse… and each other. Introverted Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) finally leaves his dorm room after weeks indoors playing World of Warcraft, when he was attacked by his once neighbor/crush, now zombie, “406”. While hitchhiking along the abandoned freeway, Columbus meets up with cowboy Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) who begrudgingly lets the little introvert tag along for the ride. Along the way, the unlikely duo stop at a market in search of the only thing that will satiate Tallahassee’s hunger: Twinkies. After a brief encounter with some store-clerk zombies, the two meet a pair of con artist sisters, Wichita and Little Rock. The sisters scam Columbus and Tallahassee a couple of times into handing over their guns and their ride, the group finally agrees to stop screwing each other over and work together to get where they need to. Eventually, Columbus, Wichita, Tallahassee, and Little Rock all end up at a Santa Monica amusement park, face off against a horde of zombies, and become a family.

The plot of Zombieland isn’t a deep one. As I said, it’s a road trip movie, so the goal is basically to get from point A to point B and entertain while doing it. Not only does Zombieland bring the entertainment factor in action and horror, but in comedy as well. What would a horror movie be without its gore? Well, the design of the zombies covers that fairly well on their own. Not quite like the Walkers in the Walking dead show, Zombieland’s Dead Heads are more “cinema”. What I mean is they share a lot of visual characteristics with other zombies/infected of the early 2000s. Red rimmed eyes, dark red (almost black) blood pouring from the mouth, and some chunks of skin missing from the face, throw on a smear of dirt and maybe some veins showing through the skin and you have a pre-2010 Lame Brain. It’s a good gorey design, but they retain too much of their living likeness and humanity to be too monstrous, despite the grime, these type of undead still seem too clean compared to the sunken in, leathery walkers of TWD. The kills of the movie lend themselves quite nicely to the humor too. Any “go” time during the movie is focused on a great balance of guns and blood. However, even during downtime, the movie makes sure not to slow down too much and still delivers relationship-building moments between characters and a healthy amount of laughs. 

All four actors were very strong and had good delivery, but in my opinion, the standout here has to be the Twinkie loving cowboy himself, Woody Harrelson. His brash gun-toting “Americanness” was a wonderful contradiction to Eisenburgs rule-abiding Columbus, who was taught that it can be okay to break the rules and just smash something. Also, it was sweet to see him trying to connect with Little Rock by teaching her how to aim and shoot a gun. Unfortunately, there just weren’t many moments that stood out to me between Tallahassee and Stone’s Witchita. 

Zombieland is an excellent zombie, action, horror, road trip comedy that balances it all perfectly and ages extremely well eleven years later. I look forward to finally seeing the sequel. Hopefully, my high hopes don’t betray me.

Zombieland is available on VoD platforms and is streaming now on Amazon Prime.