Reverend Blood Goes to the Movies: Zombieland

Sneaking into a theater just ain't what it used to be.  It used to be that it had danger, romance, and just the teensiest bit of erotic pull.  You'd get your buddies to create a diversion, or you'd cook up some half-assed story about how your friends are just inside, and they accidentally took your ticket in with them, and hope that the ticket-taker is amused enough by the bald-faced lie to let you pass.

But now that I'm dead, it's not a challenge anymore.  I can go anywhere I want, and that includes the toniest monuments to the movie arts, right on down to the grungiest porn palaces, where you stick to the seats -- not to mention the guy next to you -- and don't dare go to the bathroom.  Not that I have to go to the bathroom anymore, but sometimes I visit them for old time's sake.  Like I do those porn palaces.

A couple of Fridays ago, I went to the premiere of Zombieland, at the Orpheus -- sorry that's Orpheum -- Theater in Baltimore.  It was packed, of course, but it was no problem:  being incorporeal has it's privileges.  I just chose the prettiest girl in the house and nestled in on her lap.  Of course, being incorporeal has it's disadvantages as well:  I couldn't feel a thing.


Anyway, I liked Zombieland all right, although the zombies I've known aren't anything like the ones in the movie.  For one thing, they're fastidious eaters:  you have to be if you don't want to catch all kinds of terrible diseases.  Humans are filthy creatures, after all.

Another thing that's different is that in the real world, they don't know where zombies come from, and all this post-modern bullshit about a virus causing an outbreak -- I think it all started with Danny Boyle -- is just that.  Bullshit.  Give me a good old fashioned geek-fest without all the biological mumbo-jumbo, please.  I like my movie zombies to come out of nowhere and wreak havoc, kind of like the Goddess.  Or Michael Moore.

And whatever happened to the slow build, or the slow burn, or whatever you want to call it?  Zombieland  begins balls-to-the-wall and stays that way, pretty much throughout the movie.  But I guess that's probably a good thing: what quiet moments there are, particularly the love scenes between that Michael Cera wannabe Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone, suck

Woody Harrelson to the rescue, of course.  He pretty-much elevates everything he's in, and this is no exception.  His loony Tallahassee steals the whole show, and I couldn't help thinking how much hotter it would have been if Stone had engaged in mad-hot, zombie-scared sex with him instead of that anemic dip-shit Eisenberg.

Zombieland moves at a pretty fast pace, and first-time, out-of-nowhere writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick pack in the jokes like proverbial sardines. (Do they still say that?)  They just keep coming, one right after another, and they generally hit home.

Hell, even I laughed, and I'm, you know, dead.