It’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is but it’s impossible to dislike Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland in any meaningful way. A fancier budgeted Hollywood spit-back of Shaun of the Dead, the film belongs to a growing number of modernised B-pictures; think Eight Legged Freaks and Land of the Lost, and offers an odd, clever marriage of Sundance comedy tropes and zippy video game gore. In this spirit, a neurotic Jesse Eisenberg and a volatile Woody Harrelson are thrown together as unlikely road buddies in an America now entirely overrun by the cannibalistic undead.
Together they must fend off the zombie menace, bond in a meaningful way, and learn to live alongside the girl bandits (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) who gamely step up as terrific female foils to the boys’ masculine yin and yang. Along the way, the quartet encounter Bill Murray in his mansion and firm up the rules of zombie holocaust survival – keep up your cardio fitness, double tap the corporeally challenged, be careful in bathroom stalls.
Older zombie veterans may feel they’ve seen it all before, but puppy love and Wolfenstein gore add interesting flavours. Indeed, were it not for the 16 Cert we’d suspect this would out-gross Titanic among school kids. Duck and cover for a phenomenon at any rate.